NASCAR Cup PR

Chase Elliott led a Hendrick Motorsports sweep of the top four spots in qualifying for Sunday’s 1000Bulbs.com Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS) race at Talladega Superspeedway in his No. 9 NAPA Night Vision Camaro ZL1 to capture his fourth pole of the 2019 season. Elliott’s speed of 192.707 mph around the 2.66-mile oval was plenty fast enough to collect his eighth career MENSC career pole and second at Talladega.

CHASE ELLIOTT, NO. 9 NAPA NIGHT VISION CAMARO ZL1 – Pole Winner “We had a really fast NAPA Night Vision Camaro there. It was really faster than I was expecting it to be today, which is nice. And, Alan (Gustafson, crew chief) and our team do such a good job at these places; really, Hendrick, as a whole, and our body shop and our engine shop doing the job that they do coming to these places and have fast race cars and really, it’s kind of on them. So, I’m really proud of the effort. It was a tough week last week, obviously, so it’s just nice to come back and get a pole. Obviously, it’s a long race and anything can happen. So, we’ve got to take advantage of a good pit pick and we’ll go to work from there and see what happens.”

JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang – PENSKE HAS BEEN SO STOUT HERE. “We’ve had some good runs here, for sure. We’ve had some really good race cars and things have gone our way a lot, but I’ve said this all week that superspeedway racing evolves all the time. It never really stays the same for more than two or three races before our competition figures out a new way to beat you, and then you’ve got to come up with something new again. We’ve got to stay open to doing what our competition is doing and trying to do what they do better than them. That’s what we’ve got to try to do, but it seems like now more than ever the teamwork aspect has really come into play more than it’s ever been. I say teamwork, not just Penske – we’re talking about all the Fords or all the Chevys or Toyotas. Everyone really seems to be committed to each other and it’s really changed the game a lot.”

Edward Graham, the Assistant to the Vice President of Operation Christmas Child for Samaritan’s Purse, will say those most famous words in motorsports, “Drivers, Start Your Engines,” before Sunday’s 1000Bulbs.com 500 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series event at Talladega Superspeedway.

Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin was made available to media at Talladega Superspeedway:

BASICALLY, HOW HAS THE SEASON GONE SINCE YOU FOUND OUT THAT YOU’RE NOT GOING BACK TO RCR AND WHAT’S YOUR GAME PLAN BEEN SINCE? “The game plan, from a professional side, has still been the same. The goals you set out to accomplish in February, and really dating back three years ago with RCR, those all stay the same. Just knowing that the things that have changed is knowing the outcome is going to be what it is come Homestead."

KEVIN HARVICK, No. 4 Busch Light Ford Mustang – CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE TEAMWORK AMONGST THE FORD DRIVERS HERE AT TALLADEGA? “Nobody has done it better than we had last year at this race, so I don’t think there’s really any debate on how that will work when it comes to Stewart-Haas Racing. There’s really no debate on what our four cars can do and how we did it. The commitment and the things that it took to do all that is above and beyond what many other teams have done.”

YOU HAVE A STRONG SUPERSPEEDWAY PROGRAM. TALK ABOUT YOUR OVERALL THOUGHTS COMING IN HERE? “Yeah, we’re kind of in a points position where we have 48 or so points to the one in front of us and 80 or so behind us. So, we can kind of do what we want to do in a sense. But you look back at our races, we’ve really ran well at superspeedways and our average finishes are good here."

WHAT DO YOU THINK IT’S GOING TO TAKE FOR YOU TO WIN HERE AT TALLADEGA? “Survival. No crashes. Not for us, anyway. A good start. We are trying to figure out how to put both of us Buescher and Ryan Preece) in the best position at the end of the race. I think in the spring, we were in a really good spot."

HOW DID YOU FEEL IN PRACTICE? “Yeah, we were OK in practice. We didn’t get off of pit road very well there when we were out with our Chevy teammates, we were just a little slow getting up to speed. We worked on our height a little more after that and I think we got some speed dialed into the car. So, I think we should be pretty good.”