Catchfence

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (Finished 2nd) – “Second is bittersweet. You want to win, but we are obviously very happy with the result. If we run that well every week we will win plenty of races. The key is that we ran so well. If we can continue that every week we will be in good shape.”

HOW MANY MORE LAPS UNTIL YOU WOULD HAVE CAUGHT THE #00? “Three more laps and we would have been right there, but you never really know I guess because it depends on how hard he is running too, but I feel like with three more laps things would have gotten really interesting.”

IF YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE, REUTIMANN IS PROBABLY AN OKAY PILL TO SWALLOW ISN’T IT? “Yeah, he is just such a nice person. He is the first guy to congratulate me on something and the first guy to apologize if he feels he did something wrong. We all have to hang out with each other every week, but he is the guy you would hang out with if you had an off weekend. He is a good guy.”

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO FINALLY BE UP AT THE FRONT WHERE YOU WERE SO USED TO RUNNING BEFORE? “It is nice. It is great to run up front. Guys are so nice and quiet up there in the front of the race. It is just fun. It is good to have a fast race car and it felt good to focus on little things like my line and how I was driving the car rather than how I was going to stay on the lead lap. Hopefully we can apply what we learned tonight and go forward and be faster more often because that is a lot more fun.”

IS THIS A QUANTUM LEAP TONIGHT OR STEADY EVOLUTION? “We are definitely on the horizon. We haven’t quite gone over, but I know we can run that well because we have done it and we did it tonight. We just have to figure out how to do it every week. I hope this is something we can go back on Monday and talk about why our car was so much different this week than it has been. We have some tracks like this coming up the rest of the season that will be really important tracks, so I hope we can apply this to those races.”

GREG HAD AN ENGINE PROBLEM, ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THAT? “Well, I am not sure what broke and what the differences were in our engines. Jack Roush did come by and tell me that Greg had a failure and that we would have to think about what we are doing going forward. The Yates guys are very smart guys and hopefully we can keep that to a minimum. I have been taking for granted that our engines run so well and we won’t have trouble. We can’t have that kind of trouble if we are going to make the Chase.”

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR SHARING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE #9 CAR AND HOW IT MAY HAVE HELPED YOU TONIGHT? “Well, Kasey is a hell of a guy. He is a very good race car driver and Kenny Francis is very good at what he does. That team has been helping us and this week they helped us quite a bit and it paid off. Right up until the driver intros I was talking to Kasey about his car. He is a very even keeled guy that has given me a lot of help. The parts and the help from Kenny Francis are probably what made the difference for us tonight.”

KNOWING THAT THIS CAN BE A TRACK THAT IS A PRE-CURSOR TO THE CHASE BECAUSE OF THE SIZE, CAN TOO MUCH BE MADE OF THAT OR DOES THIS MEAN THAT SOME GOOD TEAMS ARE NOT AS GOOD AS WE THOUGHT? “That is a good question, but it looks like their teammates ran well. Most likely they were trying some stuff. I wouldn’t count any of those guys out.”

ON JEFF GORDON’S THIRD PLACE FINISH ON THE NIGHT OF HIS 600TH CAREER START “I remember I was at the grocery store, probably in 1993, with my Mom and I picked up a racing magazine on the rack and remember thinking how this guy had it made.  There you were on the cover of the magazine standing next to your race car. You had a cool race car, driver suit, mustache and mullet. I was thinking that I couldn’t even grow a mustache. It is so cool to be sitting up here with you and on the night of your 600th career start. Congrats man, it is a great milestone.”

- PCGCampbell for Ford Racing, Press Release