Ford Notes ns Quotes- Break Finally Goes Rudd's Way As He Wins Winston Cup Race At Sears Point

BORIS SAID --67-- Jasper Engines Taurus (Finished 41st) -- "The first stint wasn't so bad, but as the track heated up our car was just not as good. We just missed the setup and it was like driving on ice. I was tight in and loose off. I got spun once by Andretti. It wasn't his fault. My spotter just said, 'looking' and I turned down and he was there. That was my mistake. I feel bad about that because that kind of got us out of rhythm, but we just missed the setup and it got tighter and tighter. We tried some stuff on the last pit stop and it was worse, so I was just hanging on. I just got loose and finally lost it. It was driver error." YOU ENJOY DOING THIS THOUGH. "Yeah, I love doing this. I'm definitely disappointed in the run. I was looking for better because in happy hour we were really good. In happy hour it was cloudy, but today it was sunny and I don't have the experience with the sun to know what it does and I made the wrong call. We'll just have to work better at it at Watkins Glen." KURT BUSCH --97-- Rubbermaid Taurus (Finished 4th) -- "We had a great car. It was great to run like that. We tested well. We executed what we tested in qualifying and in the race. We didn't have anything spectacular and I wasn't gonna drive anything out of spectacular just because we needed to bring it home in one piece. We just lost our speed with braking. I got aggressive with the braking and we didn't have it there at the end to maintain lap time, but the strategy worked out pretty smooth and we're very happy with a top five." COULD YOU HAVE WON IF THOSE OTHER GUYS HAD NOT STAYED OUT ON THE LAST CAUTION? "We had a good enough car to lead at times, it just didn't seem like a car that was good enough to win. My crew got me out in the lead and that was awesome. We had great pit stops and the Rubbermaid Taurus was just rolling. It was smooth, it was turning, it was gripping, it just wasn't enough." WERE YOU SURPRISED TO SEE THAT MANY GUYS STAY OUT? "Yeah, I knew if we just stuck to our strategy it would end up playing out. Right now we got beat by two guys on the race track, which is my fault, and one car that stayed out so fourth place ain't that bad."

MARK MARTIN --6-- Viagra Taurus (Finished 7th) -- "We were off just a little bit on that last stop and that hurt us a lot. We were up to fifth and getting ready to get in the running and then the way the caution fell with some people not pitting, and then we had a little trouble, it ended up that we had to race too many guys back there and didn't get a chance to race for it. We were not that great, but we were as good as the 28." WERE YOU SURPRISED THAT MANY CARS STAYED OUT? "Not really. I was afraid that would happen, but I also saw people run out of gas." YOU GAINED A LOT IN THE POINTS TODAY. "Yeah, we had a great run and a great day. We didn't have a stellar day in the pits and we didn't have a stellar day on the race track and we finished seventh. That ain't all bad."

ELLIOTT SADLER --21-- Motorcraft Taurus (Finished 6th) -- "That was a great day. We had a pretty decent car. I could tell at the beginning of the race when we moved up through traffic, and when that caution fell I was like, 'Man, this is right in our fuel window.' I tell you, Jack Roush gave us one hell of a motor this weekend. I punished that thing terribly missing gears, over-revving it and it never faded, never broke, never did anything. I'm really proud of the motor guys at Roush for giving us something that sturdy. I'm proud of Pat for a good call. It was a good day for all of us on a road course." THE CAR WASN'T THAT GOOD AT ONE POINT. "It was a whole lot tighter. I think we just missed it on a set of tires, but it never got better. Track position is everything on these road courses, so good track position made it to where you could do OK."

JEFF BURTON --99-- Citgo Taurus (Finished 29th) -- "I don't know exactly what was wrong, but it would miss really bad. When you accelerated it wouldn't run. It would pop and miss and it ran out of fuel real early, so there was something wrong with the carburetor and that cost us a lap. They penalized us in the pits for a real strange rule. I'm not really sure I understand what they penalized us for -- something about the guy holding the catch can left the pit area or something. That's a new one on me. I'm not saying it's not a rule, I just never heard of it before. We had a problem and it just kept going away on us. Then at the end, I ran hard for a while trying to get my lap back and then I decided to get out of the way."

DALE JARRETT --88-- UPS Taurus (Finished 15th) -- "We were fortunate that some of the other guys had mechanical problems and spun each other out because we just never did hit on it all weekend. I just couldn't get up out of the corners. At times I could run reasonable times, but it was only because I was fast in places that you can't pass. Then when it came time to try to pass, I was just in trouble. We made the most of it. It wasn't a total loss I guess. I think the top three or four guys had some problems, so it wasn't a total loss. It could have been a lot, lot worse. We'll take it and move on."

MATT KENSETH --17-- DEWALT Power Tools Taurus (Finished 39th) -- "I just broke a gear. I don't know. We broke a transmission at Pocono and now we broke a gear here. I know a lot of teams were having problem with it and not just us, so I don't know. I felt like as far as driving a road course, this is the easiest I've ever been on the drive train before that broke, so I don't know why it broke." THE FACT MARLIN AND GORDON HAD TROUBLE BEFORE YOU, WERE YOU THINKING IT MIGHT BE A DAY TO GAIN SOME GROUND IN THE POINTS RACE? "No matter how they run it's just disappointing. I felt like we had a car to get a top five finish and that would have been really awesome for a road course. I felt like we had a good car. We could pretty much run the same times as the leader, but we fell out of it and finished 40th or almost last. It's disappointing whenever you break parts, especially when you break that early and it gets you so far behind."

RYAN NEWMAN RAYBESTOS ROOKIE PRESS CONFERENCE

RYAN NEWMAN --12-- ALLTEL Taurus (Finished 9th) -- "The test helped us a lot. Any time you can come and test you learn just a little bit and that can get you a heads up for the entire weekend. As a Raybestos Rookie of the Year candidate, it was pretty important for us just to come and get some experience and get some laps under my belt on a road course. Overall, we had a pretty good race and everything felt pretty good."

YOU CLOSED THE GAP ON JIMMIE A LITTLE BIT. "Yeah, Jimmie had some misfortune and a lot of guys had some misfortune today, but it's all about preparation I guess and the guys that don't break are there at the end."

WHAT'S THE BIGGEST KEY TO A TRACK LIKE THIS? "Like many tracks like this, the one big thing is just braking and getting comfortable under braking. It's not always how deep you can brake, but how much control you have and how you can position your car so you can pass people. That was a big thing that we focused on."

HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED ANYTHING LIKE THIS BEFORE? "I did a lot of go-kart practice racing and fun stuff like that, but this is my first road course race period. I never raced at all on a road course for competition."

HOW DO YOU FEEL PHYSICALLY? "It's much more physically demanding than I ever thought it would be and it's definitely physically demanding. I was pretty hot in the car today just because of the climate outside. I think that was one of the biggest things that made it so physically draining."

WHAT DID YOU SAY TO JIMMIE WHEN HIS CAR WAS SO LATE GETTING OUT? "I told him he couldn't play today because his car hadn't showed up yet. No, we were just talking about what's going on and talking about our girlfriends and how girlfriends talk to each other and stuff like that."

ARE YOU GOOD FRIENDS? Oh yeah, we're pretty good friends. We have our moments on the race track like everybody else, but off the race track we can get along just fine."

WAS IT HARD TO PASS? "It seems like anyplace you go to, no matter what race track it is, it's difficult to pass because the competition is so close. I was talking to Matt Kenseth before the race and he said that a couple of years ago when he ran his first road course race, there were 20 cars on the lead lap at the finish and the next year there were 30 cars on the lead lap. Things are tightening up and teams are just developing and becoming so good that there's no dominate team out there. Each weekend it's not the same guy that's running up front, it's a mixture of drivers."

HOW DO YOU AND RUSTY RACE EACH OTHER ON THE TRACK? "I'm racing another car, but I am a little more cautious just out of respect. He owns part of my race car and part of his race car, too, so there's no reason we need to beat and bang on each other. If one guy is faster than another, we can make some arrangements to do it, if it needs to be, but, overall, we race each other just like we do everybody else."

IS THIS LIKE DRIVING DOWN A COUNTRY ROAD? "A little bit yes and a little bit no. Most of the cars I had would fall apart before I got a couple of laps in."

RICKY RUDD WINNER'S PRESS CONFERENCE

RICKY RUDD --28-- Havoline Taurus -- "I hate to win one that way. Listening to Tony when he was talking about track position, we were sort of caught in that dilemma. I think we were running third or fourth before the caution and our car was in really good shape. We didn't have to stop. We had enough fuel, but it's one of those deals -- do you pit or do you stay out? We ended up winning the race, but it looked like Jerry Nadeau made the right call. I don't know where he was before that caution, but he was probably about 10th or so and they stayed on the race track. Track position, again, was very important today. Our guys did a great job. They got this Havoline Taurus out of the pits. I think we were the second car out of the pits that went into the pits. We went in third or fourth and we came out second, which was actually about 11th in line, so we had to race a lot of cars to get back to the front of the pack and we simply ran out of time. We were running Jerry down, but we just didn't have the time to catch him. You hate to see misfortune come those guy's way. Jerry could have definitely used a big shot in the arm with a win today and Petty Enterprises, that's just a great operation over there, but we've lost some races the last three weekends under very similar conditions. We sort of were resigned to the fact that we ran out of time and were gonna run second today and, all of a sudden, his misfortune -- he pulled over -- and we won the race. It's not something you want to go bragging about and be proud of it, but, again, we've lost some. We've had some races where we led the most laps and didn't win the race."

HOW SATISFYING IS THIS FOR YOU? "I think a lot of people, it's not that they don't want to come out and test, the problem is you're limited to test dates. So, if you test here -- it didn't even used to apply to Watkins Glen -- but now you can carry the same car because you guys have been working on the race track and making it much easier to drive this race track. A car that works here will work at Watkins Glen. So you look at your seven test dates and you turn around and go to a race track where that knowledge will only apply to two race tracks, sometimes it's not a very smart or productive way to burn a test. So, that's why a lot of guys elect not to come out here and that's been our reason over the years. But we came here and tested a month ago. This is a brand new car that we did test. We missed the boat when we started the race. The heat really played a factor. We misjudged the track conditions and the first part of the race we faded back pretty hard to about eighth or 10th and then we made some adjustments on the pit stop and our car was good again, but it took all day long to get track position after that."

YOU ARE ONLY 148 POINTS OUT OF THE POINTS LEAD. "Yeah, the points deal, we never counted ourselves out. We knew what the situation was and kept watching where the lead was. That 300-point gap is not a big gap this part of the season. I know we kept talking championship all along and nobody probably took us very seriously when we were 10th in the points, but we looked at the math. Steve Post, our PR guy, he looked at it coming into this weekend's race. If we had just finished the last 60 laps at Richmond, the last 10 at Dover and the last five at Pocono -- even if we had run second on those days -- we would have only been 45 points behind Sterling coming into this weekend's race, so we've been kind of silently back there plugging away. Yes, we woulda, shoulda, coulda won two or three races by now, but when you have misfortune you just have to keep plugging away. Today, unfortunately for somebody else, it went the other way and, all of a sudden, we inherited a race today that we were gonna run second in."

AFTER WHAT'S HAPPENED THOUGH. "I think that's the way we justify it is that we've had some races in very similar conditions and we were just snakebit. Jerry was right down at the end of the race when he broke. You're gonna have problems -- that just happens in Winston Cup racing -- but the real gut-busters are those ones when you get inside five, six laps to go and it looks like you've got the race won and, all of a sudden, something takes you out. Mechanical problems happen all the time, but when you get inside that last five or 10 laps, those are the ones that are really hard to take."

DOES THIS HAVE ANY IMPACT ON YOUR DECISION FOR NEXT YEAR? "It certainly feels good to be in victory lane. Again, I'm sort of contemplating the retirement situation, but my deal about retirement is not about being competitive anymore, it's more personal reasons. I don't feel like I've lost anything. I don't feel like I'm any better than I used to be. I don't feel like I'm any worse than I used to be. Somewhere along the line that's gonna happen. I don't know what the age is -- it might be 50, 60 or 70. I know my dad is 77 and he works harder and is in better shape than I am, so I think our family history has been such that age really hasn't affected much. Again, it's more of a personal decision, more family time and things of that nature. If the retirement deal comes up, that's what's controlling that and, again, the next couple of weeks, hopefully, we've got a weekend off. We're gonna go down and just take life easy. We're gonna go down to Disneyworld for a couple of weeks. That almost sounds like a commercial. True story, I've got Landon and all of his neighborhood buddies. We're gonna go down and have a big family deal down in Daytona and Orlando and figure out what we want to do -- just kind of enjoy things and get racing off my mind for a couple of weeks and then come back to Daytona."

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT BLOCKING. DID YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS AT THE END? "I don't know if they moved over or it was just that some of the cars could run good on old tires and some could not. I think it's a psychological disadvantage if you're in front and you're on old tires and your crew chief is saying, 'Hey, the 28 is coming and he's got new tires.' Right there, it kind of puts a psychological block in your mind and you say, 'Hey, I can't hold this guy, he's on new tires.' I had to race a couple of guys. I got into it with Tony, but Tony probably had new tires on, I'm not sure. We got to beating fenders and everything there for a while and then I'm watching the leaders just sort of check out on both of us. I didn't think it was time to race that hard, but everyone's got their own mindset at when it's time to go and, obviously, it was maybe Tony's time to go maybe a little bit sooner than it was my time to go. But some of the guys, we were able to get by. As far as the blocking goes, that's pretty much road racing. I say road racing. You only pass each other under braking. That race track is three lanes wide in some places when you go to brake and the trouble is, like Tony says, if someone moves over on you and starts braking and you have to go to the outside, certainly you can pass him but coming off turn 11, where most of the passing happens, it's real greasy and slippery out there. You certainly would have cleared the man had he not pulled out in front of you, but that's just sort of the way it always seems to go here at road racing. It's something you deal with and you go on."

DO YOU BELIEVE IN RACING LUCK? "I don't know. I don't believe in superstitions or nothing, but one of our fans sent out a package of four-leaf clovers and it did happen to make the trip all the way out to California and Linda (Rudd) did happen to remind me to rub on it this morning before we got in the car, so maybe that's the trouble -- I didn't carry this four-leaf clover around with me enough for the bad luck. I don't know how to explain it. I've never been so snakebit in my life -- the things we've had happen to us late in the race. Circumstance. You're going by Rusty Wallace late in the race and he blows a right-front tire and runs into you. You go to Pocono. There are 42 other cars out there and I'm leading the race, and with six laps to go I'm the guy that picks up the debris. That's just bad luck, that part is. The wheel left loose at Dover on a pit stop, that was human error. I can't blame that on bad luck, but there are two of them that right there that sort of slipped away from us. I don't know. You've just gotta keep plugging away and when it's your day, it's your day. You certainly look back and say, 'Man, I could be sitting here with four wins right now,' but it just wasn't meant to be and you pick up and go on."

DO YOU ALMOST THINK AFTER THE LAST MONTH YOU SHOULD HANG IT UP? "The only thing that enters your mind when you start thinking about it is that I've worked for 27 years to get a team and a crew chief and a sponsor and a car owner where everything clicks like it does here. You can go out and recruit the best driver in the world. You could take a Jeff Gordon, a Tony Stewart and you can put them around in different situations and it's not always successful. You can take and pair the top crew chief that everyone would pick in the garage area, and the best driver, and sometimes it just doesn't click. This deal is sort of not made up with any superstars. I know Michael McSwain came with me and Robert Yates says, 'Who do you want to crew chief?' And I said, 'Fatback, I want to bring him on.' He said, 'Well, I don't know about that.' But I knew that the chemistry was there and it worked, and it certainly speeded things along pretty good. Again, that's the hard part when you start thinking about retirement. 'Man, this thing clicks so well. It's a championship caliber team.' Yeah, you hate to give that up after working for 27 years at a shot at it."

HOW FRUSTRATING IS IT TO HAVE A FAST CAR AND NOT GET POSITION? "Yeah, it is frustrating. Everybody works hard to have the best car, but strategy does play a factor in road course racing. Today, for much of the race, we had a fourth or fifth-place car, but there was another group of cars -- I guess -- that were equally fast and pitted out of sync or something and they're in the middle of the pack. They're on the other side of the race track and we're up front and it can become a little frustrating. It is different. It's always been that way -- road racing -- it's always been that way and it's just what you expect. I've come in here before and had a fast car and didn't win the race. I've come in here before and had a slow car and won the race. It's just the way the conditions shake out. A lot of it is pit strategy. If you look, crew chiefs, I don't know what happened to Jeff Gordon, but it's not all luck that he's up there winning all these road races when he comes out here. There's some strategy involved in that. They obviously have good cars and a good driver, but there is some strategy that goes into that. So, the guys in the pits, they sit down and plan strategy and they'll come in with a game plan that will work at the road courses more so than anywhere else. The tire management situation, the driver has got to use his head. He knows he's got to run to like lap 35 or 36 -- whatever it was -- we weren't pitting no matter what until lap 35 or 36 today. That was just the way the deal was gonna work. My car was pretty loose. I wanted tires really bad, but you look at the race and you run it backwards and you count how many stops. You've got to do it in two stops or three stops and you plan your pit strategy and your track position according to that. It sounds easy, but it does confuse me too. Believe it or not, there is some rhyme or reason for certain guys always running toward the front at the end of the race."

WHEN YOU DO DECIDE TO RETIRE WILL YOU SKIP A YEAR FROM THE CIRCUIT? "I don't know how to answer that. What I would really like to do when that time comes is take a year off and don't do anything -- just hang out and get totally bored just sitting around twiddling your thumbs and then figure out what I want to do. This is all I've ever done. I've raced since I was a kid. My only job, I guess that I really had, I worked for my dad. I've been really fortunate. So I look at the options. I can always go back. He's still got a delivery parts truck and I probably still have my delivery route waiting on me if I need it to deliver parts, but it would be a little different if I go back and deliver parts. I would be delivering them because I want to, not because I have to. I don't really know. There are some tough questions that we're facing -- not only me, but Linda. We've got some serious things we need to think about. There is gonna be a time when I obviously step out of a race car. Tony Stewart is gonna face that. Heck, I thought he was in his twenties. He told me today he's 31. He's getting to be an old man now compared to the kids that are coming up, so everyone is gonna face that. I think the only reason I'm facing it maybe more so than the other guys is not that they're older than me, it's that my contract comes to an end this year. One of my biggest fears is that you hang in there too long and you become unsuccessful. Some of the predecessors in front of me, there were a couple of guys that hung in there too long. When I go out, I want to go out at the best of my game. Certainly, it would be nice to go out on top, but go out at the best of my game."

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE POINTS RACE HALFWAY THROUGH THE YEAR? "First of all, you guys have the stats. I think this is a pretty unusual situation to get to this point in the season and have so many guys knocking on the door with a legitimate shot at the championship. I know that last year we arrived at Indianapolis, which is not too far in the distant future, I think we showed up going into Indy and we were second in the points. Everybody looked around like, 'Where did they come from?' We were sort of lurking in the shadows. We had some problems. We got some momentum going and the cars ran better and better, but nobody really paid attention to us. Coming into Indy all of a sudden it was like, 'They're second in the points. They could be a factor.' This deal is a little different. I don't know how to read this year. I would have thought by now that there would have been some distance put in between guys. Instead, it seems like it's heating up. I've never ever experienced this many guys running this close to a points championship. If you're 300 points behind right now, that's not too far out of it. When we arrive at the halfway point, that is not a big deficit. Now we're talking 148 between the top seven. It's gonna be interesting. You asked what do we look for, I think you'll start seeing with the stretch of 20 races when we come off the break. It's gonna get back to team preparation. NASCAR will play a big factor. If all of a sudden they give somebody a half-inch on the air dam or they take a half-inch away, or they give somebody this or that. I would say it's almost in NASCAR's hand who wins this championship, if, all of a sudden, they throw a rules change in there. You look at it right now, everybody is really close and we're doing it with kind of the current rules. If, all of a sudden, one manufacturer gets something, that could sway this thing one way or the other. We'll have to wait and see. Hopefully, everyone is content. I think the Pontiacs have got a little bit extra help the last couple of weeks. I know Bobby Labonte ran awfully good on the race track today. I don't think that half-inch of spoiler or whatever they got would make a difference here like that, but those are the things you've got to watch out for because here we are, we're prepared with the cars we've got. If a rules change comes in here, then all of a sudden we're thrown off-balance and we're searching in the middle of the season. That's not a good time to be searching for answers to handling problems."

YOU'VE TALKED A LOT ABOUT THE AGE DIFFERENCE. WHERE DO YOU STAND ON THAT NOW? "The age thing, again, my only argument was that if you've got a young guy leading the race and he's doing well, by all means, mention him. There are some great young guys. If Bill Elliott is up front leading this race today, or Rusty Wallace, call it like you see it. Again, it gets back to the guys that work on these race cars -- some of them 24 hours a day -- they live and die by that television coverage so their buddies and their friends can say, 'Hey, I saw your car on TV the other day.' They take a lot of pride in that. That was my only argument. I've never had a problem with age or gender. I've raced against girls during the early part of my career. They were some of the best go-kart drivers I ever raced against. My theory is you always get in that race car, put that helmet on, put that window net up and you can't tell if you're a girl a boy, black or white, 10 years old or 100 years old. Hopefully, the best driver, the best team and the best preparation will win the race."

WHAT ABOUT THE 20-WEEK STRETCH? "It can tend to be a grind. You've got to mentally block out a lot of that. It's not as hard on the drivers as it is the crew members. The pressure comes within the organization. If you have a bad weekend, the guys feel it, they sense it, but you've got to keep the sense of panic out of the equation and go back to your gameplan and keep doing what you're doing. If you have a bad race, you have to evaluate but you also quickly have to put to rest what your problems are -- whether that means going out to Kentucky and having a test to identify your problem and make sure it's remedied. You can't stumble down the stretch. You can't break anything. That's the heartbreaker, if you break parts."

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO WIN ON A ROAD COURSE? "It feels good to win on a road course. Again, I wouldn't say we didn't take them seriously. I know we talked about testing and stuff a while ago and special cars. Maybe we didn't them as seriously as maybe we should have, but the biggest equalizer in this garage area was the changing of the transmission situation. You hear us speak about it with the Jericho's and the Textile transmissions. When they came out with those shifters. You say, 'Well, how can a transmission do that?' The biggest thing it does -- everybody in this garage area goes into the corner on an oval, gets out of the gas, puts their left foot and plants it on the brake pedal. You could not used to do that when you had the old style transmission. It's awkward to tell a driver to brake with his right foot as it is to anybody in here to switch hands. If they're used to writing with their right hand and switch to left-handed. It's that awkward. It throws your timing off and you don't feel the race car. That transmission, most of these guys come out braking with their left foot. They do on ovals. They don't have to change that now, so the transmissions were really the biggest equalizer in the garage area and that's been in play since the early nineties. There are also a lot of guys that run good on the road course. There are a lot of good guys that come in and get it done. Jerry Nadeau spent his early racing days over in Europe. You've got Boris Said and Ron Fellows. These guys, they should be good because that's what they do for a living. It kind of throws an extra challenge in there. I enjoy racing against them because it gives you a chance to see what you're made of as far as road racing ability."

SO DO YOU HAVE TWO OR THREE OPTIONS AS FAR AS NEXT YEAR? IS ONE RETIREMENT, TWO ANOTHER TEAM AND THREE WHERE YOU ARE NOW? "I don't know if it's here, I really don't know. I don't if the option of coming back with Robert Yates is here. I truly don't know that. It's a little difficult, let me just say that because I really don't know what's going on there. I don't hold the cards there, Robert holds the cards. If you've ever talked to Robert, you can talk to him for three hours and you leave there and say, 'What did he say?' It's not because he's not wise. He purposely can talk in a circle better than anybody I've ever seen. So, I'm not getting answers out of him. I really don't know. I don't know if that seat is available or not. That would be my number one priority for me to come back because the chemistry clicks. There are some awfully good options out there, if I decide to stay put and not retire. There are some really good race teams. When you start talking about going with, not necessarily new race teams, but anytime you plug a driver into a new equation, you've got new crew chiefs, sometimes that can take a little while to develop that relationship -- two years, one year. Of course, Jimmie Johnson has proven it doesn't take any time. So the way the teams are structured today, I don't think it would take as long as it has in previous years to have a driver switch and have it go well just because of the way teams are structured nowadays. You asked about three options. Robert could be an option, I don't know. If I stay, that would probably be my number one priority. Two would be retirement and I guess three would be the option to go with another team. There are some pretty heavy thoughts on my mind I have to kind of figure out. There is all kind of talk in the garage area and I've talked to some different people, but there is nothing that's been finalized at all yet."

DOES THAT MEAN YOU'VE BEEN CONTACTED BY OTHER OWNERS? "I've got contracts in hand and I've been very up front with everybody. I've told everybody, I want to sort through this retirement deal. I want to go to the best place that Ricky Rudd can go and win races and, hopefully, try to win a championship. That's my number one priority. That's kind of where we sit. In the meantime, like Robert's deal, a lot of people feel like that ride with Robert has already been signed by Elliott Sadler and that's not an option for me. Everyone wants to get their ducks in a row in case that deal falls through. I wouldn't say it's a race to get me in their car, but the domino effect will start falling. Unfortunately, it hinges off what I do. I think there are a lot of people's future kind of waiting on the side to see what I do if I stay. Every driver out there just wants the best equipment that he can get in and then the pecking order will go from there. I don't know if you'll see a lot different things next year. You might see some different drivers in different race cars that maybe you're not expecting. There might be a couple rides open up that maybe you're not expecting."

WHO ARE THE FOUR BEST OPERATIONS? "I don't know, that's a tough question. You look at most of them and very few have two solid teams up there. You'll see like a Hendrick's operation. Gordon, to me, is not on the par that they have been in years past and then they've got Jimmie Johnson that surprises everybody that team is as solid as it is. But then you've got Terry, he struggles at times and then shows brilliance at times with the car. Gordon has struggled a little bit and then you've got the 25. For some reason, that car just never seems to run. I know you could put anybody in that car and, for some reason, it doesn't click there. You have to go through all those organizations the same way. I like the way that thing runs. You've got Sterling out there and everybody kept waiting for him to fail. Obviously, today I guess he had a motor failure or something, but that team is really solid. I guess I'd have to look at the points and look at them. The Roush teams have come on tremendously this year. You didn't even really count them in the equation last year. Now, all of a sudden, you've got Kenseth out there, that team is really solid. You've got the 97, Kurt Busch, that deal is working and Mark's team is working. The Yates teams, we struggled but we're coming on now. DJ did win the race a week ago or so and he ran second the other week, so it's really hard. There's not really any teams, to me, that has shown dominance every race week in and week out, so there are some good teams out there."