Harvick wins Chicagoland for Chevrolet
CHEVROLET/TEAM MONTE CARLO NOTES AND QUOTES TROPICANA 400 CHICAGOLAND SPEEDWAY JOLIET, ILL. NO. 18 OF 36 EVENTS NASCAR WINSTON CUP SERIES SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2002 KEVIN HARVICK WINS CHICAGOLAND FOR CHEVROLET GIL MARTIN, CREW CHIEF, NO. 29 GM GOODWRENCH CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: "The GM Goodwrench car was great today and Kevin did a great job. I don¹t know what else to say, it was just a great, great race right there. The Lord stood by us right there." WHAT MADE YOU COME DOWN PIT ROAD THAT LAST TIME? "Well, we had to right there after we spun up there in 1 and 2. We were able to come back and top the tank off right there. We knew with 200 to go we could make it, we had been 67 laps. It was a great day." JEFF GORDON, NO. 24 DUPONT CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: "We had a good car all day. If we could just get in clean air, man, we could fly. It was just real hard to get track position and Robbie and those guys in the pits just did an awesome job. I mean the pit stops were great but that was a great call too. Took a risk to go to the back of the pack and get back there in traffic. I was just so loose on new tires that Kevin got by me and I guess the way it ended up, coming down to me and him that last restart, kind of wish I would have fought him a little bit harder, but I was real loose. Maybe I could¹ve stayed ahead of him and roles been reversed here we were just as good as he was but he got a good restart and drove his heart out and won the race. We¹re real happy for the DuPont Chevrolet to come home second." YOU GOT CLOSE, FELL BACK: "It¹s just aero push, you know what that is. My car was good in clean air, but when I got behind people I just got real, real tight. Even if I could have caught him, I was on him on the restart when the tires were cool, and I got up on him, but as soon as I got into the corner the thing just started really pushing, so I couldn¹t do much." JIMMIE JOHNSON, NO. 48 LOWE¹S CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO : "It¹s incredible. These guys at Hendrick Motorsports on this Lowe¹s No. 48 car have been giving me great cars, and to come out here, we don¹t really have backup cars, but we had to unload one we didn¹t intend on racing, come back to finish fourth. We passed more cars than anyone all day long. Fastest in a lot of segments, but we just didn¹t have the track position. We¹re not upset at all. To come back and finish fourth through this, it¹s an incredible day for the Lowe¹s Monte Carlo." RACING WITH BILL ELLIOTT AND OTHERS IN THE LAST 20 LAPS: "It¹s so hard to get a run because you¹re stuck behind somebody and when you pull up on them down the straightaway you push them out ahead of you. When you had a run in the corner you had to do something with it. I tried the top and it worked a couple of times. I tried the apron, it worked once. Just anywhere that I could go trying to keep my momentum on my side to clear somebody to get past them." WERE THERE GROOVES? "One and 2, the third line was still on the bottom. You could get a lap or two out there and work out a pass. It wasn¹t something that you could do all day.¹ FROM BACK TO FRONT: "I dodged a lot of stuff. There was a lot of things that came up that I was just lucky that I missed. Great race car, great stuff from Hendrick Motorsports, worked great." JEFF GREEN, NO. 30 AOL CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: "We had a pretty good car. Just the last set of tires we had on weren¹t worth a darn and just made the car really tight and being in traffic made it worse. It was a good day for us, didn¹t hit anything, and we came home with a decent finish. We need to be in that top 10 or the top five like we run all day. It¹s kind of disappointing Œcause we¹d run there all day. When you don¹t finish it¹s kind of disappointing but we¹re glad for Kevin and those guys. RCR needed this and maybe we can build off that." KEVIN HARVICK, NO. 29 GM GOODWRENCH CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: WHAT DOES THIS VICTORY MEAN TO YOU? "It¹s bittersweet. There are a lot of things that people can talk about you and we didn¹t say a whole lot, we just kept our head down, kept digging on our race teams, on our race cars. This isn¹t just the GM Goodwrench team. We made a big change there with the teams and everybody thought it was going to be better. I think in the long it¹s going to be better for everybody and then right now it¹s starting to show. I just can¹t say enough for Gil Martin and all these guys. They¹ve been working and working and working. It¹s been coming. We¹ve had good race cars every week, it¹s just we didn¹t have the finishes to show for them. We finished one, and we finished in the front. They had it planned out, how many laps to go and we just came in our window just like Johnny Sauter did yesterday and came out on top. It¹s really cool for everybody." WHAT WERE YOU THINKING ON LAST LAP? "I was just thinking, is the tire going to go flat, is the motor going to blow up, am I going to spin it out. I spun it out once. What¹s going to go wrong now? Everything¹s gone so good all day, and everything went right. We thought that our luck was going to turn around last week at Daytona, we missed a couple of wrecks; just have to take the good with the bad. And these guys keep digging and they don¹t ever give up on anybody. It¹s a team effort. The RCR organization is strong and we¹re here to stay." WHAT HAPPENED ON THE SPIN OUT? "I just got down on the apron under Kurt. He had somebody on the outside of him and, when I came up off the apron I just lost the air off the back of the car and spun out." ROBBY GORDON, NO. 31 CINGULAR WIRELESS CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: "We had a car to win the thing and Park got inside of us and tore the whole right side up to the fender. We had the pull the front fender forward and lost a lot of downforce on the front. It¹s a big disappointment. We had a really fast car in the middle of the race. We were able to pull away from Tony. We had a really good car; the guys made some great, great calls. Congratulations to Kevin Harvick for his run. We should have easily had a top five." WAS THAT WHY YOU DROPPED OUT OF THIRD? "Coming off of turn 2 I guess he must have got a push and caught us and just drug our fender off the thing. It happens, it¹s racing. No big deal. I hit the wall earlier and that cost us too. At one point we had the fastest car on the track. To come back and still finish inside the top 10 I¹m pretty proud. We were just pushing too much at the end, didn¹t have enough downforce. Real, real proud of everybody at Richard Childress Racing." BRIAN PATTIE, CREW CHIEF, NO. 25 UAW-DELPHI CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: WHAT HAPPENED TO NEMECHEK? "First we ran out of gas, which cost us two laps. Got back where we were one lap down. And then just had two flat tires and the last one finally put us in the fence." WAS RUNNING GOOD ENCOURAGING? "I guess, there are some good signs. You still got to finish where you¹re running. We had a top 10 car and that¹s where we should have finished. I guess we¹ll pick up the pieces and go to Loudon and look forward to Pocono and Indy." DALE EARNHARDT, JR., NO. 8 BUDWEISER CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: "The one thing that¹s wrong with this track is the bumps. The bumps are awful going into 1 and going into 3. If you get around those, work around them, you¹d be..." YOU HAD A GOOD CAR TODAY: "We took four tires and got beat." WHY DID YOU DECIDE ON FOUR TIRES? "I didn¹t." WHAT WAS THEIR THINKING? "The tires would be faster. When you¹re 13th, 15th or whatever in line then you got 15 @#$% lapped cars on the inside. You can¹t pass 30 cars in 20 laps, nobody can, nobody¹s that good." I said, God, we should¹ve just got gas or whatever, you know. Damn. We¹ll be all right. It¹s a good run, feeling good to run up front." FRUSTRATED? "No. We got to whoop some ass for a little while, and that really felt good." POST-RACE PRESS CONFERENCE WITH WINNER KEVIN HARVICK, NO. 29 GM GOODWRENCH CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO. TEAM OWNER RICHARD CHILDRESS AND CREW CHIEF GIL MARTIN ALSO IN ATTENDANCE. Repeat winner. Kevin¹s third career W.C. victory, his first victory and third top-10 in 2002. Second victory in the two races at Chicagoland. 13th different race winner this year. Second straight driver to win the first two races at a new race track on the W.C. circuit, joining Tony Stewart (¹99 Homestead). Led 29 of the 267 laps including the final 25. It is his fifth victory for Chevrolet in 2002. HARVICK: "It was obviously a good day and finally I think we got a little luck on our side. Got a little greedy with our fast race car and spun the thing out. And came back and then we were forced to kind of just pit when we needed to and just stay out. We didn¹t know how fast it was going to be when it got out front, but it was plenty fast. We could come through traffic and pass cars and go high and go low. It was just a matter of track position for us and once we got it it was pretty much lights out." DEFENDING WIN HERE? TESTED HERE? "We¹re just glad to defend anything at this point. We had a good month; we didn¹t have a lot of the finishes to show for it. The momentum has been building and the chemistry between myself and Gil and all the guys is really strong. They are a lot of guys like me that haven¹t won a lot of races, we¹re all hungry to win races, and hungry to prove everybody wrong. I think we¹ve accomplished all those goals and (it¹s) pretty much fast forward from here." TALK ABOT THE WHOLE MOVE DOWN ON TO THE APRON THAT LED TO THE SPIN? JEFF GORDON ALTHOUGH HE QUESTIONED THE MOVE SAID IT CLEARLY WON THE RACE FOR YOU. "At that point the race car was so fast that while the tires were fresh I was trying to get everything I could. I thought that Kurt would clear the guy on the outside of him. And when I came back up, there wasn¹t a whole lot of room to go. Because when you come off the apron you need to go straight up and I tried to go into the corner and up onto the race track and all at once and it just felt like somebody popped both the rear tires. Just lost it and (it¹s) fortunate that nobody hit us but dang you can¹t knock us for trying." MORE TO FOLLOW CHEVROLET/TEAM MONTE CARLO NOTES AND QUOTES TROPICANA 400 CHICAGOLAND SPEEDWAY JOLIET, ILL. NO. 18 OF 36 EVENTS NASCAR WINSTON CUP SERIES SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2002 RACE NOTES PAGE 6 A MOVE THAT WON YOU THE RACE WAS PITTING ON LAP 18 ON FIRST CAUTION: "We¹ve talked about this. That¹s one thing that is so fortunate about the situation is all of us hang out with each other. And we were hanging out at the motor home just going through situation after situation just watching the Busch race yesterday there at the end, when Jeff Burton passed the pace car, is that OK, or do you pit early, what do you want to do? We went through a lot of scenarios yesterday, and dang, if the race didn¹t play out the same way it did yesterday and we¹d already run through all this stuff once. So, we came in and didn¹t put any tires on, put gas in it and we were pretty fortunate. That¹s one thing that Gil taught me. If you look in the mirror and you see everybody else coming, just come. I thought I¹d knocked the valves off the thing and went through the grass and we came on pit road. It turns out that was the first move that won us the race. The second move was when we pitted when we knew we could make it to the end." DID YOU GET DOWN ON THE APRON BEFORE YOU GOT TO THE TURN BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO GO DOWN THERE OR YOU WERE FORCED DOWN THERE? JEFF SAID IT WAS A STUPID MOVE TO GO DOWN THERE: "Jeff Gordon got second, so maybe if he¹d been a little braver he might¹ve won. We went down on the apron coming into the trio-oval, done it two or three times, and he thinks it was a stupid move and I think it was pretty cool." WHEN YOU HEAR COMMENTS LIKE THAT, IS IT JUST SOUR GRAPES? "I think there¹s a lot of people that thought they had us beat down and kicked up and buried in our grave and looking for somewhere to fill the hole at RCR. Like I said before, if anybody read the article on nascar.com, we¹ve been sitting back for a couple of months just watching and writing and remembering. Just putting our heads down and letting our race car do the talking. That¹s been our main focus, to go out and work on our race cars and really not get in the middle of any turmoil and just go out and what difference does it make. If we can make it through last year at RCR, we can make it through anything and this is a little speed bump going through the parking lot at 15 miles an hour. We¹ve got a lot of confidence in each other and we¹re very, very excited to be together as a race team and as an organization. It doesn¹t matter what they say. We¹re here and the only people that I care what they say are in these black and silver shirts or on the America On-Line or Cingular car." RICHARD CHILDRESS (this weekend is a sweep for RCR: Busch win and Winston Cup win): "It¹s great. It shows the strength of our organization. We were down, everybody, when you¹re down, people try to kick you as hard as they can. No one ever gave up. We knew that there was a peak up there and we could get there. And Kevin and Gil and everybody in our organization never gave up. Johnny Sauter, he was hurt for a few weeks there, and we got him back and I¹m just proud of everyone and all CHEVROLET/TEAM MONTE CARLO NOTES AND QUOTES TROPICANA 400 CHICAGOLAND SPEEDWAY JOLIET, ILL. NO. 18 OF 36 EVENTS NASCAR WINSTON CUP SERIES SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2002 RACE NOTES PAGE 7 of our sponsors, ACDelco, Goodwrench, for sticking behind us. That¹s what it takes. I heard Kevin say it before. The people that believe in you will always be with you." GIL MARTIN: ON RECENT SWITCH AND YOUR SUCCESS? "Everybody from the outside is pretty surprised at the fact that switching teams and we had good chemistry right off the bat. Well, we¹ve had pretty good chemistry the whole time and because we had Robby from last year and we had a lot of momentum. It¹s probably a surprise to a lot of the people in this room, in the stands and all over the country, that we¹ve been able to run this good this fast. This team is good, the organization is good. We just had a lot of little things that we had to get over and we¹ve gotten past them. We¹ll be strong." WHEN YOU WERE DOWN, HOW DID YOU KEEP THAT FROM BECOMING DOUBT? "He¹s sitting right here (Childress). We have a lot of meetings and he let¹s us know he¹s been through this a lot of times. That when you ride the highs you¹ve got a lot of people that are there to support you, and when you get down, when you¹re having trouble, hey, the only people you¹ve got to depend on are the people that you¹re right there working side by side with. And he¹s preached that to us and he¹s been there and done it and we believed in him. He has 246 employees and it¹s paid off." HARVICK: "I¹m kind of in the same boat. Richard will tell you. I was right on the verge of being in the doubt category and he took me down by the river and he said, Look, everything is good. He said just trust me and I¹ll trust you and all of a sudden everything just kind of clicked in my head and I said, You know, everything is good. We¹ll just roll along with this thing and he¹s been through this before and I¹m just here to learn and try and listen to what he¹s got to say. I was there and he pulled me up and kept me from drowning. We¹re just fortunate to have him on our side and him keeping us going in the right line and really making us pay attention to the things that we need to pay attention to." CHILDRESS: "Just a great organization behind us, you know. At RCR it takes a lot of people. Like I sayŠWe still got a lot of hurdles we got to cross. I wish I could say that everything was uphill from here, but we got a lot to do. Our goal is to win a championship and have Kevin Harvick on the stage in New York. It¹s going to take a lot of work to get us there and (we¹re) excited about a lot of things in the future that we¹re working on." HARVICK: "We got two more race teams to get into victory lane before the end of the year, too." CHILDRESS: IMPORTANCE OF MOMENTUM IN RACING. WAS PART OF IT WHAT HAPPENED AT DAYTONA? "If you were speaking to the 29 team I think we went there and sat on the outside pole, I think. Was running second in the race and we ended up getting turned around and at