GM RACING NOTES--POCONO 500

POCONO;  JUNE 8, 2003;  PAGE 1


TONY STEWART, NO. 20 HOME DEPOT CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: NOTE: Stewart won 
Sunday’s Pocono 500, his first victory of the 2003 season. “We wouldn’t have 
guessed it would have taken this long to get back [into Victory Lane] either, 
but it’s just been one of those years for us. Everybody on this Home Depot team 
and at Joe Gibbs Racing, they’ve done such a good job of getting is better cars 
than we’ve ever had this year, and the motor department is giving us the best 
motors I’ve ever had in Winston Cup and this new Monte Carlo is the best body 
and the best race car we’ve ever had, for sure. It’s just a matter of 
consistency on our part. We haven’t had any luck all year. All of our sponsors 
have kept patting us on the back and telling us we were going to get it 
eventually, we just had to keep our heads up and keep focused and we’ve done 
that. We finally got one here today.” DID QUALIFYING HERE FRIDAY TELL YOU THAT 
YOU MIGHT HAVE A SHOT AT VICTORY LANE? “Yeah, especially as loose as we were. 
That’s what kept us off the pole. I told Greg [crew chief Greg Zipadelli], ‘as 
loose as this thing is, it should turn good in the race.’ It just seems like 
you can always get a good feel for what kind of car you’re going to have in the 
race by what goes on Friday.” DID YOU HAVE TO MAKE ANY ADJUSTMENTS? “We just 
kept having to free it up. We were pretty tight at the beginning, and we wanted 
to tighten it up a little bit for the beginning to make sure we were on the 
safe side for the green track today. As the race went on, we just kept having 
to free the car up. It was real tight on entry and we kept making real good 
changes and the car kept responding to it. We just kept sneaking up on it, but 
we never got all the way there. But the guys on the pit crew are the ones that 
won us this race. They got us track position and we were able to run our pace, 
not everybody else’s pace.”

DALE EARNHARDT JR., NO. 8 BUDWEISER CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: (Finished 4th): “I 
was happy with the top five. We didn’t have the best car, and Tony had a real 
good car. I’m pretty happy. It was a top-five. Matt [Kenseth] finished right in 
front of us, bit we’ve been keeping him in sight, and that’s all we can do all 
year long to stay in the point battle. I’m real proud of my team, we had a 
great car all weekend. When you have a good car, you can do whatever you want.”

TERRY LABONTE, NO. 5 KELLOGG’S/got milk? CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: (Finished 7th): 
NOTE: Labonte was battling with Jeff Green on the 197th lap when the two made 
contact, sending Green head-on into the inner retaining wall. “I had a heck of 

a run on him there, and he cut down to block me. I tried to cut back to the 
right. I didn’t want to let out of the gas, and I thought I had him cleared. I 
caught him on the back and around he went. I hate it. I just never meant to get 
into Jeff. 


GM RACING NOTES AND QUOTES; POCONO 500:
POCONO;  JUNE 8, 2003;  PAGE 2

MORE LABONTE: He’s a great competitor and he was having a really good run 
there, but I had such a good run on him and we got together.”

JOE GIBBS, TEAM OWNER, NO. 20 HOME DEPOT CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: “It sure has 
been a long, hard year. Tony has had a good car week in and week out, but 
nothing has gone right for us. It just shows you how hard this sport is.”

STEVE PARK, NO. 30 AMERICA ONLINE CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: (Finished 35th): “It 
just got real loose, like we did at Dover, and there’s something we’re doing 
that is making it get that way. It’s a brand-new race car, so we’ll get back 
and get a good look at it. We wanted to test this car, but we didn’t. Its first 
time on the track was this race. It started off really decent and then got real 
loose.”

TONY STEWART WINNER’S PRESS CONFERENCE: NOTE: Sunday’s victory was Stewart’s 
first since Watkins Glen last August and the 16th of his NASCAR Winston Cup 
career. The 32-year-old Indiana native climbed three spots in the point 
standings to 13th, 540 behind leader Matt Kenseth. “WERE YOU CONCERNED ON THAT 
LAST RESTART? “I think we had a good car. I knew at the end of the race we had 
a good car, it was just a matter of getting a good shift from second to third 
gear on the restart and just running my line. I got a smooth shift and got into 
Turn 1 all right.”

GREG ZIPADELLI, CREW CHIEF, NO. 20 HOME DEPOT CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: DOES THIS 
MEAN YOUR LUCK IS CHANGING? “I think things just haven’t gone our way this 
year. We’ve made some mistakes and lost our focus a few times this year. That’s 

all just part of the sport. Everything has to be 100 percent, every lap, in 
order to win. It’s gotten that competitive. I was a little nervous at one point 
because we had to give up track position because of our fuel mileage, and I 
felt that if everything went our way, we’d get back up front. We did it.”

STEWART: HOW IMPORTANT WAS QUICK PIT WORK TODAY? “I think it won us the race, 
to be honest. I felt like the crew won the race today, not me. I just did my 
part driving. They got me in position on that stop where we went back to green. 
I was able to run my pace, and not abuse the front tires chasing down the 
leader. I could run the way I wanted to run and lift the way I wanted to lift 
and do everything my way instead of trying to push hard and run those guys 
down. When it came time to come in and make our green-flag stop there for fuel, 
they had a great stop again, got us our ahead of Sterling and Mark and the 
biggest thing was just getting right back into my rhythm. They had two really 
good stops right there at the end of the race that I feel won us the race.”

GM RACING NOTES AND QUOTES; POCONO 500:
POCONO;  JUNE 8, 2003;  PAGE 3

MORE STEWART: WITH THE WAY YOUR LUCK HAS GONE IN RECENT RACES, WERE YOU WAITING 
FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN? “Zippy called me before the last restart there and 
asked me, ‘what are you doing?’ I kind of thought to myself, ‘what do you mean, 
what am I doing? I’m driving the car around under caution.’ So that’s what I 
said to him. He said, ‘we’re just checking. We’re all standing here with 
butterflies. What about you?’ I said, ‘nope, I’m in good shape right now.’ I 
figured something was going to happen, because that’s been the story line for 
us all year. In all reality, it probably made it easier for me on that last 
restart. I stayed focused, just concentrated on doing what I had to do behind 
the wheel. In the back of my mind, I thought, ‘well, surely something’s going 
to happen here, so don’t get too excited,’ It probably kept me more calm and 
made it a little easier to stay focused.”

WERE YOU CONFIDENT ON THAT LAST PIT STOP THAT EVERYONE WAS GOING TO CYCLE 
THROUGH AND YOU’D WIND UP BACK FRONT? “When Sterling came in as early as he 
did, I knew what their strategy was. You know what they were trying to do was, 
if a yellow came out after he came in, he’d already made his stop, everyone 
else was going to some in for their fuel and he was going to be leading the 
race on track position. I thought that Zippy was going to stretch it out more. 
I really didn’t know exactly what he had in mind and I didn’t ask. My job was 
to just try and click off the lap times I was running. Every lap we stayed 
out , I thought that’s less fuel we have to put in, but at the same time, the 
more guys that pit, if there is a caution it just puts us that much further 

back. When we came in as early as we did—I don’t know how many laps it was 
after that, but it wasn’t too long—I was hoping that in that time frame we’d 
build up enough of a lead because we were able to run in clear air. I thought 
if we could run some good laps and get back out before the caution comes out, 
we could beat them. That’s what happened. We just ran a real strong pace there, 
a little harder than I really wanted to run, but I knew we needed to get that 
out there to be able to get in and get back out before Sterling came around. 
When I saw Mark come out behind us it made me feel a little better, and I 
didn’t know exactly where Sterling was, but I couldn’t see him so I was 
assuming we had beat him out. But I didn’t know for sure.”

HOW MANY MORE LAPS DID YOU HAVE IN MIND (BEFORE PITTING)? “I honestly don’t 
know. I was just worried about the lap times. I knew Zippy had a plan and was 
watching what everybody else was doing and was going to base his strategy on 


what everybody else was doing. I was more concerned with running the lap times 
I was running and hoping I was building up a margin there to when we came back 
out we’d be ahead.”

DOES THE UNIQUE SHAPE OF POCONO CHALLENGE YOU AS A DRIVER? “It’s a three-turn 
road course. You’re shifting like you do on a road course and it has three 
unique corners. It doesn’t have the big banked corners and two and three 
grooves like you MORE STWEART: typically see. The only turn that had that was 
Turn 1 at the end of the straightaway. It just makes you focus and concentrate 
really hard. The Tunnel Turn is line-sensitive. You can’t go down in there and 
miss your marks and expect to run a good corner through there. It’s a very 
technical track. It makes you really focus on all three corners, and the 
hardest thing is getting that car to drive well in all three. That’s normally 
the challenge. It seems like I always get two of the three fairly easy and it 
seems like the third corner is the one you have trouble with. It doesn’t matter 
which one it is on the track, it just seems like one of the three is always off 
a little bit. That’s the challenging part about this speedway.”

YOU CLOSED THE DEAL AND WON THE RACE. “It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been 
running well. We’ve had better cars than we’ve ever had, better engines, the 
best bodies we’ve ever had on our cars. It’s just a matter of everything 
falling into place, finally. When you go out and lead the laps that we led at 
Charlotte, run as hard as we did at Dover last week, The Winston, California. 
You look at all those places and we were doing our job, but we didn’t have the 
luck on our side. We knew in our hearts and minds that it was just a matter of 
time before it finally turned back around in our favor.”

HOW MUCH DID THE RECENT PRACTICE SESSION HERE HELP, ESPECIALLY SINCE HAPPY HOUR 
WAS RAINED OUT YESTERDAY? “It was pretty valuable. It makes me look like a 

genius on days like today when we capitalize on it. Zippy asked me where I 
wanted to test earlier this year, and that’s something he normally doesn’t do. 
He just picks the tracks he wants to go to and he has to use. This is a track 
where we’ve always been in the top 10 or five with it, but we never really had 
a car that stood out, that we thought we could win the race. I kind of adopted 
Zippy’s philosophy. If we run that well here, why run a test? We were trying to 
take a track where we were a top-10 or top-five car and make it a track where 
we can win a race, and that’s what happened for us this weekend. That makes it 
very valuable. Unfortunately, we had rain that week too, so we didn’t get two 
full days in. If you put all the time together, I think we got one day of 
productive testing out of two days, but I think it showed we made some pretty 
big strides with it.”

WHAT’S THE MOST BIZARRE THING THAT’S HAPPENED THIS YEAR IN TERMS OF BAD 
LUCK? “You can pick just one thing? It’s been just little things here and 
little things there. It’s not been anything huge. I think all you guys expected 
me to flip out this year with the way things have gone, but we’re running good. 
We’re doing MORE STEWART: everything right. We just haven’t had the luck to go 
with it. Having last year over with and out of the way and the stress of that 
being gone, it’s helped put things in perspective. If we were running 25th to 
30th or something and blowing motors and having something happen it would be 
harder to deal with. Zippy’s putting great setups on the cars, the guys are 
building good cars, good bodies, good motors. All the ingredients have been 
there to win races all year, it’s a matter of having everything go our way. 
When you have a year like we had last year, we needed a lot of luck at the end 
of the year to help get us up to where we were. That’s what happened, we had 
good luck. My grandfather’s turning out to be a genius. He said everything 
makes a full circle, and it has. It went from everything being really good at 
the end of the year to things starting off to kind of going south for us. Now, 
hopefully, it’s coming back the other side of that circle and we’re finishing 
that cycle. There’s nothing you can do about it. I think I’ve probably dealt 
with it better than Zippy has this year. I’m the one inside the trailer at the 
end of the day trying to find the positives in every negative this year. It’s 
kept us with an open frame of mind to say, ‘hey we’re doing everything we need 
to do, it’s just a matter of getting luck on our side.’ With that in mind, it 
has let us stay focused for the next week and not dwell on the past week.”

ZIPADELLI: ON THE FINAL PIT STOP, DID EVERYONE ELSE COMING IN FORCE YOU TO STOP 
WHEN YOU DID? “We talked about doing it as early as we could. We wanted to wait 
for a few of the cars to come in and I felt like where we were, we were in the 
best position to build our lead. Our car was better than anyone’s at that time 
and we had taken off. We were building a lead a couple of tenths a lap. When I 
felt like we got to the point where I could dictate the two or three people we 
were racing, that’s when we elected to come down pit road and we did. The 12 
and 6 had to follow us at that point. The guys who did it were all 10th or so, 
other than Sterling, he kind of rolled the dice early. There were going for 
what they could and we had to get ourselves a big lead, so we could get on pit 
road, do our stop, get out and come back, kind of like it happened. It’s fun 
when it all works the way you want it to. Most of the time this year, it hasn’t 
worked out that way.”

STEWART: WHY DID YOU BUMP THE PACE CAR AT THE END OF THE RACE? “I hadn’t done 
it all day, and I think from the time I led my first Winston Cup race under 

caution I’ve always made a point to touch the pace car. Buster is a pretty good 
guy. As much as we’re all around each other, it’s like a giant family down 
here, so I always go up and give him a little nudge and he’ll wave in the 
window. I hadn’t done it all day, and I thought well, maybe if I don’t do it I 
won’t jinx myself. We did it at Dover and look what happened. I didn’t touch 
him all day, but it’s kind of like spraying Joe [Gibbs] at the end of the day. 
I think Joe had made it through one race this year with a dry head. It’s just 
tradition. Every chance I get to lead a race, if we lead it under caution…I 
tried to get him loose. I tried to work him around, because I knew there wasn’t 
anything else going to happen. I could kill the engine and pretty much coast to 
the finish line, but I started kind of trying to get him on the left rear and 
see if I could get him wiggling around a little bit, mess with him. The guys 
called me on the radio and said, ‘be easy on the race car!’ So I got busted. It 
was having fun. As stressful as what we do is, if you can’t have some fun at 
some point during the race, and do something to make yourself laugh, you’ll 
drive yourself crazy.”