NEXCUP: MARTIN AND BURTON POST TOP 10 FINISHES FOR FORD AT TALLADEGA

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DEWALT Tools Taurus (Finished 42nd) – “We’re done for the day. Something broke in the engine. It just missed a little bit by the start-finish line and then it went ahead and blew up, so it’s disappointing. I made a big mistake early in the race and wrecked and could have torn up a lot of other cars and thankfully we didn’t too bad. After that, we just tried to get back to the front and the engine blew up.” WHAT HAPPENED EARLY IN THE RACE? “I don’t know. It kind of surprised me. I was pushing Kevin on the outside and my teammate, Kurt, was on the bottom so I was gonna go try to push him and as soon as I switched lanes I kind of got under Kevin and we got real close together. He got a little bit down and I got a little bit up and I just hit him in the door. My wheels were turned and it spun my car out. I’ve never raced this car before. That’s the first time I was in that situation in the tri-oval and it just took the air off the nose and I couldn’t get it to turn. I kind of got up into him and I turned myself around.” YOU ENGINE ISSUES IN THE FALL AS WELL. “Yeah, hopefully it’ll get better. You’re gonna have these things happen now and then. We’ve got a great engine program and a great group of guys. They do a lot of hard work to give us good horsepower and this is one of those things that’s gonna happen now and then.” HOW DISAPPOINTING TO COME FROM THE BACK AND THEN HAVE THE ENGINE GO? “You never know what’s gonna happen here, so it’s always disappointing when you drop out, but things could have been a lot worse.” HOW WAS IT OUT THERE? “It was crazy. It was a lot worse than I’ve seen it for a while. I was no exception, I guess. I got in that first accident and didn’t end up doing what I probably should have there. It didn’t quite work out right, but we were already running three-wide and then there are guys going in the middle four-wide. There was a lot of crazy stuff going on, but it’s a good race. All of the cars are about the same speed.” WHY IS IT SO WILD? THE WEATHER? “No, I don’t think it has anything to do that. It’s just that there are so many rules that the cars are just pretty much all the same speed and when you put them in a big glob and when you get in the draft you can catch up to the guy in front of you. It just has everybody under a blanket.” IS THAT WHY TALLADEGA IS NOT FUN FOR YOU GUYS? “Sometimes it’s fun when you have a real good car and you can get to the front, but it’s just a different kind of racing. You’re just on the floor all day and, hopefully, you’ve got a fast car.” ANY WARNING? “No, when they blow up they blow up pretty quick. It just missed a little bit and then it broke.” WHAT ABOUT THE QUALITY OF DRIVING TO HAVE AN ACCIDENT LIKE YOU DID AND NOT HAVE A BUNCH OF CARS INVOLVED? “That was pretty amazing and since I was pretty much the start of the incident, I was happy nobody really got torn up too bad in that. Everybody is a great driver out there, obviously, and there’s a lot of luck that comes into that too. There was a lot of smoke and you can’t see, so it doesn’t really matter how good of a driver you are. Everybody did a good job of not hitting each other. I was all over the track and nobody got into me, so that was pretty amazing.”

KURT BUSCH – No. 97 Sharpie/IRWIN Taurus (Finished 36th) – ANY IDEA WHAT HAPPENED OUT THERE? “I’m just looking forward to the next race. We go to a real race track where we can race side by side and not have a draft that ruins it. We just got ruined by the draft today.” IT LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVE A LITTLE FRUSTRATION WITH THE 20 CAR. “Yeah, we drafted down the front straightaway together real well. All race I acknowledged he was on the bottom lane. That’s cool. We drafted together. I was gonna call him on Monday. ‘Dude, everything was great.’ I don’t know why he committed to turn three as late as he did. He knew he needed to follow me and now we’re here instead of out on the track. It’s a bad finish. So far this year our two worst finishes are in restrictor plate races.”

JEFF BURTON – No. 99 Roundup Taurus (Finished 7th) – “It was a good day for us. We ran pretty good – never quite good enough to really get up and lead a long time, but we ran well and were real competitive all day. It was a great day in the pits. I kind of wanted to see that thing keep going, but with the kind of year we’ve had, I’ll take a seventh and not complain.” WHAT WAS IT LIKE OUT THERE? “It was real wild – real wild. You put 43 cars out here all running the same speed and that’s what it’s gonna be. That was probably the wildest plate race I’ve ever been involved in.” YOU GOT THROUGH SOME WRECKS WITHOUT DAMAGE. “Three of those wrecks happened right in front of me and I was able to just get by them. They were literally right in front of me. Stewart just wrecked the 97 and we were lucky to get through that. There were a bunch of wrecks that we were right behind and we were able to get by them.”

MARK MARTIN – No. 6 Viagra Taurus (Finished 6th) – “We did everything we needed to. We were in second place and we were just too slow. We just couldn’t contend for it. We had an awesome run. We had an awesome car, team and effort. It was fantastic, but the bottom line is there was five Chevrolets there and they didn’t even mess with us. They didn’t even get in there and say, ‘Oh, he’s up there, I’ll push him.’ They just found another place and boogied on.” IT WAS WILD OUT THERE, ESPECIALLY EARLY. “I’m proud of my team. I have an awesome team and I believe if we can get on a roll this summer, we’ll get back in the top 10.” YOU’VE GOT TO SMILE WITH THIS RESULT. “I’m glad I didn’t wreck. I’m glad nobody got hurt today. That wasn’t much of a race to me. I tell you what, I’m proud of my Viagra team. We put ourselves in position up in second place right at the end and we did everything we could, but we were just too slow for about five of those guys. There wasn’t anywhere I could put it and not get swallowed up. That’s all the effort we had. I just want to thank Pat Tryson and my entire Viagra team. We had awesome Ford power and a great car here with the Taurus, but we just weren’t fast enough to race with those top four.”

DALE JARRETT – No. 88 UPS Taurus (Finished 16th) – “I just couldn’t get in position. We couldn’t go through the center of the corner and I’m not sure if it’s a chassis, aero or engine deal. It’s something we’ve got to figure out, but I was just getting killed through the center of the corner. If you don’t go through the center, then you’ve got to spend your time catching up going down the straightaway instead of passing.” SOME GUYS WERE WARNED ABOUT CALMING DOWN TODAY. WAS IT PRETTY WILD OUT THERE? “If they want to tell us to calm down, they need to look in the mirror because they’re the ones that created this. They need to do something about it. They shouldn’t be telling us to calm down because this is the position they put us in and they need to change it.”

EDDIE WOOD, Co Owner – No. 21 Keep It Genuine Taurus (Rudd finished 17th) – “Sitting on the pole made the weekend very special and we had a pretty good race car today. We probably pulled too high of a gear because we were kind of sluggish on restarts. The car was pretty good on long runs, especially after we made a couple of adjustments, but at the very end when the wreck happened we were up on the outside, which is where we could run. The higher gear was gonna pay off right there because we were coming with the 15 and the 42, but that wreck happened and we wound up where we wound up. At least the car wasn’t killed, so we can go back to Daytona with it. It was a good weekend.”

TODD PARROTT, Crew Chief – No. 38 M&M’s Taurus (Sadler finished 28th) – “It was one of those days. We stayed out there to get a little track position and then something happened with Matt. Elliott and the 9 car were down low and when the 9 checked up Elliott didn’t have time and got in the back of him. That did a lot of damage to the nose, but we kept working on it every pit stop. At one point we ran too hot, but it was probably a blessing in disguise because we dropped way back and that’s when they had the big wreck over in turn three and four. Otherwise, we would have probably been right in the middle of it. The car got better and was a little racy at one point, but the water temp went too high and we had to come in and cool it back down.”