BIFFLE WINS THIRD NEXTEL CUP RACE OF THE SEASON

· Greg Biffle won for the third time this season and fourth time in the last 11 NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series events with today’s triumph at Darlington. Biffle won the season-ending Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway and then captured the Auto Club 500 at California and Samsung RadioShack 500 at Texas earlier this year.

· Biffle now owns six NNC wins (Daytona, Michigan, Homestead-Miami, California, Texas, Darlington).

· Today’s win was the fifth of the season for Ford (Greg Biffle at California; Carl Edwards at Atlanta; Biffle at Texas; Kurt Busch at Phoenix).

· Today’s win marked the 27th all-time win for Ford at Darlington Raceway, which is the second-most for the manufacturer at any active track, along with Michigan, Richmond, Lowe’s and Daytona. Ford has won 28 times each at Bristol and Atlanta.

· Taurus has now won 89 points races and 96 overall when taking into account victories in the Budweiser Shootout and All-Star race. Ford has 559 all-time NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series triumphs.

HERMIE SADLER – No. 66 Peak Fitness Taurus (Finished 40th) – “It got real, real loose. I don’t know if it was something in the drive train or something else that caused the problem first, but I lost first and second gear. Then I was having a hard time getting third gear, so I’m not sure what happened to it. I couldn’t go anywhere and I was just gonna get in the way and tear something up, so we’re gonna get it fixed and try to get back out and run some laps.”

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard/Travelodge Taurus – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW – YOU NEEDED THAT LAST CAUTION. “Yeah, we did. There was no question in my mind we were coming for tires no matter what because for three laps yiou can pass probably 10 cars if 10 cars stayed out, but I’m just so excited for this team. I mean, these guys worked really hard. I love coming here to Darlington and racing. What a show underneath the lights tonight. These Darlington fans are awesome down here. I’m just excited that National Guard. We’re thinking about the soldiers and we’ve got Travelodge on the car this weekend, so anybody that needs a place to stay on the way home try out a Travelodge.” WHAT KIND OF CHANGES DID YOU MAKE? “We were chasing the thing all night. There at the end we got the second-to-last run there we tried some tire pressure things and got my car way too loose. I thought, ‘Why in the world would we wait until the last run to try something?’ It went the wrong way, but we recovered from that. We were gonna end up second. I feel bad for Ryan Newman. He had a really strong car tonight and that’s a tough decision to make. I probably lost the Busch race last night by not pitting for tires, but we didn’t save Jack a set of tires tonight.” HOW SPECIAL IS THIS? “Man, this is really special. I tell you what, it’s almost like the track owed us one. Doug and I almost won the first time we were together – the first race here – and the thing was bottoming out coming off turn two and it broke the flywheel, so it’s awesome to be able to come back here and win a race. I think we’re gonna win a couple more this season and we’re gonna be tough when it comes down to the championship hunt.”

MARK MARTIN – No. 6 Viagra Taurus (Finished 4th) – “I’m just proud of this race team. It was a hard fought fourth, but they had the car to do it – just not quite enough car to win with. But it was an awfully good run. It seemed like forever before we got to the top five, but once we got there it was no problem to stay there. I just thank the Viagra team and it was a good run. If I hadn’t spun out there, we would have run third but we were lucky to get back to fourth.” WHAT HAPPENED THERE? “I got a little greedy and tried to make a pass too quick. I stepped on that big motor and it was like stepping on a cats tail and it went right around. It worked out OK. I was gonna pass ‘em both and get third, but I couldn’t waste any time. I had a chance to go and I stepped on the gas a little bit too hard and you really had to feather the throttle with those old tires so it slipped away from me.” THE LAST NIGHT AT DARLINGTON. A MEMORABLE NIGHT? “It was OK. It was alright. I ain’t no big deal.”

DALE JARRETT – No. 88 UPS Taurus (Finished 15th) – “I just fought it. It’s just a tough race track to ever get a hold of, but we just could never make it do what I needed to to get our way marching forward. We tried different things but, once again, we managed a reasonable finish out of it. We’ll keep doing that until we get better.” HOW WAS THE TRACK AT NIGHT? “It was great, perfect. We had no problems whatsoever. The track was great. It’s a great race track to race on. This better not be the last time we race here.”

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Taurus (Finished 9th) – “We were all just racing for a win there and it was just hard racing. It was a blast. I had a good time. That’s why I go racing so I can have that feeling I had there with two to go thinking, ‘We’re gonna win this thing.’ That was a lot of fun. Our team did a great job. We just took that gamble on two tires because no matter how fast our pit crew got us out of the pits, we would lose like two spots because of the way the pit stall was situated. We were losing about a second in the pits so we thought, ‘the heck with it, we’ll go for two tires and see what happens.’” YOU SEEMED TO COME TO LIFE AFTER ABOUT 35 LAPS. “Yeah, we had a really great setup for the long runs. We were hoping for longer runs, but then other people started working on theirs and by the end of the race we were about a fifth-place car on long runs. It was hard work. Everybody is really good out here and we needed just a little bit extra to win that race.”

ELLIOTT SADLER – No. 38 M&M’s Taurus (Finished 20th) – “I thought we had some broken shocks. I know I lost power steering with about 150 to go and it’s hard to handle a car that’s already ill-handling without power steering. I had no brakes. That’s why I got my teammate, Dale Jarrett. That’s the last person in the world I wanted to get into, but I just didn’t have any brakes tonight. Just a lot of things seemed like it kept compounding, but that’s by far the loosest race car I’ve ever had in my whole racing career. I’m not even sure where we finished, but we were lucky wherever we finished. We got the lucky dog that one time and the cautions just kept coming out right for us. My guys tried to fix it. I mean, I give them an A for effort for trying everything and coming up with every idea, but it just wasn’t meant to be here tonight.”

RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus (Finished 13th) – “We had a mediocre car all day. The guys worked hard on it all day to try to make it better and it got a little better. It seemed like we were better on long runs, but we didn’t get many of those.”

GREG BIFFLE PRESS CONFERENCE – DID YOU TAKE FOUR TIRES OR TWO? “Four. I don’t know how two would really do anything. We were using up our left-rear a bunch for forward grip off the corner, so we had no choice but to take four. With two laps, I felt like we would be able to pass probably six or eight cars if they stayed out, which I didn’t think they were going to. Ryan and the 49 stayed out. My biggest concern at that point on the restart was how they were gonna be able to get going because those tires and trying to accelerate with those old tires was gonna be very difficult. I knew I couldn’t pass before the start-finish line, so there wasn’t any strategy for us. We knew we were coming as soon as the caution came out.”

WHAT ABOUT THE RESTART. WHAT HAPPENED? “I don’t know. I was gonna hang toward the bottom and I gave those guys a little bit of room because I knew they weren’t gonna get going right away. I saw them all just checking up and getting on the brakes and getting out of line. I saw the 9 coming by and I was like, ‘Dang it,’ I didn’t know what to do because I know we’re not allowed to pass until the start-finish, so I really didn’t know what to do. Then I got a good run going because I had new tires, so I got back going again. I was thinking about going on the top and the 24 was coming and then Carl started moving up, so I wanted the bottom anyway. I was gonna put it on the white line down there and just hold it to the mat. With new tires it’ll go around there flat, so I knew I was gonna be able to get ‘em on the bottom and, sure enough, I was able to get Carl and the 49, and then run Ryan down on the backstretch.”

DID CARL TAKE TWO? “Yeah, Carl took two and that was gonna be a big handful to drive, but you’ve got to get track position. You never know. We could have only run half-a-lap and if the caution would have come out, the race would have been over and he would have gotten second or third or fifth.”

COULD NEWMAN BE SMART ENOUGH TO CAUSE A CAUTION? “I’m not sure. I guess so. I’m not that smart. Maybe he is (laughter). That could have happened. I don’t know what happened on the start. There were four or five cars up there. I heard the 49 spun his tires. I don’t know what happened.”

DOUG RICHERT, Crew Chief – No. 16 National Guard/Travelodge Taurus – THE SHOE WAS ON THE OTHER FOOT TONIGHT. “Believe me, I thought about the same thing there when it was coming down to the end. I know exactly what the 12 car feels like because we did that to ourselves. Leading here is hard because when you’re out front, you can think all you want but the whole field can drop in behind you when it’s too late to come to pit road and you’re doomed. Whether he was looking. Whether his mind was made up to stay out there no matter what, it just happened in our favor this time. I wouldn’t do it the same way as Bristol again.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? “I started losing my concentration about three-quarters of the way through the race. I don’t think you physically get fatigued, but mentally you do because you’re constantly thinking and watching. The car is like driving on ice on those tires, so it takes a tremendous amount of focus and concentration and I got upset that the car wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. I was trying to drive it faster than it may have wanted to go and I got in the fence a little bit coming off of two over there. It was my fault. I needed to back up a little bit and not put myself in jeopardy of losing the race because we were leading at that point. I was thinking about that and got refocused. I knew I couldn’t make anymore mistakes or I wasn’t gonna be able to win or even finish in the top five. I almost feel like the track – nothing ever owes you – but I kind of feel like the track owes us a little bit. The first time Doug and I were here together – the first race that we were together – was here. We had a dominant car. I mean an unbelievable fast car. We led a lot of it and it was bottoming out a little bit coming off of turn two over there through the dip and it broke the flywheel. We ended up finishing 10th, but the thing was shaking so bad that you couldn’t really drive it anymore. But that was a race we won’t forget. The next race we came here we had a right-front tire problem. We had too much camber and kind of got us on that one, so we were excited to be able to come back here and win for sure.”

WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS SEASON COMPARED TO OTHERS? “This isn’t something that’s happened overnight. We’ve been working on this program really, really hard for a year and a half. We’ve worked really hard in the wind tunnel. Our engines are way better. Our team has gotten better. Our pit stops are better. Our race savvy is better. I’ve learned a little bit about the race cars along the way. There are a lot of things that have turned around. If you look at this same question keeps coming up over and over. If you really look from the middle of the season on last year, we really ran about like we’re running or close to it. We weren’t quite there yet, but we’ve turned the corner. We finished fourth at Pocono, sixth at Indy, won Michigan, dominated Kansas and had that thing won and weren’t gonna make it on fuel because we ended up third. We did the same thing at Homestead. We had some other brilliant runs in there as well – Bristol, we led a bunch of it and ended up finishing well, so we were there, but just weren’t quite winning yet. By the end of the season, if the season would have had another 10 races, we probably would have won two or three more. I felt that’s where our team was at and the level we were at at that point and we’ve gotten better over the winter.”

JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – CAN YOU SIZE THESE GUYS UP? “They’re a perfect match for where they are. Doug is a seasoned crew chief. He’s seen it all and done it all. He won’t get confused by somebody that hasn’t seen as much as him and provides direction. He’s good natured enough that he does so in such a way that it doesn’t rankle you. I’m not speaking for myself, I’m speaking for the driver and the car chief and the other guys he works with. It takes a while to put together the right group and to get them to where they work together well and that’s finally happened. Last year was the first year of the new Taurus, that we hadn’t had a change to since ’97 that was an improvement. So we ghosted around and Greg and Doug did one kind of thing for a while and to start with it didn’t look very good and then toward the end of the year it looked very good. It was almost the same paint job here, but we had to learn about the car at the same time we were learning how to work together speaking for these two. It all came together. When things don’t go well a lot of times you cast around and make speculation on what’s wrong and that can be a real distraction. We got all of that behind us by the middle of the year and then we were able to focus on it, but I’m really proud for Doug to be here. Doug was there with Earnhardt, Sr. when he won his first championship and I think he’ll be here when Greg wins his if I’m able to keep it all together.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – IT SEEMS YOUR LUCK HAS TURNED AROUND. “It really has. I’m surprised that we weren’t the one to get a flat tire instead of the 48, but it was the 48’s luck to be the lucky dog on the caution to get his lap back. We were working on the race car. We pulled a spring rubber in the left-rear spring, which takes time on pit road, and we decided we were gonna do that now in the middle of the race, lose some spots on pit road, and work on our race car because we needed to get it better for the end of the race. Then later with 50 to go when we stopped, I think we were leading then, and we were adjusting on the tire pressure kind of, ‘let’s see what this does.’ After the fact we probably shouldn’t have been messing with it at that point because we knew it was down to our last stop and what we did made the car looser, so let’s try this didn’t work for us at that point. We would have ended up second, but it almost cost us a win. The car was just too loose then and it definitely, you can see how hard I run my car at the beginning of the run until the end of the run. I drove by the 9 and the 24 like I was towing a parachute with six laps to go and had a full straightaway on them in three laps. I just saved enough. They wanted to go up there and race their tires off. I knew we were gonna have to make that 50-lap run all the way to the end, so I paced myself. I wasn’t fast enough to run the 12 down and stay with him on that very last run, but we were catching him two or three tenths a lap before the caution came out. We weren’t gonna get to him, but, again, we had the fastest car, but it took considerable time for that to level out. I was just too loose and couldn’t use the gas pedal and you’ve got to be able to do that to make ‘em go.”

DO YOU FEEL BETTER ABOUT DEALING WITH THESE CARS? “You have to deal with what’s given to you. These are the tools that we’re given to work with and we’ve got to do the best we can with them. The cars were very hard to drive tonight. They were really, really loose – weren’t into the race track very good. I think if you asked a lot of the drivers they probably weren’t very happy with the way their car drove. It was difficult and it was hard to race side-by-side. It was really hard to pass. You know what I didn’t see tonight is I saw everybody giving everybody room going into the corner. There wasn’t any side-by-side racing, really. There was some, but, gosh, you almost can’t do it. The cars slide so much on the race track, especially after 10 laps, but it’s a matter of managing your tires and managing what you can drive. You should have tape recorded after qualifying I said that same thing. Ryan Newman has a tremendous amount of car control and so does Kurt Busch and those are the guys that are gonna run well at a race track like this and there’s Ryan leading the race toward the end. That’s what it boils down to.”

JEFF GORDON SAID HE WISHED HE WOULD HAVE BEAT YOU OUT ON THE LAST STOP AND MAYBE WOULD HAVE WON. “You feel like Superman. I’m telling you, when the caution came out I was going into the corner so slow and the car was just sliding. I mean, I wasn’t even in control of it. I couldn’t imagine restarting on those tires and trying to make three more laps and I knew that’s what they had to drive and I had new tires on it. It was gonna be four seconds a lap faster than what he has, so in three laps he could be 12 seconds ahead of him or more if he happens to slip a little bit. Well, you’re not gonna slip because you’ve got new tires, so I knew that I had ‘em beat and Jeff Gordon is totally right. But that’s a product of NASCAR making a pit road speed that everybody has to stick to. No more cheating on pit road and I love it. It’s just leveled it out. It’s like, ‘catch me if you can – who gets caught and who doesn’t.’ You have to go pit road speed, so it’s up to how you get in your pit box, how you accelerate off your pit box by not spinning the tires too much versus forward acceleration and these guys putting tires on it. So I like that. I don’t like the Mickey Mouse game of running too fast and then slowing up and did they catch me on the stop watch. I like the timing lights because I don’t know if I would have beat the 24 out if there wasn’t a pit road speed. If he would have sped up just a little bit, I mean it wasn’t by much, so that has a lot to do with the outcome of these races now.”

WHEN YOU DROPPED TO FOURTH DID YOU THINK YOU WEREN’T GOING TO GET BY THEM AGAIN? “I was considering that a little bit, but, there again, I saw them in the mirror. They were on me pretty good and I was running my car a little bit harder than I wanted to right at that point, so I decided to let ‘em go and let them run out there a little bit and let them try to chase the 12 down, which I knew they probably weren’t gonna be able to do. I figured in 50 laps that might play into my hands, so it was kind of a crapshoot. I wasn’t gonna keep him back there for 50 laps, so I might as well let him go and have my own race track to race on with nobody around me because then I can focus. Then I could run faster than them about five laps later, but I just maintained that distance behind them and they kept getting worse and worse and worse. I kept slowing up a little bit and then when I finally got within two car lengths of him, I passed him, passed the 24 the next lap and had a full straightaway in probably three laps. I just paced myself to get by them when I felt like it was time and I knew I wasn’t gonna catch the 12, but I was just sizing him up. I didn’t know if I’d get back by him or not, but I knew we were gonna finish in the top five.”

HOW DO YOU MANAGE YOUR TIRES? “When you go down in the corner, it’s hard to explain, but when you go down in the corner and how hard you’re turning on the wheel you feel the tires doing their job so to speak – your speed that you’re carrying down in there. How much brakes you use getting into the corner and then how you go back to the pedal. Do you want to be pretty aggressive with it and try to cut a fast lap time? Or do you try to baby the tires as much as you can and just try to nurture it along to have something for later. That’s kind of how you do it. The biggest thing is to try and not get sideways or spin ‘em. If you start to spin ‘em, you’ve got to let up right away because that will hurt ‘em worse than anything is just spinning ‘em. The 24 and the 9, the 9 was leaving black marks coming off the corner when he was trying to beat up on the 24. I knew that he was gonna be a sitting duck eventually by doing that.”

WHAT ABOUT RICHMOND AND CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW YOU HAVE EVOLVED AS A DRIVER? “I’ve certainly learned a lot over the last year and a half. Our race cars have gotten a lot better. We’re all parts of the pie – all of us are – and I’ve learned to manage the car better and manage the tires and we just tested Richmond and we feel like we’re gonna be a top 15 car at Richmond – possibly better. When we go back Rusty seemed pretty quick there, so we just got done testing Charlotte. We feel really good about going back to Charlotte, like we’re gonna run well there, so I think this team is capable of winning some more races this year. I don’t want to speculate on how many, but I think we can win some more races. Your question, we’ve all been a big factor and getting better at building these cars and we’re understanding what we need and what’s making them go. Doug is spending a lot of time and he’s elbows deep in these cars everyday with our engineer and Bobby, the car chief, and at the wind tunnel and spending a lot of time with them baby-sitting them and that’s what it takes. It takes more dedication than you’d ever think to be competitive like we’re being right now.”

ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT A LETDOWN AT RIR? “I don’t think so. Maybe I was being a little too relaxed. Maybe top 10. I guess if I said 15th I wouldn’t have a lot to live up to and we’d just go there and see what we could do. I think that we’re capable of winning at Richmond. I don’t know if that’s gonna happen, but I think we can run inside the top 10, top 15. We’ll work on the car during the race and see what we can come up with.”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – DO YOU EXPECT THESE RESULTS EACH TIME THEY GO OUT? “I was really heartened by the way that this time came to life in the middle of last year. Greg’s got it right. He was a threat to win virtually every race that I recall for the last third of the year. Of course, he came out and won early – three times and we’re not a third of the way into the season yet and he’s won three times already here. So, yeah. Somebody asked me at the souvenir trailer this morning what I thought about our chances and I said, ‘We have five really strong bullets in a gun.’ It’s a six-shooter gun, so you might come up empty on a chamber, but I felt like we had a really good chance. Greg and Doug are as good a combination of driver and crew chief as I’ve had for this – my 18th year. Unless I let mechanical parts break, unless we have missteps in the pits that I don’t expect, based on the way we train and condition, he’s gonna be a factor in the championship – a very serious factor. I’m looking forward to the 48 having a little more of their trouble that we’ve had and that they seem to always miss. They do a good job with that, but I hope he can be in front by the time we go into Loudon in the fall.”

WHY DO YOU SAY THIS DRIVER-CREW CHIEF COMBO IS GOOD. “It’s one of the best. I don’t want to throw any rain on this thing, any cold water on it, but I will throw the gauntlet down. You know, these relationships with the drivers and crew chiefs, they go through a period of romance courtship and productivity, which we’re into right now, and many times they get to the point they can’t help one another. Historically, it’s about three or four years that they’re really the best for one another and I hope that we don’t have that cycle here that I’ve seen so many times. So for any of the driver-crew chief packages, you look at them and you’ve got to pick your year because they generally don’t start off to be as good as they are in the middle and many times you have to make some changes to get them both into a situation where they can be as productive as they’d like to be. Doug has been doing this for a long time. Greg came to me when he was 28 years old and it took him five years to get here, so that’s a long time. That’s not a quick study. He’s been real patient and like taking control of his car and himself today on the race track. He didn’t let the things that were happening in front of him distract him from doing what he needed to be doing. Doug is as heady about what he does as that and I’m real confident that they’re gonna win multiple championships before they quit. It was with Randy Goss, who is a great racer, motorcycle racer and I did a lot of road racing with, but Greg won the first Truck championship that Roush Racing had and the first Busch championship. If I’d have been in a position to put him in a Cup car as early as I might have if I’d had sponsorship, he would have been there with Kenseth the first year to compete for that as well. But the stars have got to line up for all these things, but right now it’s Doug and Greg’s time and I’m just glad to be watching it.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – ARE YOU GETTING ANY FEEDBACK FROM SHORT TRACK GUYS ACROSS THE COUNTRY? “Yeah, I hear that from a lot of people – a lot of people I’ve raced with and a lot