Kenseth Wins at Bristol
FORD RACING NOTES AND QUOTES Food City 250 (Busch), Page 1 August 25, 2006 Bristol Motor Speedway GREG BIFFLE-16-Ameriquest Mortgage Ford Fusion (Finished 37th) - WHAT HAPPENED? "The 4 car spun the 27 out, and, unfortunately, we were right in the middle of it. We were passing the guys on the outside and we had new tires, and I guess things got a little aggressive and caught us up in a wreck. But, that's Bristol. That's racing and that's why I love this place; it's so fun to race here. Maybe we'll have better luck tomorrow night." YOU SEEMED TO HAVE A RACE-CONTENDING CAR. "I think we had the pit strategy to win it, too. Eddie (Pardue, crew chief) and the guys did a great job and we had good track position with new tires and could have gone to the end. We'll never know." KENNY WALLACE-22-AutoZone Ford Fusion (Finished 29th) - ARE YOU OK, AND WHAT HAPPENED? "I'm OK. It's just a Bristol deal, that's really all there is to it. You can't blame anybody and we were all wadded up there. That's all there was to it. I guess the 00 got in the back of me and I tried saving it, but I couldn't, so we'll go to the next race." YOU RAN IN THE TOP 10 MOST OF THE NIGHT. "Well, we used some pit strategy. I was really loose, real loose and drove it. But, that wasn't what made us wreck, so we'll go on. I accidentally got in the back of Todd Kluever, so I guess turnabout is fair play. I punted him and didn't mean to; I had new tires on. So, I got taken out. How's it go? All's fair in love and war." MATT KENSETH-17-Ameriquest Mortgage Ford Fusion (Finished 1st) - YOUR FIRST BUSCH SERIES WIN HERE IN FIVE AND A HALF YEARS. "It's been a while. We've had some great cars here and just could never get it done for some reason, me being clumsy or whatever was going on. But, it was a great race tonight. It was a really exciting race for the lead. I knew it was going to be exciting and I figured I'd get Kevin. We had way better tires and he wasn't going to make it easy, so I decided to try the outside and he didn't give me any room, but it was a heck of a battle." DID YOU THINK THE PASS ON THE OUTSIDE WOULD STICK? "Well, I was trying the high side a little bit on the restarts just to see what kind of grip was up there, but I dying to get high to get a run underneath him. Kevin is so good here that he knew that was coming, so he did a really good job of holding down the middle and protecting the bottom. I just figured I'd give it a try. Nobody was behind me and I didn't have much to lose, so I figured I'd go for it." YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE FINAL RESTART. "You hate cautions when you're leading and you'd like to just keep going, but our car was particularly strong on restarts tonight. I worried about spinning the tires a little bit, but other than that it was all good. Jimmy Fennig (crew chief) did a great job on this Ameriquest Fusion and I'm proud to have him back here in victory lane at Bristol. It's always a cool place." YOUR THOUGHTS ON WINNING TOMORROW. "I don't want to make any predictions, but we've got a lot of work tomorrow. I think we have a pretty good car, but you've got 500 laps of hard work and no mistakes to have a chance at it. I think we have a good car, but there's a lot of work in front of us." DANNY O'QUINN, JR.-50-Stonebridge Life Ford Fusion (Finished 26th) - "We had an awesome car. The guys gave me a great car that would have easily been a top-10 car, I think. I got tapped in the back and I just kind of yanked back on the wheel and I had my hand against my cam-lock seatbelt and I unsnapped my seatbelt. It was just something freak. How many times does that ever happen in your career? It really happened on a bad night because we had an awesome car and I was racing in front of a lot of friends and family. But, you can't take a chance riding around out there with no seatbelts." FORD RACING NOTES AND QUOTES Food City 250 (Busch), Page 2 August 25, 2006 Bristol Motor Speedway CARL EDWARDS-60-Ameriquest Mortgage Ford Fusion (Finished 8th) - "That was awesome to come back from basically one lap down to finish eighth. That was fun working through traffic, but we also got fortunate to end up eighth. We should have been about 40th, so I'm real excited." DID THE POINTS RACE ENTER YOUR MIND AS YOU BATTLED BACK FROM ONE LAP DOWN? "Oh yeah, we're racing for second, for sure. That was mission, to get back up there so we could get some points." REGAN SMITH-35-McDonald's Ford Fusion (Finished 19th) - "We salvaged a 19th. The car got so loose. We were really good in practice and I thought we were going to have a really good night. We in the top 10 in both practices and just got loose. It's not normal for here, but it happened. We'll go back and take the McDonald's Ford to California and see if we can't have a better result there." STACY COMPTON-59-Kingsford/Bush's Baked Beans Ford Fusion (Finished 16th) - "The guys did a great job. Jay (Guy, crew chief) made some great calls. We could never get the car turning like we needed it to. We worked on it all day and all night tonight and we could never get it rotating like we needed it to. If we could get it rotating, we'd be too loose. We couldn't get it rotating through the center, so I'm not sure. We've got an idea on some things we want to do. We definitely didn't have that good of a race car tonight. We survived, avoided some stuff, and Jay had some great pit strategy to help us get up through there, but I wish we had a little bit better car, but that's just the way it goes. We'll take it and go on. A top-20 was not what we were hoping for, but we'll take it and go on next week and try to better it." -30-