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NASCAR WCUP: Ricky Rudd, Pontiac Excitement 400 Post Race Quotes

17 May 1999

RICKY RUDD -10- Tide Taurus -- "It was frustrating because we had a real good race car. We had a top 10, maybe a top five. We raced hard to try to gain our lap back, but kept popping tires. I'm not sure exactly what happened. We hit the fence with the last one and the night was over after that. We had to go behind the wall and had to fix a bunch of parts on the car and just rode after that." HOW MANY RIGHT-FRONT TIRES DID YOU BLOW? "It happened twice. The first one I caught it, the second time I thought it was going down but they said there might be a caution coming out, so I stayed out and it popped going into the corner and that's when we did all the damage." ANY IDEA WHY THERE WERE SO MANY PROBLEMS WITH THAT? "Not really. We saw no indication of it in practice. Generally, low air pressure and a lot of camber will do that. That's what gets them, but we hadn't gone down in the air-pressure yet. We were waiting for later in the race to go down, which would have been a little bit of speed later on, but we never went down. I'm a little bit baffled myself."

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