NASCAR BGN: Notes and Quotes; Busch Series Qualifying
10 March 2000
Posted By Terry
Callahan
Motorsports Editor, The Auto Channel
HUT STRICKLIN, NO. 61 IWX PONTIAC GRAND PRIX (3RD):"We would have liked to have been about two tenths quicker. But that is the best we've run. We had been a little loose prior to qualifying and I totally left it up to (general manager) Dave Fuge. All the guys did a great job of making a great call. It was a little bit too tight. It didn't really slide the front tires. It just kind of bogged the motor down. It was a good lap for us. At least we feel like we'll be in the race now and can work on race set-ups in the morning. Hopefully we can have another good run this week." (ON THIS RUN AS A CONFIDENCE BOOSTER) "It really is. We sat on the pole there at Daytona and then we had a rude awakening happen to us at Rockingham. We missed the race there. Last week we qualified 13th at Las Vegas and this week we're third. Rockingham was a reality check, I guess you'd say. As a driver I think I'm in the best race car I've been in as far as Busch car go in a while. I thought it was gong to be real easy. Dave probably felt like he had a race driver that could do anything. Neither one of us really put forth the effort that we needed to. It's just something that happened to us that caused us to dig deep and work that much harder. We kind of proved that a little bit last week at Vegas. We were down a little bit when we got here to Atlanta. We weren't quite up to speed although we tested here. We struggled a little bit when we got here, but we got it better-and-better. Probably the best lap we ran was in qualifying. Every change we made was a good one. They were real calculated changes. I'm pretty excited now. We've got a good starting spot and weather permitting Saturday we can have a good race."
MIKE BORKOWSKI, NO. 20 AT&T PONTIAC GRAND PRIX (DNS): (ON HIS PRACTICE INCIDENT) "We were running really strong. I was borderline loose. Some of that I think is the tires. But no excuses - I'm still learning the feel of these things. Some of the veterans and my crew chief were telling me that these tires would give you a funny feeling like that, so I was kind of forcing myself to drive through it. We had just put stickers on it, made one change to the car, were going to do one run and put it away. I was 300 feet from the start-finish line and I touched the turn four wall. I got a wiggle in turns three and four. I thought I had it saved, it kind of wiggled again and I didn't (have it saved). It came around on me. It's unfortunate. I honestly thought we had a shot at the pole. That's how good I felt about it. We're waiting for our back-up car to come, so we're just going to wait for second round tomorrow. It was just a case of trying to go fast with not too much experience."
JASON JARRETT, NO. 11 RAYOVAC PONTIAC GRAND PRIX (48TH): "It's frustrating. But we made a lot of changes - I mean a ton of changes - since that last practice and we picked up a second and a quarter. Sometimes you can come test for two days and not pick up that. So I'm disappointed but at the same time, I'm a little bit happy for these guys because they busted their butts all morning. We'll come back and qualify tomorrow. If we're lucky enough to get in the race we'll just try to improve on everything."
Text provided by Al Larsen
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