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NASCAR WCUP: Johnny Benson, Rick Mast notes and quotes, Indianapolis Testing

13 July 2000

Posted By Terry Callahan
Motorsports Editor, The Auto Channel

JOHNNY BENSON, NO. 10 TYLER JET MOTORSPORTS PONTIAC GRAND PRIX:

(ON BEING FASTEST ON TUESDAY) "We thought we'd be decent. This car has treated us really good, and it's been decent. But we surely didn't expect to be on top of the sheet. We thought we could maybe stay around the top 10 and we felt t that would be a good day. We just kept making runs all day, and then of course later in the day the temperature was starting to get good. We just felt really good leaving here with that kind of qualifying run.

"We didn't run this morning and a couple of guys really ran some great laps, but the air was about as good as you're going to get here. Knowing that we did it later in the afternoon makes us feel like we're going to be decent, and we just hope when we come back we can repeat that same type of scenario. Whether it be that fast or not isn't as important, just as long as it still compares to what everybody else is doing. That's what we'll base it on."

(ON BEING CONFIDENT HEADING INTO THE BRICKYARD 400) "I really like this track. I've run extremely well with the Pontiacs here, and now that I'm back in a Pontiac again I'm hoping that we can have more of that success. "Hopefully when we come back we'll be relatively competitive with everybody just like we are now. We've worked on race set-ups today, just trying to get that aspect better. We've still got some work to do. We've just got a lot of little things that we've tried, and I think when we come back here we'll be in OK shape. We'll really have to fine-tune it when we come back because track conditions always change. But we've tried a lot of different scenarios to prepare for that, and we'll just go from there."

RICK MAST, NO. 14 CONSECO PONTIAC GRAND PRIX:

(ON PREPARING FOR THE BRICKYARD 400) "We've got two cars here, the car we ran in Loudon and the one we ran in Pocono. We spent the first day of testing figuring out which car was working best with this racetrack. We decided that it was the Loudon car, so we loaded up the Pocono car. We've got a new car at the shop that we built for Indy, and we are going to come back in two weeks and test with it. We are going to find out then which of the two cars we are going to bring to the race. What we spent today doing was trying different things out with the car and not focusing on the speed so much. We went for speed yesterday and we were pretty pleased with how the car handled. We ran a 50.40 (seconds) and the quickest speed was a 50.17. We felt like we were pretty close to the fastest car and that was with an old race motor so we felt pretty comfortable with our speed. So today we just worked on the car. We all have a lot of good ideas with set-ups, so we are just trying a lot of things and hoping something comes together."

(ON RACING IN INDY) "Indy is a big deal to me. It always has been since the first race in 1994, when I was the first to get the pole here. So, we always enjoy coming here and hope to do well. Of course this is A.J. (Foyt's) race team and A.J. owns Indy. So we are putting a lot of emphasis on this race."

Text provided by Al Larsen

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