BOBBY HAMILTON -43- STP (24th)
"I haven't won seven championships and I haven't won 80-something races, but I'm smart enough to kncw you don't do stuff like that this early in the season. That's an end of the season move. He plain hit me. lt wasn't close at all. I don't know if we had it won. He was good. I was good. He's professional. I'm just getting proeessional. We're both going to be around a time so we'll work it out. "The car was good. It was better on restarts toward the end of the race, and a little of that was me. You know how I am. I try to take care of things and be there at the end. We were good all day. I think we could have marched up there to start with. I don't think we had anything for Terry (Labonte), but nobody else did either. When we were leading the race we had another two-tenths left in the glove compartment. I just tried to stay real consistent. We need to do a little more work on the front fenders of the car, and if we can get a little more downforce on the front end of the car it's going to be a good car. "We were racing each other and I passed him. He took the air off me and passed me back. I took the air off him and passed him back. I think he just said, 'Whoa, wait a minute. This is the only one here that's going to run with me.' Coming off of four he loosened me up, he gassed it and hit me. He turned me. It's all I could do to save it then. The right-rear hit the wall and it bent the trailing arm or something. I was just trying too hard after that. "We were trying to get a top-five out of it after that. I'm not sorry about not backing off because that's what we're here for. He Just pushed us out of the way. "After that I got loose going into turn one and I had to take it up high, and I just got in the loose stuff and lost it. "Can't you see I'm going to race people tougher this year? We're going to do it every week when we've got the car right. But we can't do stuff like we did today (wreck) every week. If we're bad at one race track we can't wreck. Of course all the guys are happy we ran so well, but I'm sitting here thinking, Maybe I should have backed off of it and we'd have finished in the top-10. That's not what we're here for. I want to win races this year. Until they call me down on it that's the approach I'm gqing to take." "I'm real disappointed Earnhardt didn't race me clean."
RICHARD PETTY Owner of STP Pontiac
"What can I say? It just wasn't our day. But we had a lot of help for it not being our day though."
DALE INMAN Team Manager STP Pontiac
"He hit us. We got by him, he got back by us, we went back by him, and when he came back by us the next time. . . He definitely took the air off our spoiler and that's how we got by him. Bobby said, 'I didn't have my guard up that good. I thought he would race me cleaner than that.' I'm disappointed in Dale. There was still 35 laps to go. He hit us just enough to mess us up. I think it knocked the Camber out of the right-rear wheel. We were loose and then it just got away from it at the end. "I know he's a hard-nosed racer, but if we raced him clean he should have raced us clean. We raced him awful clean, "It was a good car. It was real good. They adjusted on it a little bit. We got better on long runs. The last couple of runs he took off and run good. We were pretty well pleased. Early we got behind and it's just hard to pass here. Later we could run harder. It was just a tough day. Bobby made a heckuva save, but I've seen that a lot. He does a heckuva job from that standpoint. "He thought Earnhardt would have raced him.clean. "I think we'll run awful good up there (Richmond). On the restarts up there going into turn three a spotter will close his eyes and hopes to see his car come out the other end. "Maybe we can be leading on a restart toward the end there."
ROBBIE LOOMIS Crew Chief STP Pontiac
I think all the guys showed their strength today. It showed Bobby's strength as a driver. It's exactly what Richard talks about. The circumstances just didn't work out right. I think the run proves Pontiacs given us a great car. My hat's off to those guys especially. I didn't exactly see it happen. I knew that being a new guy beating him (Earnhardt) that he wasn't going to like it and wasn't going to race us clean like Rusty and some of those other guys. I'm very disappointed in Earnhardt. If it's somebody that can beat him week in and week out he'll race them clean. It was in my mind all along, especially when we had that caution and he beat us out of the pits. I think if Rusty or any of those other guys would have been there he would have raced them clean. He's given us our little tap, and you never know what's going to happen next time. "I think after what you saw today you'll see some rubbing back by Bobby. There at the end when Earnhardt came on by us we just let him roll on by. Hopefully the next time he'll be running first and we'll be running seccnd, and maybe we'll accidently hit him because I'm sure it was an accident when he hit us. "We had a test that went real well at Richmond. We'll put our best foot forward and hopefully we'll have the car driving good. If we get the car driving good he showed he's going to put it out front."
JOHNNY BENSON Jr -30- Pennzoil (20th)
"The car was running great until the accident. I thought we were going to be in good shape. it was one of those deals. You don't play with 'The Rock.' The car just didn't handle after the accident. The car was pretty good. If we hadn't gotten in that accident I think we would have been in pretty good shape. It think we definitely had a top-10 car."
KYLE PETTY -42- Coors Light (11th)
"I didn't see it happen. I just saw him (Hamilton) stopped in the middle of the straightaway almost. We were good at first and then we went straight to a push. We've been fighting a push ever since we've been down here and we just couldn't get it out. We were able to race, but we weren't able to race the way we wanted to race. We lost two laps in the first 150 and we didn't lose a lap after that. It's going to take us a few races to learn what the Pontiac needs. We came down here and qualified good, so we know the car is good enough to qualify. Now all we have to do is get it to where it will race better. I thought Bobby was going to win today, I was going to go to Victory Lane and kiss Bobby."
WARD BURTON -22- MBNA (41st)
"He might have been under me (a little bit), but it wasn't enough for him to take the position. We just have to all give and take. We have to all use our heads, and I don't thing Ernie Irvan did that right there. It hit pretty hard."
