Richmond - Notes and Quotes

Tony qualified 22nd turning a lap of 21.673 seconds at 124.579 mph.

“I never really felt like we got heat in the tires,” said Stewart, who has three Nextel Cup wins at Richmond. “We only got to do one simulated qualifying run (in practice) and Johnny Benson got right in the middle of it. Qualifying is a big deal because of pit selection here and if you get a bad start because of qualifying, normally it will bite you.”

Q and A:

HOW COME THE CONSISTENCY HAS BEEN AN ISSUE THIS SEASON?:  “I’m not real sure to be honest. The good thing is even though the finishes aren’t what we wanted the performance of the car on the tracks is. Sometimes we missed that bad luck at the end of the races. It’s better than being consistent and being consistently 30th.”

ON WHY DRIVERS GET EXCITED ABOUT THIS TRACK: “I don’t know. The drivers were excited, the teams were excited; we just can’t get people that build tracks to figure this out that this is the perfect size race track. Racing is always good here. It’s always exciting. It always has good finishes so that’s what so special about this place.”

HOW DOES YOUR APPROACH CHANGE RUNNING THE IMPALA SS HERE? “It really doesn’t change. It doesn’t matter to me the whether it’s a Car of Tomorrow race or not. Whatever we can get into it’s about how fast we can get it to go and trying to be faster than everyone else is.”

ON JEFF GORDON’S SUCCESS: “I mean the whole Hendrick organization has been good compared to what they’d been. It’s not just been Jeff. Jimmie’s been good. Kyle Busch has been good and Casey Mears has been better than he’s probably ever been so the whole organization has got their act together.”

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.