CARL EDWARDS -- No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (Finished 39th)
"That's a
mercy killing there. It was just a long night for our Aflac team. We
don't give up, though. We're a team and we all made mistakes tonight
and it just culminated in a bad event. Hopefully, Matt can win this
race and get a Ford in Victory Lane. But I can't thank Aflac enough,
Ford. You're gonna have nights like this. That's life. That's
racing."
A TOUGH NIGHT. "It was bad. We had everything kind of go
bad all in one night, which, in a way, I guess you can say that's
fortunate. That engine was probably gonna blow up whether or not we
were running bad. If that was the 17's engine, that would be
heartbreaking. I think it just showed a little mercy on us and let me
go home early right now, but our Aflac guys don't give up. We made a
couple of mistakes and we just had a bad night. We didn't run well.
We don't have them very often. Bob is down on himself right now.
He's all upset because the car was slow, but Bob's a smart guy and
I've got a lot of faith in him. We'll just go to Martinsville and go
strong there."
A FRUSTRATING NIGHT. "I think that's the most
frustrated I've been in a long time, but you can't do anything about
it. If you look at the night the 11 had, the 42 -- this is auto racing
-- a thousand things have to go right and if any one of them go wrong,
then your night is bad. We had about four things go wrong tonight,
and, luckily, they all happened in one night. If we can get that out
of the way, I guess that's good."
YOU LABELED THIS A MERCY KILLING.
"Yeah. I guess I get to go home early, that's about it. The way I
like to think of that is if your engine blows up on a night like that
-- we don't have very many engine failures, we don't have many problems
like that -- but if you can have an engine blow, tonight is the night
to have it for us."
***
MATT KENSETH -- No. 17 Carhartt Ford Fusion (Finished 2nd)
"It's been
getting better. I thought tonight we had a really solid night on the
race track and on pit road. All of these Carhartt guys did a good job
for me. We made good adjustments and it seems like maybe we're
starting to understand what's going on a little bit more at these
mile-and-a-halfs and had really good track position all night, so it
was a great night for us."
DID YOU HAVE THE CAR TO WIN TONIGHT? "No.
We weren't quite that good, but we had a good car and had a really
good, solid night and made the best of it and got the best finish we
could out of it."
IS IT TOO EARLY TO SAY YOU FEEL YOU'VE TURNED THE
CORNER? THINGS ARE BETTER THE LAST COUPLE OF WEEKS. "We've been
gaining on it. I don't want to go back and say we found it. I don't
know if any of our other cars ran real great tonight. As a team, we
seemed to hit it pretty good tonight. We qualified good, which makes
a huge difference. We had track position all night and never got
behind and that makes a big difference in these races. I think you
have to have more races to average in before we feel too good about
it, but it certainly feels like we're going in the right direction
the last three or four weeks."
***
GREG BIFFLE -- No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (Finished 16th)
"I had a really
good car. We lost our track position there because of a little
miscommunication about what we wanted to do and never got it back. We
possibly could have finished in the top five if we hadn't given up
track position."
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE POINTS NOW? "We're
just fighting for the highest spot in points we can finish, which
isn't looking bad for us right now considering the 42 had problems and
the 99 and the 83. Our goal is to finish as high in points as we
possibly can and if that's one, two, three, four or five, that's what
it is."
-credit: ford racing
