Carl Edwards, No. 99 Cheez-It/Kellogg’s Ford (Finished 2nd)
“Kevin wouldn’t give me enough room to run into him. He stayed on the bottom because he said I knew I was going to hit him. I wanted to get him for Trevor last night (laughs). He did a good job staying on the bottom and I couldn’t get a run to get up to him at all. That was a great race. As much as I am frustrating for not winning, tonight was about remembering our heroes and what America is about. I appreciate the fans coming out here. Hopefully we bring all these troops home soon. It was a fun race and I am ready to go win this championship.”
WHAT DOES TONIGHT SAY ABOUT THE ROUSH GUYS ON SHORT TRACKS? “I says these other guys might have somebody new to deal with. I am excited to go to Loudon now and Martinsville. We have something here that is really great. I want to thank Kellogg’s and Cheez-It for being on board. We only run a couple races for them and I would love to get a win. Thanks again to the fans for coming out here. It was a huge crowd and it was a pleasure to put on a shot for you.”
Matt Kenseth, No. 17 Ollie’s Ford (Finished 23rd)
WERE YOU SURPRISED BY THE AMOUNT OF CAUTIONS TONIGHT? “Yeah, it seemed like there were a lot more than normal for whatever reason, I don’t know. But it did seem like there was a lot of wrecked stuff.”
YOUR THOUGHTS ON BEING IN THE CHASE AGAIN AS WE HEAD TO THE LAST 10 RACES. “Tonight wasn’t a good night for us at all so I am looking forward to trying to forget about it and go to Chicago and hopefully compete.”
DO YOU FEEL LIKE CHICAGO IS A GOOD KICK-OFF SPOT FOR YOU WITH IT BEING A MILE-AND-A-HALF TRACK? “I don’t know. We ran good on some and not so good on others. Everybody else groups the tracks together but you really can’t. Atlanta is nothing like Chicago and Chicago is nothing at all like Las Vegas. I mean, it is hard because you can’t loop them together. They are different. Just because it is the same size around the circle they are still a lot different. It seems like our cars run a little better on the bigger tracks than the shorter tracks but yet on the other hand the 16 and 99 and 6 all ran really stout tonight. I think our equipment is okay, we just have to get running better.”
David Ragan, No. 6 UPS Ford (Finished 4th)
“We needed to win this thing and our UPS team did a nice job. It is the same car we ran well with here in the spring. We had a race winner here if things would have fell our way. I think there are four or five guys that could have won this race depending on pit strategy and how the cautions fell. We weren’t very good on the short runs. We needed about a 150 or 200 lap run and I think we would have been fine but our UPS team did a good job. We want to win every single time we come to a race track. A top five is good. We gained some points from our recent bad luck and we will move on.”
TALK ABOUT HOW ROUGH IT WAS OUT THERE. “It was rough. Everyone was racing hard and I think the Chase atmosphere and the Saturday night racing here at Richmond I think there are some guys that had some payback before the Chase started. It was fun to watch that. If one of them had gotten in our way we would have been mad but we were able to drive around them. I am glad we had a fast enough car that we could be the aggressor and not the one being pushed around.”
Travis Kvapil, No. 38 Long John Silver’s Ford (Finished 28th)
WHAT HAPPENED WITH YOU AND THE 88?
“I don’t know. I think we were racing for the Lucky Dog, and two or three times I got a run on him on the outside – obviously the hard way to pass – and he chopped me a couple times. So I gave him a tap at the start-finish line, and next time by he let me go and then he just wrecked me. It’s just frustrating. Obviously neither one of us was having a very good night, so it just made both of our night’s worse. I feel like we had an OK car, we just caught up in that big wreck really early and it really messed our car up on both ends.”
