DESPITE 14TH-PLACE FINISH AT SONOMA
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Post-It/National Guard Taurus (Finished 14th)
HOW DOES IT SOUND TO BE THE NEW POINTS LEADER?
“It sounds really good. I tell you what, this team has really worked hard. We wanted better than a 14th-place finish here and think we deserved it, but it was just unfortunate that caution came out toward the end. We lost about six spots because of that, so that might have moved us into the top 10 – probably eighth – but we were off a little bit today. We just had to work on our race car. I put a bigger rear swaybar in it before the start of the race, so that kind of hurt me, but I just did the best I could. I stayed on the race track. I knew fuel mileage was gonna be an issue, so I was light-footing it on the throttle and let a couple of guys go because of the big picture. We needed to make it.”
DOES IT MATTER TO LEAD THE POINTS? “Yeah, it does because we wanted to lead the points. Even if I only lead it for a week, I wanted to be the point leader. This team has worked really hard towards being the points leader. We’ve had two or three bad races and we’ve been able to bounce back from them. Today we didn’t have that great of a car. We finished 14th, but we could have finished a lot better than that if the caution hadn’t come out. We had a great pit strategy. I went off the track at the beginning of qualifying and that certainly hurt our track position all day, but I can’t be happier for the team. They’ve worked hard for being the point leader and we are.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT DAYTONA? “Pretty good. I’m taking my Bud Shootout car there, so anybody that saw the Bud Shootout race, I mean, it was a really good race car. We’re ready to go back. We like going to Daytona. It’s a big place with a lot happening there with it being the Fourth of July and everything so we’re ready.”
YOU WANTED THIS POINTS LEAD. WHY WAS IT SO IMPORTANT TO YOU? “I think just because the eyes and the focus is on you. We had won five races, but weren’t leading the points. Now we’re leading the points and we’ve won five races. We wanted to lead. We want them to talk about us and write about us a little bit and now we’re on top for a little bit.”
KURT BUSCH – No. 97 Crown Royal Taurus (Finished 3rd) – “It was a solid job. Ricky Rudd did an awesome job. To finish third to him and have Tony as the fastest car, we did a great job with our Crown Royal Ford. We had a great setup and it’s good to bounce back.”
YOU WERE STRONG ALL DAY. “Yeah, we had a plan to just stick with our strategy. Some guys gambled a little bit on fuel so then we had to pass them. Our Crown Royal Ford was good, we just didn’t have the solid turning ability of the 20 car, but we had a great run and I’m real proud of my team.”
A GOOD POINTS DAY AS WELL. “Yeah, we’re still under the gun because there are still nine or so races to go, so you’ve got to run hard.”
ELLIOTT SADLER – No. 38 M&M’s Taurus (Finished 6th) – “It was a great day. Todd had a great gameplan and we stuck to it and it worked out for us, so I’m very proud of my guys to come home sixth and for Dale Jarrett to come home fifth. It was a great run for the Wood Brothers to finish second, so, all in all, it was a great day for everybody.”
YOU SAID AT THE BEGINNING YOU JUST WANTED TO STAY ON COURSE AND YOU DID. “Yeah, just stay on course and I knew my guys were gonna give me great pit strategy, so I just conserved fuel from the start of that last green flag run all the way to the checkered flag. I didn’t race anybody all day long. I let ‘em go. I saved my fuel, saved my transmission and saved my motor and it worked out great for us.”
A GREAT POINTS DAY AS WELL. “It was a great points day. We didn’t lose anything to the leaders and I don’t think we lost a lot to the guy who was 10th in points, so this was a big hurdle for us to come here and run as good as we did. It’s a great points day for everybody, so it was a great, great day for us.”
RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Air Force/Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus (Finished 2nd) – HOW CLOSE WERE YOU ON FUEL? “We knew it was gonna be within a lap of making it or not making it, and then it started surging and popping and snapping before it finally ran out.”
YOU DIDN’T GET BACK TO PIT ROAD. “We knew all along it was gonna be close. He said, ‘It’s within a lap, but it could be one way or the other. We might not make it.’ Then we got that late caution and we needed another lap of that caution to really think that we could go the distance. He wouldn’t tell me, so I knew when he was silent about it. He didn’t say, ‘Just let it go.’ He said, ‘Really guard it. Guard it every lap right up to the end.’ It actually started running out the lap before and Kurt was able to catch up to me. What happened is the motor was cutting on and off anywhere you would rise up over a bump and then the motor would cut off. Then when I would downshift, it would snatch the rear wheels loose and I got really ragged on the last lap and Kurt nearly got by us, but I’m really happy for everybody on this Motorcraft/Air Force Taurus. We’ve done a good job all year, we just finally got some results that the team deserved. The pit strategy was unbelievable. We had a good car, but we needed track position and they gave it to us.”
WHAT ABOUT THE BATTLE WITH TONY? “He was coming really fast. At first he was just inching and inching, but my tires went away. We needed one more chassis adjustment, but with the way the pit road cycle system works here, you can’t go to pit road and get an adjustment and get tires like you normally do on an oval track, but we were one air-pressure adjustment away from being a really great car. We ended up second. I’d say in practice we kind of knew what we had. We chased Tony around and Tony was doing the same thing to us in practice. He would inch up on us every corner. He could get more forward bite off the corner than we could. Our guys changed the car around last night and it made a big difference. Our car was better, but not good enough to beat Tony.”
YOU NEEDED THIS. “You can keep telling everybody all year, ‘We’re running good. It’s coming. We just can’t get any luck,’ and finally we had a day that goes our way. We’ve had some top fives all year. I don’t know about any wins, but we had some good, solid top fives that snuck away from us, but this is really the first time we’ve had any results like the team has been running at times. I’m just tickled to death for these guys.”
DOES IT REJUVENTATE YOU? “Not really. Last year was a little different because we ran poorly last year. We didn’t run good and we finished poorly, we finished in the twenties, and that was hard to take. Now coming out this year and having a competitive car, to me, I’d rather run good and break than to just run poorly, so it hasn’t been that bad. Still, it’s nice to look in the newspaper and see where you finished.”
DALE JARRETT – No. 88 UPS Taurus (Finished 5th) – “Things worked out really well. Thanks to the guys at Bondurant in Phoenix. Elliott had a good run out there. He was a good teammate out there, I cut him off on that one restart a couple of times. I felt like my car was little faster, but it was a good day for us. I really wanted to try to get to fourth and get by Rusty, but the main thing was to bring this UPS Ford home. This Herbie Full Throttle paint scheme needed a good day and this was it.”
WERE YOU CLOSE ON FUEL? “I knew as much as they were hollering about twice a lap that we had to be pretty close. It’s a fine line out here – trying to run hard enough to stay in front of those guys and then save fuel, too. If you’re on an oval, you can kind of know what you’re saving. Here, it’s a little more difficult but it worked out.”
SOME GUYS HAD TROUBLE TODAY AND YOU WERE ABLE TO GAIN SOME GROUND IN POINTS. “You’ve got to be able to take advantage of that and we were able to do that. It doesn’t do any good if they have problems and you have problems, too. We just need to keep a little bit of momentum.” A
GOOD WAY TO CAP OFF THE MONTH. “Yeah, things didn’t go exactly as we had planned, so it was a good way to finish it off.”
RICKY RUDD-KURT BUSCH PRESS CONFERENCE
RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Air Force/Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus –
WHAT ABOUT THE BATTLE WITH TONY? “I guess with the way the week started, we had a good car in practice. Going into qualifying we were eighth-quick and qualified poorly – like 20th. Man, you get yourself in hole here and you just can’t dig out. You can have a winning car and get buried and just can’t dig out. Finally, Fatback had some really smart strategy and that’s what got us the track position. We had the car, but we were buried in the traffic. Again, he had the strategy knowing that sometimes this thing ends up with a lot of yellows near the end. When we pitted, we knew there was no possible way we could go the distance on fuel, but with the cautions that we thought would be coming, and you could see the intensity level picking up with the competitors on the track. Everybody was starting to not be as kind to each other as they were earlier in the race and we knew cautions were gonna be coming. So he gambled and went for it and got us track position, and then we had to race. We were pretty good with that group that we were racing and we knew Tony was fast. He was fast in practice, so I was just trying to hold him off the best I could. Obviously, we weren’t able to do that. It was right down to the wire on fuel. We didn’t know if we were gonna make it or not. It actually ran out. When you hit those little speed bumps the thing would just quit running, just like you’d turn the ignition off. I don’t know how he (Busch) missed my back bumper. If I was him, I don’t know if I would have been as kind. I owe him one because he cut me some slack back there at turn five and it all worked out. The motor got running again and it started surging coming to the line and then it ran out going up the hill. You couldn’t have planned it anymore perfect.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE ATTEMPTS TONY MADE TO PASS? “He kept coming and coming and inching up, and then he got there. I tried to hold him off trying to out-brake him getting into turn 11, but it was just a matter of time. Then I started making mistakes. I started wheel-hopping my car and then it was just a matter of time before I spun off the race track. You can only run over your head for so many laps and then the tires take a lot of abuse and the brakes won’t take it, so he was able to just drive by. We had nothing for Tony there at the end. We were just trying to play the hang-on game.”
KURT BUSCH – No. 97 Crown Royal Taurus -- DID THE SUN COMING OUT AFFECT THE TRACK? “I was hoping that it would stay overcast. We went with a bit more aggressive setup to try to corner at some of the high speeds a little better, but the sun always pops out here. You can count on the clouds burning off and just the way that this track always greases up, you’ve got to have a setup that will run through the day and that means it has to be a little bit different at the beginning than it is at the end. We were hanging in there. We just missed it by a little bit, so we’ll take this knowledge to Watkins Glen and check it out.”
RICKY RUDD CONTINUED – “As far as our car, we weren’t very good when the race started. We were just average at best. When the sun came out we got better. At the same time, we had our first pit stop and they adjusted the tire pressure and stuff and we got better, so with our situation the sunny track and hot track came to us better than it did when it was cool.”
YOU TALKED ABOUT THE NEW TRANSMISSIONS THE OTHER DAY AND IT WAS AN ISSUE TODAY. “I don’t know if it’s experimental. Guys have been running that thing for a while. I don’t even know the name of it. I guess there are several versions of transmissions out here. I think we had the transmission that the Hendrick cars had because that was the sales pitch that the guy gave us. ‘They’ve run two or three races out there and nobody’s broke one yet.’ So we didn’t have nothing to lose as far as points go, so we tried it and I liked it. We tested it at VIR and, again it’s so easy to shift, but I think that’s part of the problem is that the thing is so easy to shift that maybe you’re over-confident and you’re not matching the revs on the downshift. I don’t know what broke in them, but, again, I was abusive on mine from what I usually do. I never hopped the brakes, but I was jamming gears and not using the clutch. Guys have been doing that for years with transmissions, but something about it just sounds like it’s tearing things up. I shifted all day without a clutch on the up-shifts and I’ve never done that here before. I abused it as much as you can abuse one, but I did match revs. If the guys didn’t match revs, evidently, that’s probably what I would say broke in one but I’m not certain.”
KURT BUSCH CONTINUED – WHAT ABOUT GOING OFF COURSE BRIEFLY TRYING TO CHASE DOWN TONY EARLIER IN THE RACE? “I saw a window up. Tony Stewart might talk about it, but his ignition box failed going through turn nine and it looked like his car shut off and then he got going again. That was the closest that I was to him all day, so I took an extra chance to go into turn four deep, hopefully, try to make up some time and then go underneath him in turn seven. That seemed to be where we passed most guys. I just got in there too hot. The rear end started chattering, which is axel hop, so I had to abort the plan and get back in line. You try not to over-drive it too much, but those are corners where you can over-drive it and get away with it because there’s asphalt run off, instead of dirt.”
RICKY RUDD CONTINUED – CAN DAYS LIKE TODAY LEAD TO A GOOD SUMMER? “This is fun being able to race for the win or race for a top five. To me, that’s what racing is all about. I don’t know. I probably will have some decisions. I know I’ve got decisions to make here shortly, but as far as good performances, the team runs good and car runs good and you get good finishes, that’s why I race to begin with. That’s probably the biggest motivation I had to hang around a little bit longer – just being a competitor. You don’t want to be out there just riding around.”
WHAT CAR DID YOU USE TODAY? “Somebody was asking me about that earlier. It’s really strange. This is the car that I won with in ’02 with Yates. I guess Yates is building their own chassis now and they were gonna put this car out to pasture, sell it or whatever. I don’t know all the particulars and how it came to be, but Fatback was able to buy it and get Robert to sell it to us. There wasn’t much left on it, I think, when they got it but a bare chassis, and then our guys took it and did all their package, put a body on it and things of that nature. They updated the car because a lot of things have changed since them. Some of the rollcage configurations have changed since that time, but it is odd. I don’t know if Elliott ever ran it, but the last time we ran it we won with it and we came here and ran second today with it, so it’s kind of strange in a good way.”
DID YOU GET A WARRANTY WITH IT? “I don’t know, Robert’s probably gonna want it back right now. Their cars struggled a little bit today. I’m not sure what their problems were, but they struggled a little bit. They might want this thing back, but, hopefully, the Wood’s have paid for it.”
HOW MUCH DOES THIS MEAN TO THE TEAM? “These guys really haven’t gotten the credit they deserve. Really, you’ve got to have good finishes to get credit. You can run good all day and then people forget about you, but it doesn’t really bother me. I’m much happier this year than we were last year. Last year we just ran like a dog. We ran 25th on the race track and finished 25th. When Fatback came on board we ran better, but this year we’ve run well. I don’t think we’ve been good enough to quite win, but we’ve had some good top-five finishes slip away from us. If no one was at the track watching and you read the newspaper and read the NASCAR Scene you’d read it and wouldn’t even know we were there. Today, it’s kind of hard to skip over the guy that finishes second. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t care if we’re ever in print or not, but the guys that bust their butt on these cars week in and week out, they’re getting some credit, hopefully, that they deserve. Again, they’ve had good race cars and we’ve been in every wreck, I think, that there’s been on the circuit this year. We didn’t start them, but we’ve been in every one of them. That’s just sort of how the year has gone. To get a finish gives those guys some respect that they deserve.”
IF FUEL WASN’T AN ISSUE COULD YOU HAVE HELD TONY OFF? “No. I could go for awhile. We were one chassis adjustment away, I think. At the start of the race we weren’t good. We had the first chassis adjustment on the set of tires, and we only had two stabs at it. The second time they got better. We were adjustment away, I think. Of course, sometimes you go the wrong way, but I feel like we were one adjustment away from being a great car. We were a good car, but maybe one adjustment away from being able to race these guys here.”
RICKY RUDD CONTINUED -- WHAT ABOUT ROAD RACING? “I love road racing. I always have. I came up as a kid racing tracks like this running go-karts. I’ve got a go-kart today that I go out and play with on a road course that’s very similar to that track at the top of the hill. Charlotte Motor Speedway has been nice enough to let us go there and play and practice. As a matter of fact, they’re getting ready to repave it for us. A bunch of guys are starting to get them. I know Burton’s got some. I don’t know about Kurt. The Labonte’s have got them and Joe Nemechek. A bunch of guys are starting to get them and it’s kind of neat to go over there and play. I guess that’s how crazy I am over road racing, I go out there on my off day and drive something on a road course.”
WHAT’S THE RIGHT PROPORTION FOR ROAD COURSES? “I think because you only have two a year, a small team like ours cannot really put a lot of focus into that because if you really get smart on your road course car, it’s not really gonna help you on oval track racing. Our tests are limited, so we elected not to test at a road course. I feel like you need at least four road races a year. Now you’ve got 36, 38 races a year – four road courses would probably be a better balance and you could probably learn a little more about them. It seems like we’re always behind trying to play catch-up on the equipment nowadays it’s changing so quickly.”
EDDIE WOOD WASN’T HERE TODAY. “I forgot all about that. Eddie Wood, one of the owners, was not here. I don’t know if he’s ever missed a race. He went to Milwaukee to watch his son, Jon, run. I don’t think they had too good of a night, and his flight was cancelled that he was gonna fly back on from Milwaukee over to here and he didn’t make it back. I don’t know, Eddie is as superstitious as they come so he’s liable to think hard about this. He’s liable to have Sunday’s off here for the next 17 races or whatever we’ve got left here.”
KURT BUSCH CONTINUED – THOUGHTS ON ROAD COURSE RACING. “You have to race each and every race as if it’s a new week and we’ve been successful on the road courses in the past. We just hadn’t found our niche yet and this was a great run with the team and the pit strategy and for Crown Royal, of course. It’s just a matter of going out. We’ve got a good group of tracks coming up and it’s the same kind of stretch we had last year, where we had to go through some turmoil and some bad things. I was just getting caught up in wrecks and we got that out of the way early, so here comes our stretch again. Where we are in points is irrelevant. It’s just a matter of putting together consistent finishes and that’s the fun thing and I hope we’re able to do that.”
TALK ABOUT THE POINTS SHUFFLE TODAY. “It’s just this point in the season nobody has really had a good group of consistent runs and a group of guys haven’t been able to stretch out. It’s real tight. I think I was 100 points out of third coming into today and my little brother, who was 18th in points, was 100 from me. So you can’t look at where guys are, if Gordon is out and Junior is out and some guys are in. It’s just how many points are they behind that guy in front of them and watch them put some good runs together.”
RICKY RUDD CONTINUED – DOES A DAY LIKE THIS MAKE YOU THINK ABOUT RIVERSIDE? “It was kind of strange for a while there because of the way the pit strategy worked out. I think Rusty was in the lead and we had to get by Dale Jarrett and Elliott Sadler and a couple other guys and, all of a sudden, I was chasing Rusty. That was a flashback to the late eighties. Having two old guys chasing each other again for the lead, that was kind of neat. It did cross my mind. I think the last time we did that Rusty ended up in the dirt. I’m not sure exactly what happened.”
KURT BUSCH CONTINUED – DO YOU TRY TO PROTECT YOUR SPOT IN THE STANDINGS? “There’s no reason to try to protect. You can’t do that. You have to race your car. If you’ve got an eighth-place car, you try to finish eighth with it. If you’re on the outside looking in going into Richmond, you better have tested there to try to make sure that you get your way in. There are all kinds of scenarios to look at and I think we’re still sticking with our plan. Hopefully, everything unfolds for us again with making the chase in an appropriate position and then saving our tests and attacking the final 10.”
