Carl Edwards, driver of the No. 99 Dish Network Ford Fusion, took his fifth and final lead of the race with 23 laps remaining en route to winning the Auto Club 500 at Auto Club Speedway of Southern California on Monday. In eight career Sprint Cup starts at the two-mile track, Edwards now has seven top-six finishes. Teammate Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 Carhartt/DEWALT Ford Fusion, finished fifth.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Dish Network Ford Fusion (finished 1st) –
CONGRATULATIONS. A GREAT VICORY FOR YOU OUT THERE TODAY, YOUR THOUGHTS? “I’m very proud to be driving that Ford Fusion today. Ford and Roush Fenway and all engineers, everyone has worked really hard, all of them have worked very hard this winter and it’s paid off. This is the reason we won this race today is because of the preparations. I’m proud to be driving that car right now. It’s a lot of fun.”
IN THEORY WE HAD TWO RACES, YESTERDAY AND TODAY. IS A SHORTER RACE LIKE TODAY A BETTER RACE? SHOULD WE HAVE SHORTER RACES? “I don’t know, to me, personally, part of what makes the sport what it is at this level is that Jack and Ford and Roush Yates engines. The cars have to be able to make it 500 miles. In my mind it’s always been a test of man and machine. I think a lot of the fans respect that. There is a balance; 25-lap features are great, but this is a real test to the vehicle as well.”
DOES THIS GIVE YOU CONFIDENCE THAT THIS WILL BE A SEASON WHERE YOU CAN DO A LOT OF GOOD THINGS? “I really hope so. We have worked very hard. I owe a lot – I owe all of it to Jack, the engineers and Robbie Reiser and Bob [Osborne]. I hope this is a sign of how our season is going to go. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned is that we’ve got to stay on top of it. We’ve got to keep working just as hard as we have. There are very minor differences between the cars that are winning these races and the cars that are running fifth or sixth. We’ve got to just keep on top of it. It’s a great way to start and I hope it keeps going like this.”
WERE YOU BEATEN DOWN AT ALL BY YESTERDAY? “I told my guys that we’ve got them right where we got ’em. This is what we prepared for. The tougher it gets, the more competitive it is. If we had a 55-hour red flag, and we’re still going to go out there and race as hard as possible. That’s what we prepare for. That’s what I prepare for, I enjoy that kind of stuff.”
WHY, A DAY LATER, DO YOU THRIVE ON WHAT YOU JUST SAID AND ABLE TO HAVE SUCCESS? “I don’t think that, I like to think that it didn’t really matter if we raced last night or today, we had a really good car. Our car was great. But that’s part of it, we’ve all had to sit and wait through rain delays. We’ve all had things where anxiety builds up and stuff like that. It’s just adds another variable to it and that’s fun. We’re all competitive people sitting right here and we don’t mind having extra things to have to work for.”
TALK ABOUT THE AERO SIDE OF THIS CAR. “The aero side of the car seemed really good. It seemed like it affected the downforce less and when you’re following someone and the drag more, so you could actually gain a little bit being behind someone. It didn’t stop you from being able to race with them. This is a very good track for racing because you can move around. It might not show up. It might show up worse maybe next week at Vegas, if there is something that is going to show up but I’m really happy with the car right now.”
TALK ABOUT THE BATTLE WITH JIMMIE JOHNSON AT THE END. “It was a lot of fun. Jimmie is always fun to race with; he’s a true racer. To race him and Jeff [Gordon] and Matt Kenseth earlier, these guys are, in my mind, the best in the world. It’s always fun to race them. I was just trying to go wherever Jimmie wasn’t and then he went where I wasn’t. I’m lucky, he was a little bit loose because that would have been really, really tough to get by him if he wasn’t so loose. We were very fortunate there.”
IS TODAY ANY INDICATION THAT ROUSH FENWAY OR ANYBODY ELSE HAS CAUGHT UP WITH HENDRICK WITH THE WAY THEY JUMPED OUT WITH THE COT LAST YEAR? “I hope it’s an indication that we’ve caught up with them. They were still second and third. They were the guys to beat today. I hope that this is a sign that were up to their standards, to their level. I believe we are. I know that last year I would not have traded my car in for one of theirs at any of the COT races towards the end of the year. I thought we had the best car. Everyone knows, all the drivers know, for sure, it’s what you’re sitting in a lot of the times that makes that tiny little bit of difference. I’m proud to be driving this car. I’m proud of what Jack and Bob and all the engineers did last year when we saw how far behind we were. That reaction and the action that came after that is what got us here today.”
BOB OSBORNE AND JACK ROUSH press conference
BOB OSBORNE – crew chief, No. 99 Dish Network Ford Fusion – “I felt track position was a big factor in how well you went around the race track, obviously. You start ninth, 10th in that place, you think in the back of your mind that you’ll be okay, but it was hard passing cars today, and there is a distinct speed difference from the first three cars to the rest of the field last night and all day today. So, track position was very important and we struggled with that a little bit today, and that’s something that we’ve got to work on in the future to be one of the top teams.”
JACK ROUSH – owner, No. 99 Dish Network Ford Fusion – “I’ve had the honor and the privilege in being in more than two decades now in NASCAR Racing, and, of course, a couple of decades preceding that in drag racing and road racing that I did first, I’ve had the honor and privilege to be in the company of really good racers – and the definition of a racer is not in Webster’s Dictionary, it’s a person that wise and competitive and aggressive and conservative and all those things that it takes to make prudent decisions and make the best of your situation competitively on the race track. I’ve never been around better people than I am today.
Bob Osborne is a fantastic engineer. He prepared himself for a professional life in many fields. He happens to decide he wants to be a racer for the time being. In addition to being a racer, he provides a lot of leadership in the engineering application which is so much a part of what we do today. Robbie Reiser is doing a great job in the shop. We’re surrounded by great drivers. Carl is approaching the top of his game, I hope, and we’ll be able to keep him up there for a long time. And Mark Martin certainly set a high standard for guys and Jeff Burton did nice job for a number of years, and I’m just thrilled to have Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle and David Ragan and Jamie McMurray involved with our program. I’ve really got to screw up bad to mess it up for the guys so they can’t do what they want. I tried to last year.
Getting behind on the testing early on when we went to Bristol and we were 2,000 miles behind the other cars in terms of what they’d been doing in not NASCAR sanctioned tests was a surprise and it was all my fault. But they suited up and worked hard and through the year I think caught up, and toward the end of the year, even though luck wasn’t on our side and we didn’t win a number of races we might’ve in the Chase, we certainly had great cars, had great car of today cars for that time and the car of tomorrow was on its way, and they were able to pick up with the tests with what they did at Daytona, and, finally, with the test they did at Fontana here and Las Vegas. We’re going to have a great year. That monkey is not going to ride as high as he did in the past, and we’re going to a great year and Carl is going to be in the front of it.”
IN RETROSPECT, AS FAR BEHIND AS YOU WERE EARLY WITH THE COT, DID THAT HELP YOU ACCELERATE YOUR PROGRAM TO GET BACK UP TO SPEED AS QUICKLY AS YOU DID? “Possibly. The things that we had to do was we had to remain a competitive posture with the car of today, which was more than half the races, and then try to catch up on what other people had been doing in the winter. We weren’t behind where NASCAR wanted us to be. We did exactly what NASCAR said they wanted us to do, tested at their designated tests and had stood down from the other races, feeling that NASCAR was going to take a position that folks were doing that, shouldn’t, aqnd at the 12th hour they stood back from that and said, hey, you guys just do what you want. But at that time I had helped my guys down and we were behind. The fact that we had a good, deep, strong organization and the guys were highly motivated and didn’t all quit on me and have a bad attitude about it, and we all just suited up and did what we could, we couldn’t do what we did in the past, we couldn’t correct that, but we had all the future to deal with. And they made from about the first of May when we really suited and went on the market to find some tires other than Goodyear tires and went to the race tracks that weren’t on NASCAR’s schedule, that we made a Herculean effort, the guys did. And I say that because I went to very few of the tests and those guys, on their back, carried the load and caught up.”
BOB OSBORNE, continued – HOW MUCH SLEEP DID YOUR CREW GET, AND HOW DIFFICULT WAS THIS TURNAROUND? “The crew got seven hours of sleep. We got out of here right around midnight, I think was the timeframe and everybody woke up about 7 and got back here at 8 o’clock. You want to try to have the best preparation possible every time you come to the race track, and that means sleep – seven of hours of sleep, for some people is good enough, but for an athlete you’d like to see him have eight, nine, 10 hours of sleep the night before an event. So, it wasn’t the optimum, but it’s what we have to deal with sometimes with the situations that we get at the race track, and it’s about the guys who step up the most and endure. Any my guys and Jack’s guys and all the guys in the Roush program did a great job with that. The Killer Bees struck again. They had great pit stops. We had good pit stops. We have a lot of young guys, but for the situation they were in this weekend, some of them for the first time, and I was proud to see they didn’t crumble under pressure.”
DID THE FACT THAT THE RACE ENDED IN DAYLIGHT AFTER STARTING AT NIGHT HELP YOU AT ALL? IT SEEMED LIKE THE CAR WAS BETTER TODAY. “Yes, it was a benefit to our race package. With not having a lot of practice this weekend and all the practice that we did have was under cloud cover for the most part, we really had to fall back on our test notes and make decisions based from our test, which was run in the sun, and we really didn’t intend to race yesterday at all. I was surprised when we got on track, based on the weather forecast on Saturday when we had to make all of our decisions. So, I was planning on racing today, really, in the sun and a little bit more heat than yesterday. I was happy to see that the car performed fairly well last night in the cloud cover, but, you’re right, I believe it performed better today than it did yesterday.”
JACK ROUSH, continued – IN THEORY THIS WAS TWO RACES, 87 YESTERDAY AND 163 TODAY. TODAY’S RACE, IN THEORY, IF IT WAS A SHORTER RACE, WAS PRETTY EXCITING. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE SHORTER RACES IN SOME CASES? “Absolutely not. I like to compete with the durability of the car, to have varying weather circumstances, and have the car be adjustable and have the crew chief and the engineers behind it and be able to anticipate the very scenarios and have those in a can and be able to react when the time comes. I especially like racing around the clock, the 24-hour race is one of the most exciting things for me in my career. Because there everybody’s physiology, the diets, all the rhythms that go through that – you can’t keep your adrenaline up for 24 hours, you’ve got to do it based on strategy and just being hard-headed and focused. Those things are a factor in these races, the shorter races, but the more things that we can do to help the driver to really race with the team, and for the crew chief to be able to face off against others for his strategy, the better I like it. The complex it is, the more fun it is for me.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 Carhart Ford Fusion – (finished 5th) “We got the sun today and I felt a little bit better about it. We were just off all weekend. We really didn’t get enough practice time to figure out what we needed to fix. We really struggled with it all day, but we had a great day on pit road and Chip [Bolin, crew chief] made a lot of good adjustments and we tried to get it better and we were able to salvage a good finish.”
IT LOOKED LIKE YOU AND CARL BOTH HAD GOOD HORSEPOWER TODAY. “Yeah, when you run through the corners fast, they run down the straightaways fast. So Doug Yates and those guys always do a great job on engines. That certainly wasn’t a concern of mine at all today. I just couldn’t get through the corners.”
YOU MADE IT UP TO THE FRONT, AND THEN I GUESS YOU GOT A LITTLE LOOSE? “Yeah, we worked our way up there a little bit and the farther toward the front we got, the more clean air we got, the looser the car became. We had a really good pit stop and really drove hard up there. Ryan was on two tires to get our bonus points then after that, we were too loose to hang with the good guys today.”
WHAT WAS IT LIKE GETTING THROUGH THIS WEEK? “I’m glad it’s over. To me, it seems like it was longer than Michigan last year when we raced on a Tuesday or whatever. It was really tough because I wasn’t in a Nationwide car and there was a lot of down time with no practice.”
YOU WERE ONE OF THE BEST PERFORMERS; TELL US WHAT HAPPENED AS THE RACE SETTLED IN? “I think we got a little better, I don’t think we were ever one of the top four or five cars were. The guys did great pit stops and made great adjustments and it’s just about what we had. We had about a fifth- to 10th-place car and they figured out how to bring it home fifth.”
HOW ABOUT THESE FORDS HERE? “They always run good. I like driving a Ford everywhere, so it’s great that Carl [Edwards] won, it’s great for Bob Osborne [No. 99 crew chief] and those guys. They did a great job.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA/Southern California Insurance Ford Fusion (finished 14th) – “It just feels good to get this race in. I feel like our AAA Ford was probably a little better than a 14th-place finish. I thought we had a top-10 car for most of the day, and then track position, we just weren’t in the right place at the right time. There were a lot of guys taking two tires. We could get stretched out long enough, just couldn’t get caught back up. The car was pretty good, and certainly we could make it a little better. But, it’s good to get some points back after Daytona. We’ll just have to move on to Las Vegas.”
ALL OF ROUSH FENWAY RACING RAN PRETTY WELL FOR MOST OF THE DAY. “It just shows that we have put a lot of effort into our Car of Tomorrow program, certainly for this year. We had a pretty successful test out here and in Vegas, so hopefully that will show up. And, like I said, we’ve been working hard because this is the future of Cup racing. It’s good to get a race in out here in California after waiting here for four days.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (finished 15th) – IF THE CHASE IS A MARATHON, WAS THIS THE FIRST MARATHON RACE? “This was a marathon California race, for sure. It felt like the 24 Hours of Daytona or something. We ended up with a 15th-place finish; not where we wanted, but it will be a good start to the season.”
MANY HAVE SAID THAT THIS WILL THE FIRST REAL TEST FOR THE NEW CAR. HOW WOULD YOU GRADE IT? “It went fairly well. I don’t think we did very good, but the car did fairly good.”
YOU WERE QUITE PLEASED WITH YOUR CAR YESTERDAY, SO IS A 15TH-PLACE FINISH A DISAPPOINTMENT? “Oh, yeah. I don’t know what happened. The 99 wasn’t very good last night, he was so-so and we were really good, and then the weather just swapped it.”
THE WEATHER DIFFERENCE FROM LAST NIGHT TO TODAY MADE THAT MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE? “Oh, yeah. It was just hot and sunny, couldn’t get a hold of the track. It was too loose. We just missed it today.”
ROUSH FENWAY RACING DID WELL AS A GROUP TODAY. COULD THAT BE AN INDICATOR OF THE SEASON, OR IS IT TOO EARLY TO TELL? “Too early to tell.
DAVID GILLILAND – No. 38 freecreditreport.com Ford Fusion (finished 17th) – “We’re excited. Our freecreditreport.com Ford Fusion was good all day. It was a challenge after making all the adjustments from last night and then having to take them out for today. But, we’re real, real happy, and I’m real proud of the guys. I thought like we were competitive all day, and that’s important for us. We were never really, really in jeopardy of going a lap down. I’m just real proud of the guys. Our pit stops got much better there at the end, and I think as a whole Yates Racing showed a lot promise today, and that’s what we need to do to get more sponsors.”
COULD THIS TRACK BE USED AS AN INDICATOR FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR? “I’m very happy. Like I said, we were very competitive, we learned a lot. There’s a lot of things that we weren’t exactly 100-percent sure what I needed as a driver, my feel and stuff. We have a lot of options right now on the car, and I think we’re going to put a lot of things in the car to go to Vegas, and I think that’s going to really help us out in Vegas. So, I’m really excited. I thought like our test was actually better at Vegas than it was here at California, so I’m real, real excited and proud of the guys. Cully Barraclough [crew chief] called a great race, and it was just a great day.”
