NASCAR Cup
Atlanta II: Edwards post-race press conference
CARL EDWARDS - No. 99 World Financial Group Taurus (Finished 3rd) "I'm just very fortunate to be in the number 99 car. That's a great car and the team has worked very hard all year to build high downforce cars that handle really well and I'm ...
Published: Nov 2, 2004, 9:09 PM
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CARL EDWARDS - No. 99 World Financial Group Taurus (Finished 3rd)
"I'm just very fortunate to be in the number 99 car. That's a great car and the team has worked very hard all year to build high downforce cars that handle really well and I'm the beneficiary of all that hard work, so I'm just glad to be in it."
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TRUCK AND CUP CAR AT AMS.
"It's a lot different. We tested with our SuperChips truck and you could hold it wide open here pretty easily and our World Financial Group.com car, you definitely couldn't hold it wide open. I told somebody it was an awful lot like dirt racing out there with the way you'd slide around and catch different grooves in the race track. It's just a blast. I love race tracks like this that you can move around on. They get slippery and I think it's a lot of fun."
MINDSET ON THE RESTART BEHIND MARK LATE IN THE RACE? WAS IT TO CHASE HIM FOR THE WIN OR PROTECT HIM AS A TEAMMATE?
"I thought of both things and I decided before the green flag that if he took off and was really fast, I'd do my best - if I wasn't faster than him or I was only a tiny bit faster than him, I wasn't gonna race him really hard. I was gonna let him go because he had the fastest car all day, but we had better tires. When we took off I also thought, 'Man, if my tires stick really well, if we're really fast, I'm gonna go ahead and go as hard as I can.' This 99 team, every week we're racing for our jobs next year. We need a full-time sponsor and winning a race at this time would be good for us."
WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE 8?
"We were just racing very hard. He was on the bottom and he was moving up. I thought, 'He's got to know I'm there. He's got to know I'm there.' I held my ground for as long as I could and then when I realized he was gonna come all the way across the front of my nose, I tried to lift a little bit and run against the wall and I just didn't do it enough. It's just one of those instances where I think he thought he was about six inches farther forward than he was and if he would have been everything would have been fine. You have a couple of options there and with 10 or 15 laps to go I just wanted to race as hard as I could. I wasn't just gonna lift because I thought he was gonna come up. I feel terrible for them. They ran great all day. He's a great guy and it wasn't intentional by any means."
DID IT DAWN ON YOU THAT A WIN WAS POSSIBLE?
"Yeah, it absolutely did, especially on that restart when I was looking at Mark thinking, 'He's got old tires. We've got new tires and we're second.' That was kind of a neat feeling. I never thought in my whole career I'd be that close to a victory in this level of sports, so that's a pretty neat feeling. Hopefully, it's something that happens quite a bit. It was really neat. I think that's the neatest feeling I think I've ever had in a race car."
IF YOU WON WOULD YOU STILL BE DOING BACK FLIPS?
"Absolutely. I definitely would have done a back flip. I'd
probably still be doing them from right here. It would be hard to stop
me. That would be neat."
-ford racing-
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