NASCAR Cup
Preseason Thunder: GM - Johnson/Knaus quotes
JIMMIE JOHNSON, NO. 48 CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO, crashed at the beginning of the morning test segment today. The team will continue to test with the second car, but will not participate in the afternoon drafting session. "It's really hard to spin ...
Published: Jan 16, 2004, 4:02 PM
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JIMMIE JOHNSON, NO. 48 CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO, crashed at the beginning of the morning test segment today. The team will continue to test with the second car, but will not participate in the afternoon drafting session.
"It's really hard to spin a car out - especially by yourself here. And before I turned off the wall into the turn on my warm-up lap - I wasn't even up to speed yet - the car was backwards before I entered Turn 3. We're not really sure yet if it was water (on the track) or if there is some oil down or something but without a doubt there is something on the track that knocked out our good race car.
"If you look back there, there are shadows on the track. It's been a pretty wet morning. Maybe the track is just wet, especially in the shadows. We run the top all the way around here on the first two laps basically and maybe it was still wet up there. Without a doubt there was something on the track. Casey (Mears) had troubles and we were the car right behind him. So he went through and almost crashed and unfortunately I came through and did.
"You just don't spin out here. You just don't do it, especially in qualifying trim. I'm bummed out for the guys. That was our primary race car and we were just trying to work on a couple more little things and take it home. We were going to quit early today and take it home and clean it up for the race. But unfortunately now we have to go to the backup car. I don't know if Chad (Knaus, crew chief) is going to want to keep testing, but I definitely know that drafting practice will be out for us."
CHAD KNAUS , CREW CHIEF, NO. 48 CHEVROLET MONTE CALRLO:
"Our second car is actually the one we ran at the Bud Shootout last year and we almost won that race. It won't be as fast as the first car because it's not in qualifying trim but it's only about a half a second off. So we're going to take some stuff out of the '1' car and put them in the Shootout car and test with it a little more today. We'll check out the (crashed) car when we get back to the shop and find out how bad it is then. So we really don't know yet. We might bring the Shootout car back as the 500 car. We don't have any 'bad' or 'backup' cars in our shop, really. They're all good cars (grin)".
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