Rockingham Dodge post-race quotes

STERLING MARLIN (No. 40 Coors Light Dodge Intrepid R/T)
“We stayed out a long time and got behind. I guess we got up to second or third and stayed out. We hoped it would stay green, but it didn’t. A lot of ‘em got their lap back and got ahead of us. The guys on the Coors Light Dodge team did a good job. We got a little tight, real tight on the last two stops and couldn’t get it to turn. We ran out of brakes with about 30 laps to go. The track changed up today. It was real cloudy yesterday and we were set up for cloudy weather. The track got tight. It usually gets loose when it gets sunny, but we got tight today. We never could get it freed up.
“You’re never satisfied, but not having any brakes for the last 30 laps, I think we did pretty good. We’ll take it. Toward midway in the race, we were running faster than the leaders. We kept starting so far back. We could gain about a tenth a lap, but it wouldn’t really show it. Midway was real good, but we just got too tight and couldn’t turn. We were ready to race yesterday and put it all behind us. We’ll still think about Dale though.
“I think we had a better car than an eighth-place finish. It just got too tight the last 150 laps. We were good early. I thought we had a top three car, but it got so tight I couldn’t drive it. I think we had a good car. We kept adjusting to get it freed up, but we never did enough. We thought we got a mismatched set of tires, but that wasn’t it, and then we ran out of brakes with about 30 laps left. That hurt us a lot.
“Still, we’ve got two top 10 finishes in the first two races. We’ll keep working on it and try to turn those into top five finishes and then give ‘em a run for their money for the checkered flag. We’ll pack up now, go to the house and get ready for Vegas.” STACY COMPTON (No. 92 Kodiak Dodge Intrepid R/T)
“At least we led the race all night long. We broke a motor (piston or rod). I’m not sure exactly what happened. It looked like the bottom end came out of it. We’ve got a couple of little holes in the oil pan. We’ll have to get back tomorrow and look at it and make sure what it was. Chad (crew chief Knaus) did a great job. We kept adjusting on the car and got it better and better. We tried short stopping and figured that would be the way to go. It wasn’t. We made the decision to try it and it didn’t work. We’ve got it in our notebook and we won’t try it next time. It was a good learning day. It wasn’t what we wanted or what we needed. We’ll build on it and go to Vegas and try to improve.”

DAVE BLANEY (No. 93 Amoco Ultimate Dodge Intrepid R/T)
“We had a decent Busch car here a couple of times, but I never had a good Cup race here before today. We had a good car all day. We could hang in there. We didn’t make up much ground the second half of the race, but we just hung in there. The car kept getting a little bit worse in the same area the whole time. We kept changing, but I guess we didn’t keep up with the race track or something. We didn’t quite get it fixed. This is all a handling race track, so you work on that first. We’ve got a good core group going to the track, and our equipment is great. I’m learning more and more, so I’m hoping we can be a top 15 team every week. Any time we get a top 10, we’re going to be happy. We’ll just learn and go from here.”

TIM CULBERTSON (Program Manager, Dodge NASCAR Winston Cup Engineering)
“I thought we did very respectable today. This was our first downforce open motor program. We finished eight out of nine cars and two in the top nine. I think it was pretty respectable. I heard a lot of guys talking about tight. I’m going to investigate that some and see if there is something inherently wrong with the car. Maybe it was just track dependent, but we’ll study that. We beat some real good cars today. We lost to some good cars, but we beat some good cars, so that’s something to hang our hat on. From what I’ve seen here, we’ve got something to work with. We tested good at Las Vegas. It’s more similar to this than Daytona, so I’m very optimistic for Vegas. I’m not disappointed. Considering this is our second race and we finished eight out of nine cars and got two in the top nine, I don’t think there’s anything to be disappointed about. I’m not ecstatic and happy, but I think we definitely have something we can work with. With that, I think we can do nothing but move up.”

WARD BURTON (No. 22 Caterpillar Dodge Intrepid R/T)
“We never got our car handling like it needed to during the race. We thought we were pretty good from what we saw yesterday, but we were junk today. It’s a long drawn out season. Every day away from the shop and away from home just makes it that much longer, but we’ve got a lot of fun races to go to yet. Yesterday the car was turning a little bit better than it did today. I think I was just capable of making it work when the weather was cooler. We changed things a lot of times and every time we changed things, it felt like it tightened the car up. We never could get the nose to turn. It was horrible all day long. It wouldn’t work anywhere. I scraped the wall a little bit, but that didn’t really matter. It just messed up the sheetmetal a little bit.”

BILL ELLIOTT (No. 9 Dodge Dealers Dodge Intrepid R/T)
“Casey (teammate Atwood) was good out there, but our car was tight all day. We struggled since we started. We coulda been better if we had a little more time to adjust on it. The weather change didn’t hurt us. We just weren’t right today. What do you do?”

CASEY ATWOOD (No. 19 Dodge Dealers Dodge Intrepid R/T)
“We were real happy with the race today. We want to make these first four races and earn some points. It’s an educational process. The team and I need to gain some experience together. We want to stay consistent and run really good. I’m real happy. We had a great run at Daytona and a good run here. I’ve been here (eight times) more than I’ve been anywhere, so that helped me a little. I did learn some different lines today that I’ve never run before.
“We’re still ahead in the (rookie) points since Kevin didn’t run at Daytona. The rookies are going to be tough, but we’re going to be tough, too. That’s our main goal for the year.
“The car was OK today. We got behind a little early and couldn’t get our lap back. I couldn’t get on the gas like I wanted to, but we did get better every pit stop.
“I think Vegas is going to be good. We tested out there in January and ran pretty good, but it’s a lot different than here and Daytona.
“I can’t take advantage of Las Vegas. You gotta be 21 to do anything fun out there, so I’m going to have to wait another year.” JOHN ANDRETTI (No. 43 Cheerios Dodge Intrepid R/T)
“We had a decent car, but we didn’t have track position and I couldn’t go as good on greens as I wanted to, but on that one restart, I had a guy underneath me and he went from the bottom lane to the top lane going into the corner and put me in the wall and bent the steering. I couldn’t do anything then. My car was super loose yesterday, so it helped me to be like that. I was still super loose today, but I can’t drive a tight race car. I was better off being loose. Once I hit the wall, I got tight and I couldn’t drive it. We tested at Vegas, but that was our first test with the car. I can’t say we had a good test. We learned a lot of stuff, but we just didn’t go super fast. Hopefully with everything we learned today, we can go back and be a little quicker.”

- Dodge Motorsports