YOUR QUALIFYING LAP WAS MUCH DIFFERENT THAN
YOUR PRACTICE SPEED, CAN YOU TALK ABOUT
THAT?
"When you get as old as I am you can't hold your breath but one time of day and that's basically it. You get the car feeling good and this is the most exciting lap is the best way to put it that you'll make anywhere that we go. I told my son Jason that before he came here this weekend and Mark Martin and I have talked about it all day. This is just a very, very hard lap to make and you have to have a very good race car, one that you can really depend on. It helps to have the horsepower that we have at Robert Yates and I think that's shown up this year as Ricky and I have both been qualifying well. We weren't very good when we got here this morning, but we kept improving on it and making it better and as we made it better I got more confidence. Then, seeing the draw that I had, which was a late draw, that helped a lot and even having an extra hour delay there made it an even better situation for us. We just got the car to where it drove extremely well and I was able to take advantage to all that."
TWO POLES THIS YEAR AFTER NONE LAST YEAR AND WHAT ABOUT THAT STRONG CHEVY SHOWING?
"I don't have an answer as to why we've got two poles other than good race cars and good engines versus last year. We came close a couple of times last year, but we've worked extremely hard -- Doug has in the engine room with his people in providing Ricky and I with extremely good engine. I think that has shown up. Scott Pruett has done a good job and his engines come out of our shop and I think that shows a lot of where our qualifying effort is, but you have to have a good race car. Todd's worked hard. He's had our guys working late nights this week to get this car prepared for this week. I haven't seen a rundown, but I know that the Chevrolet guys are good. Did that help them? I'm sure the change that was made was to help those guys and to help the racing that all of you all keep writing about how bad it is. I really haven't seen that, but you all seem to think it's pretty bad racing. I guess we'll get into that another time, but, hopefully, it's gonna be better and we're gonna see a good race and all the manufacturing squabbles are gonna stop and everybody is gonna be happy so we can just race and put on a good show this weekend."
WHAT IMPROVEMENTS DID YOU MAKE ON THE CAR?
"I was extremely loose the first time that I went out, so we started making adjustments to tighten it up. I was still loose the second time out, we made more adjustments to tighten the car up and then we actually got the car too tight the third time out today so we made some adjustments to go back from there. When I made my bonzai run in practice I knew that the car was a little bit too tight still for a qualifying effort, especially with the late draw that we had, that I was gonna be able to loosen it up. This is a different tire than what we've had here before and we had to do some different things than what we were accustomed to doing, but we had to do what the car was calling for and we were able to hit it right, get a good draw, and get a little bit of a cloud there late this afternoon."
YOUR THOUGHTS ON HAVING EARNHARDT, JR. STARTING NEXT TO YOU?
"I feel fortunate to be starting up next to him. He's done a great job of qualifying and racing. He's just a great race driver. It doesn't matter how young or how little experience we might talk about that he has in these cars, he obviously has a very good feel and likes to go fast. He's gonna be somebody we're gonna have to contend with here on Sunday, there's no doubt in my mind."