JACK ROUSH – owner, No. 17 Carhartt Ford Fusion – “It was awesome. The whole team, really, we had run well here, didn’t win the fall race, but we run well here many times and look forward to coming to Fontana. We were really taken aback by how well the Hendrick cars were running throughout practice, particularly the 48 was just awesome. He certainly put a real high mark up there that we had to look at it. As we started the race, I knew that Matt was pretty good because – one of the things about Matt Kenseth, he doesn’t practice as well as a lot of people do, as seen by me. He goes looking for the feel he likes in the car and tries to save the car so he doesn’t put extra wear and tear on it. So, he reminds me of what I heard, and, of course, David Pearson was before my time, but when I first got involved I was around the Wood Brothers, Leonard and Glen, and they would talk about how David, they could never tell how much car they had until it was time for it to count in the race, and Matt’s a little like that. I had a feeling he was going to be a little bit of a surprise to some folks tonight because he had not been up there on the leaderboard in practice, but had said that he wasn’t worried that his car had not gone faster in practice, that he felt that he had what he needed, and it felt like it had before when he was able to win. But the 48 had been really fast, and, of course, as it turned out, the 24 was a really good car as well. Greg Biffle and his 3M Fusion was, in the closing stages, from the indication I saw, it looked like he had the best car. He overshot his pit box there, not really going outside the box, but stopped squarely on the air line, and Greg Erwin made a good call by having him back up; he would’ve been last on the lead lap if they hadn’t backed him up when they did. I’m sure they would’ve had trouble with that air line, getting the right wheel off, with the left-front wheel parked on the air line. So, Greg nissed an opportunity tonight. I know that Carl Edwards was a little disappointed, and David Ragan and Jimmy Fennig will be a little disappointed. Donnie Wingo and Jamie McMurray had a brake problem, that was unfortunate. All of our Fords ran well. As I look at the no-testing program that we’re on and not being able to come to this race track and test, it’s clearly played to the strength to the people that have had success, it’s played to Hendrick’s program, it’s played to Gibbs’ program, with the way that Kyle Busch had run and it played to ours as well.”
THAT’S FIVE STRAIGHT WINS HERE IN THE EARLY RACE AS WELL. “I don’t expect that to continue. We’re hard-pressed to figure out what to do to be more ready. But, my experience is that these things tend to even themselves out, and I just hope that when we have to give back all this success, I’m not here, I’m someplace else.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 Carhartt Ford Fusion – “Just great team, great crew, great, great engines. Just you need everything to go right, really, to win these races. Our car handled really good all day, and we had excellent pit stops. Our fourth one from the end we were a little bit off and I started complaining and then all of sudden they got me three or four spots every stop, so the pit stops were really important to our outcome. Their adjustments were really important. We were a little off, even though we got out in front we run down and passed. I don’t even know what they changed.. Drew and Chip came up with changing a couple of things and got it just good enough at the end. It wasn’t easy, but it was just good enough to hold them off.”
DREW BLICKENSDERFER – crew chief, No. 17 Carhartt Ford Fusion – YOU ARE NOW TWO FOR TWO AS A CUP CREW CHIEF, PLUS YOU WON YOUR FINAL TWO RACES AS A NATIONWIDE CREW CHIEF. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT SOME OF THE STRATEGY HERE TODAY? “I think our car was pretty close from the beginning. He seemed to like it better than he did yesterday. We made our way through the field, but obviously five or six cars, when you’re running in the top 10 are the hardest to pass. Thankfully, if not the, one of the best pit crews on pit road, which catapulted us to the front every single time. Because the track was getting dark, it was getting a lot faster. It wasn’t great for our set-up, we knew we had to start in the middle of the pack, so we kind of changed some things around to make sure we could get to the front, and when our pit crew got us out front, we ran extremely fast, a second and a half faster than we had run all weekend. So, that was a good thing. We had to adjust our car a little bit when we were in clean air to make sure we could run out front. Matt can drive it on the free side and can do the things we need to do to get the win, so I just kept him free and let him go after it.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – WHAT HAS THE 17 TEAM, AND MATT, DONE TO WIN THE FIRST TWO RACES? “Well, Drew has brought magic to the team. His dad was a coach and he played real competitive sports in high school, so he know how to build a team, he knows how to capitalize on the energy within a team and we needed that. We had all the right people with the right skill sets on the team, but we just need somebody to create the magic and Drew has done that. We had the same cars last year, and Matt was the same guy that he was last year – he sure didn’t learn anything over the winter because he didn’t have the chance to drive these cars as much as normal. I’m celebrating with Drew the fact that – he needed a little help with the champagne. I took a little hit in the Victory Circle because I gave him my champagne bottle, which I had all primed. That’s what happened. Drew got me. We’ll credit what we’ve got going for us early here as the Drew factor, and look forward to carrying it forward. But with way that Carl had won and with the way Jamie has been running and the way Greg has won, and way David has been coming, certainly there is an expectation on my part we were going to be fastor in these races until we get to Martinsville, and the guys snuck off to the Little Rock there at Rockingham race track, and that is one of the places where you can go and test a little bit, and we think we even got something for Martinsville that we haven’t had before. So, I’m real optimistic about what’s going to happen in the first handful of races. The idea of winning Daytona under rain circumstance was a surprise. It caught me totally off-guard. Of course, I was afraid it was going to finish under rain and I was hoping it would win, but I certainly didn’t want to read the press and have two rainouts and having one of our guys be the benefactor.”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED – THE LAST 20 LAPS WERE VERY ENTERTAINING. DID YOU THINK JEFF GORDON HAD WHAT HE HAD FOR THOSE LAST 20 LAPS? “I thought he was going to pass. I kind of have a bad habit, I guess, people call me a pessimist, I think I’m more of a realist, but when we took off the run before that we got in the lead and we ran some real fast laps and we left Jeff by 15, 20 car lengths or something like that and in the middle of that run he just ran right by me and took off. Greg would go by me, took off. I couldn’t do any better than that.
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED – “I was doing the best I can. So I don’t even know if they adjusted, but that got us in the front again, which obviously was a big key to it, and we took off. Right away I could feel it was better, but I didn’t think it that much better and I was getting looser as I ran and with as many laps that were left I honestly thought we were going to be too loose at the end and he was going to catch us. I couldn’t get away from him that time and then he got right on my bumper and I thought, ‘I’m about over,’ but I guess they tightened his up a bit and got too tight, and I was able to hang there. These things are real sensitive and they just made the perfect adjustment, and had the perfect pit stop.”
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