“Oh, no—I have to be honest, when I was sliding through the infield and into Carl, I never thought we could finish like this,” McMurray said, referring to his crash with teammate Carl Edwards. “We got a lap down because we waited a little too long to pit that first run, and our car was a little bit too tight, but once we got our lap back I thought we were in good shape because the car drove really well.”
Then McMurray got the smoky party started when David Stremme and Edwards got together coming off Turn 4 on Lap 168, with Edwards’ No. 99 Ford spinning into the infield grass. McMurray spun behind him and ended up hitting Edwards’ car.
“We got caught up in that wreck and it’s amazing sometimes how you can hit the wall with these cars and it knocks the steering out, the toe out and everything,” McMurray said. “And then there’s other times like, when I hit Carl I thought, ‘That’s it, we’re done, this is probably destroyed.’ And it wasn’t even tore up. We came back and the car drove really, really good.”

