Q Jeff, congratulations on a strong finish. You had a strong finish last night in the Nationwide Series. Your thoughts now as you build towards 2010.
JEFF BURTON: Certainly we’re happy with what we did tonight. We weren’t ecstatic about what we did; Denny and those guys did a little better job than what we did at the end. Just a little too loose, but I think that’s a little bit of me and Todd getting to know each other a little bit better. Again, we’re playing catch-up. We’re not 100 percent sure what we need to be doing to the cars, and the speed that we have right now we’re not 100 percent accustomed to it. So we’ve got to get familiar with it and understand what we need to do with our cars, and that’s as much about me telling him what I want as much as anything.
Hopefully we can continue to improve this winter because I know a lot of our competition is, and we can come out and be strong next year.
Q. Jeff, I think it was you, somebody at RCR said a while back that you guys built your cars to start the season and realized that you had gone in the wrong direction with them, and basically had to rebuild a fleet. You’ve now finished second two weeks in a row and three top 5s in the last four weeks. Was it simply a matter of you had the cars wrong and getting them right, or are you guys feeling like you’re back to where you need to be?
JEFF BURTON: Well, I think it’s more than that. I think obviously you’ve got to bring good hardware to the racetrack, and we did push the wrong buttons this winter and played catch-up obviously. With Todd coming on board, we’ve gotten together pretty quickly and had fast race cars pretty much all four weekends, and that’s certainly—we’ve put a different group of people together, a real strong group of people, and I think that’s helped us, as well.
So I think we’ve gotten—we’re certainly gotten better cars, but also I think we’ve done a nice job of putting together a really, really strong race team.
Q. Jeff, I know it’s a little early to look ahead, but you take an effort like this, and are you already thinking about what you have to work on in the off-season, what you have to do with these cars? I mean, do you feel encouraged coming out of this?
JEFF BURTON: Well, I certainly think that all of us at RCR are encouraged. I think it’s important to understand that we’re not where we need to be, and if we were, one of us would be over there where Denny is right now.
You know, we’ve made up a lot of ground, but I think it’s—we can’t take the approach going into next year that we’ve got it, you know what I mean, okay, we’ve got it figured out, because I guarantee to that our competition will be working really hard to be better, and if we bring the same stuff that we have here today to California, we won’t run very well.
So we’ve got to find a way to continue to improve, which is what we didn’t do last year, and we have to be on full alert to not let that happen again. I think we made a lot of mistakes last year that we can learn from going into this coming year, and hopefully we don’t make those same mistakes again. I don’t think we will. I think that we’ll be much smarter and do the right things.
But certainly I think all of us are fairly encouraged.
Q Certainly, Kevin, good way that you finished up here this evening. Your thoughts about tonight’s race.
KEVIN HARVICK: Yeah, it was a good night for us. Obviously like Jeff said, we wanted to win the race. We got off a couple runs there in the middle of the race with a flat right front tire and over-adjusted it for the second run and kind of lost some track position.
But good weekend. It’s been a good last several months. Really since Sears Point, I think the cars have shown the speed that they needed to. We’ve crashed a lot and made a lot of mistakes from all angles to kind of screw that up when we had good cars, so from the driver’s seat, from a lot of different angles. But the speed has been there, and now we just need to get the consistency back and do the things we’ve always been known for as a company, and that’s being consistent and making decent days out of bad days.
You know, happy with the turnaround, and we’ll go forward.
Q. Gary just asked this to Jeff and I’m going to ask you, Kevin, we’ve seen teams have momentum at the end of seasons and not carry it over to the following season. We saw that with Carl last year; he won two out of the last three races and didn’t really carry it over. What changes do you need to make sure that you carry this momentum over to 2010 and keep this going? I also have a question for Jeff. Just wanted to clarify your contract. Are you in the same boat with Kevin that you’re up at the end of 2010, or are you signed for a couple more years?
KEVIN HARVICK: The biggest thing is we just can’t sit on our hands. We have to push forward. You have to figure stuff out. We figured a lot of stuff out in a short amount of time while we’re still trying to race, and that’s hard.
I would assume that they have a good plan going into the off-season as far as the things that we need to work on. And the biggest thing when it comes down to it is depth of your cars and your fleet. We’ve been building these cars, and we don’t have a lot of them, and we’ve figured some stuff out suspension-wise, so we’ve just got to keep pushing forward, and you’ve got to get ahead, and once you get ahead, you can’t stop, you’ve got to keep pushing.
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