From Ford:CARL EDWARDS WINS AT NASCAR NATIONWIDE RACE IN MILWAUKEE
CARL EDWARDS – No. 60 Save-a-Lot Ford Fusion – (finished 1st, qualified 11th) – TALK ABOUT YOUR RUN. “First of all, a huge thanks to Erik Darnell. I’m sure Drew would say the same. He did a really good job and that was very much appreciated by me. I also have to thank PK [Pierre Kuettel]. We made this crew chief swap this week and I think Drew would also agree with me that PK did almost all the work on this car and got it set up to come here. He’s a huge part of this win. We’re thinking about him. It just feels good to win a race for Save-a-Lot and for our team and for everybody at the shop and all the guys who’ve been working hard and sticking with this program even though we haven’t won a race for a long time. It means a lot to have all that support. This win is a huge relief.”
DREW BLICKENSDERFER – No. 60 crew chief – TALK ABOUT YOUR FIRST NIGHT ON THE PIT BOX WORKING WITH CARL. “Obviously it went pretty well. I’m kind of hating to go to Loudon next week, I might mess something up. At Roush Fenway, we do things in a way that really inspires teams. The 17 team and the 60 team and the 6 and the 16, all of our crew chief offices are within five feet of each other. We all know what everybody else is doing. We all stay in constant communication. We work hand-in-hand with each other’s team. So coming over to the 60 wasn’t anything new. The guys knew who I was; I knew they were. It isn’t like I switched teams. I just went to a different car number, really under the same team, Roush Fenway. It wasn’t difficult at all coming over to work with a guy like Carl, obviously that makes everything a little easier.”
CARL EDWARDS (continued) – WAS THERE REALLY ANY TIME TO ESTABLISH ANY CHEMISTRY WITH DREW TONIGHT OR TODAY AT ALL? “No, we’ve talked for a total of about 10 minutes. We learned a little bit about the way we communicate today. It was a long race with a lot of pit stops and a real chassis race, so we got talk a lot during the race. Jason Hedlesky [spotter] actually joked around one time that we talked for a whole lap under caution and Jason thought that was funny. We’re just getting to know one another and hopefully this is a relationship that continues in this manner for a long, long time and that would be very cool for me.” WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT DREW THAT HE’S ABLE TO COME INTO HIS FIRST RACE WITHOUT ANY TIME WITH YOU AND WIN RIGHT AWAY? “I think it says a lot about Drew and his composure. I mean, he got pretty much called into meeting and told what was going to happen and was very cool that PK and Drew and all the guys on both teams were all okay with all the changes. Everyone kept their heads up and went forward. I think that says a lot about Drew and PK and all the guys that change like this that we can do it without missing a beat.”
CARL EDWARDS (continued) – CAN YOU RUN THROUGH THE CHRONOLOGY? YOU MUST HAVE SEEN EACH OTHER BUT YOU BARELY KNEW EACH OTHER ON TUESDAY OR HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? “Yeah, I was just asking him now exactly how to pronounce his last name. I’ve been calling him ‘Drew’ all week because I didn’t want to mess up his last name.”
DREW BLICKENSDERFER (continued) – “Obviously, we’re around each other by the race and we’re around each other’s teams at the race track. I probably talked today more to Carl than I talked to Matt [Kenseth] in two years. And we got to talk together more today on the radio that we’ve spoken in the whole time that I’ve been at Roush and he’s been at Roush. Today was a pretty important day for us to get it off that way and looking forward to Loudon where he’s actually in the car in practice and we get to find out exactly what loose means and tight means and each other’s lingo.”
CARL EDWARDS (continued) – CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE BATTLE WITH BOWYER, HOW YOU SET THAT UP AND WHAT HAPPENED? “What happened with Clint, I’m not real proud of. I like Clint a lot and I have a lot of respect for him and I just got into him. I dove for the bottom and there wasn’t enough room and I hit him. That’s what happened. When we restarted, he kind of left the bottom opened and I got in there a couple of times and I felt like my car was really good there. When he went into [turn] one, I thought he was going to leave it open and I stuffed a nose down there and hit him. I’m just glad he didn’t wreck.”
IT’S MORE THAT A YEAR SINCE YOU WON. WAS THERE A POINT WHERE IT WAS EATING AT YOU REAL BAD? “Yeah, that’s what we do. I’m a competitor and I want to win more than anything in the world. So, yeah, it’s very frustrating to do all this interviews and they put up the chart and say, ‘Look how great your 2007 season started. Look how terrible it’s been since then.’ Those are terrible graphics that somebody made up that I have to talk about seems like all the time. It’s very nice to get back into victory lane. It’s very good. This is what Jack [Roush] pays me to do and that’s what the sponsors are all counting on and that’s what the whole team works for – to win.”
YOU PASSED ON THE TYPICAL CELEBRATION BECAUSE? “The back flip is something that I do because I’m real excited to win and I feel like doing it when I win. Today, with what happened with Mr. Kalitta and the way I passed Clint, I just didn’t feel like doing a back flip. I felt bad for the fans, they were a little upset about it, but hopefully we’ll come back here next year and we’ll do it again and I’ll give them a really nice one.”
WHAT’S IT LIKE FOR YOU TO HAVE SAVE-A-LOT ON BOARD, NOT A REGULAR SPONSOR AND GET THE WIN? “It’s very good to get the win for Save-a-Lot. I felt like we could have won at Las Vegas and we ended up wrecked there. Then we had a spectacular crash at Talladega with them. I was kind of thinking this white car is not that lucky. I couldn’t believe it when they threw the white flag and I made it all the way around and then the checkered flags. It worked. It happened. That’s very cool. They’re a great company. We’ve had a lot of fun so far. We’re actually going to do a production day there next week and it will be very cool to go to their headquarters in St. Louis on the heals of a win.”
DREW BLICKENSDERFER (continued) – WILL YOU USUALLY WEAR A RACE UNIFORM OR FIRESUIT? DID YOU NOT WEAR ONE BECAUSE OF HOW FAST THINGS CHANGED? “Actually, I don’t. I don’t wear a fire suit. I normally would have a crew shirt on, but yeah, things went fairly fast this week. I kind of went away from wearing a firesuit; the way NASCAR has it know. If you don’t meet minimum speed you gotta go behind the wall and fix it. If I need to go over the wall, there’s big problems. We have very qualified guys, especially on the 60; they’re a full time team. Darrell Morrow is too qualified to be a car chief in the Nationwide Series. He can take care of anything that needs to be done over there. I wore a firesuit changing tires, so I kind of want to stay cool and maybe breathe a little easier without one.”
CARL EDWARDS (continued) – DO YOU THINK THIS WILL AFFECT WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO DO TOMORROW? GETTING TO AND FROM SONOMA? “No, if we can get out of here pretty quick and get a little sleep on the plane, this is what I prepare for. I try to be as physically fit as I can be. Tomorrow’s going to be fun. It’s going to be really hot and pretty strenuous and that’s what I train for. I’m really looking forward to it. As long as Clint is not too mad and I don’t have to race around him, we’ll be all right.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 Discount Tire Ford Fusion – (finished 4th, qualified 13th) – “We just needed a little bit more. The car was pretty decent all night. We were just a little tight through the center and fighting bouncing getting in. For the most part our Discount Tire Ford Fusion pit crew did an awesome job on pit road and we just got to keep working on particulars, top fives are great and top 10s are great but we’ve just got to keep working on the details.” YOUR FIRST TIME IN THE CAR WAS FOR THE RACE AND YOU MOVED FROM THE BACK TO A FOURTH PLACE FINISH. “Yeah, we can practically set them up within pretty close where we can get it close in ten minutes in practice if we needed to every week. And Auggie Vidovich does a good job and Mike and all the Discount Tire team do a good job preparing these cars. Nothing falls off and we have pretty reliable motors every week. It is fun just making laps and getting good finishes but we always want a little bit more.”
MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 59 STP Ford Fusion – (finished 16th, qualified 21st) – “It was a frustrating night. We had a tight race car towards the end and it really hurt us. We made some changes and worked on it during the race, but we were always going to be a little behind [traveling between two races, missing qualifying]. But we’ve got to look at the big picture. We came all this way to keep the points from ticking over and we did that.” YOU STARTED IN THE BACK AND MADE IT INTO 17TH BUT COULDN’T GET MUCH HIGHER. WHY? “We just couldn’t go. It was tight all night. We were getting close there for a while and we were looking in good shape to get close to the top 10. But we couldn’t get it just right and it started to get worse. We hung on at the end and it wasn’t much fun having to work so hard because it was really tight, but while it’s frustrating you’ve got to think that we got a bunch of points, so in that regard we achieved what we came here to do. We’ve got a big day ahead tomorrow in California. The No. 21 Ford Fusion continues to go well. We had a brush with the wall but we got away with it without anything serious. The big deal for us was to get in the race, so now that we are there and we have a fast car it’s going to be a very excited day for everyone at Sonoma tomorrow.”
COLIN BRAUN – No. 16 CitiFinancial Ford Fusion – (finished 21st, qualified 10th) – TALK ABOUT YOUR NIGHT RUNNING IN THE TOP 10 “We just pretty much got wrecked by the 9 there. I don’t know what he was doing or didn’t see me or what. We were well up alongside of him and he just came down, turned into our door of our No.16 CitiFinancial Ford Fusion and spun us around and that was that. We got back out there, it wasn’t too bad, I thought we were still in good shape and tried to pass the 33 on the outside and he turned up into us and wrecked us again. It’s unfortunate that those two guys had to do that and be that way. I guess that’s part of racing and I certainly won’t forget that.” DID YOUR TRUCK RACE HELP IN TONIGHT’S RACE? “Absolutely, it helped a lot. I felt that I knew what the race track was doing a little bit more than if I had never turned a lap here before. That definitely helped me out a lot. I felt a lot more comfortable out there. I think we can make adjustments a little bit easier and a little bit better than what we could of if I had no experience here. It was definitely good. We had a fast car, that’s for sure, I thought we had a car that was competitive enough to run solidly in the top 10 probably in the top five there. It shows we definitely had the speed, I guess we just need to have some luck go our way.”