Quotes from Phoenix
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
Mark Martin, currently 73 points out of first place, and Jeff Gordon, 112 points out of first, chat in the garage at Phoenix International Raceway after NASCAR Sprint Cup Series practice. (Photo Credit: Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)
"I don’t know why everybody tries to cap this thing off and doesn’t just wait and watch. There are still two races to go and still things that can happen." - Mark Martin.
"I really don’t want to finish this season without a win." - Greg Biffle.
"Phoenix, to me, is a short track even though it is one mile in length. It drives like a short track." - Brad Keselowski.
"It’s not freshly paved. It’s not locked down. You’ve got to drive the cars here." - Tony Stewart.
"There are close calls all the time, and it can happen at any time. I get through every race and think, ‘whew, we survived this moment or that moment.’" - Jeff Gordon.
"It’s not really a short track. It’s like a small superspeedway. The straightaways are real long and restarts are really aggressive." - Jeff Burton.
"It’s different from one end to the other, and, therefore, the crew chief can only get one end perfect, it seems, and the other one the driver has to adapt to." - Ryan Newman.
"We are already talking about next season but still feel like we have unfinished business this season." - Denny Hamlin.
"That’s when we knew we needed to start doing some work on our cars. What made it really evident was that we ran 30th. It wasn’t like something happened to put us back there." - Kevin Harvick, recalling the season’s earlier Phoenix race.
"I’ve never felt like I had this track figured out. It seems like we’ve always got a 15th-place car." - Kasey Kahne.
"We can’t say that one race changed everything. Did we close in on Jimmie (Johnson)? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that the whole Chase has changed. We’re going to keep doing what we’ve done every race week: try to win." - Mark Martin.
"There will be one or two guys that really get their cars to get through the center of the corners, and those are the guys that will be racing for the win. That seemed to be what we did when we won there. We beat everybody right down in the middle." - Dale Earnhardt Jr.
"To win here this weekend, I expect that we’ll have to beat the usual suspects. We finished second to Jimmie last fall and third to Mark here in the spring." - Kurt Busch.
"All the Joe Gibbs Racing team drivers won in their hometown, which was pretty cool. Denny (Hamlin) won at Richmond, Joey (Logano) won up at Loudon and I won at Vegas. That’s pretty cool." - Kyle Busch.
"Phoenix is a bit of a challenge. We’ve run in the top 15 here, but I don’t think we have had the car we needed to mess with the frontrunners." - Marcos Ambrose.
"I think our crown-jewel events like the Coca-Cola 600, Daytona 500, Southern 500 and Brickyard 400 should remain the same and make those races the big deals. Then shorten the rest of them to 300 or 400 miles." - Michael Waltrip.
"We’re getting better. It’s clear. For three months we’ve definitely been better." - Scott Speed.