Auto Club 500 - Ford Post-Race Quotes

MATT KENSETH PRESS CONFERENCE -Okay, this is way too long. I'm going to do some selective editing. Okay, this is still to long. I'm removing more. Matt can be quite the little chatterbug when he's in a good mood. See link at botttom if you want to read the whole thing!

YOU FLEW THROUGH THE INFIELD LAST WEEK AND IT WASN’T WHAT YOU WANTED. HOW GRATIFYING TO WIN TODAY? “I got to fly through the infield again, but it was after the race this week (laughter). Sometimes it feels like there is justice in the world, so that feels good because I felt last week we had a car that could have won. Usually I go away from the plate stuff and don’t feel like I’m very good at it and usually aren’t in position to win and we had a real fast car and felt like we did all the right things last week and I thought we were gonna be in position to win, so it was disappointing although we still got a good finish — better than it could have been. We could have finished last and somebody could have hit me. Last week was last week."

THE 48 LAID BACK ON THE RESTART. WERE YOU WORRIED? “That’s always real concerning. NASCAR, you can’t blame the guy in second for doing it, but they try to make a rule on you’re not supposed to lay back more than a car length, but it’s real inviting to do so. If you can get a run on the leader. If he would have gotten up along side me he very well could have beat me. It’s hard to get anything done in two laps, so I saw him holding back and I saw him getting a run on me and I actually waited until I was 10 or 15 feet past the restart point until he slowed his momentum up before I got in the gas. I just tried to watch him to make sure we sort of took off at the same time. If I would have taken off right at the point he had a run on me, he was probably already going three or four or five miles an hour faster than me and that would have put him up alongside of me getting into one. That certainly is something you’ve got to watch and also all day we’ve been restarting on new tires, so restarting on used tires it’s easy to spin the tires and we did spin the tires just a little bit. So that’s the most nerve-wracking part. If you can get through one and two and you’re still a full car ahead, you feel a little bit better about it.”

ANY COMMENT ON QUALIFYING LIKE POINTS FOR WINNING THE POLE? “Heck no. Are you crazy? (laughing). No points for poles. I loved the impound thing. I thought that was a great thing, even though in the big scheme of things it probably didn’t save a lot of money, but it still probably had to save a little bit of money in tires and whatever. I like coming to the race track and working on race setup. I think today is the day that pays all the money. They’re 500-mile races and if you have the best car, you should be able to start anywhere in the field and get to the front in 500 miles. If you can’t, then there either have been no cautions or you’ve probably done something wrong. I don’t like to handicap us and qualify that bad, and our qualifying has been a lot better except for Friday, but we just totally missed it. We worked on our race setup most of the time and tried to do a bunch of stuff to qualify and I gave them the wrong feedback and loosened the car up way too much and couldn’t go anywhere. But even on the non-impounds last year our qualifying has been a little bit better with this rules package and we certainly try hard to qualify, but with the new testing policy and stuff we try harder to race. When we go to the race track every week, we’re gonna go to the race track every week in race trim and make the car drive good for Sunday before we worry about our starting position.”

WHAT DID YOU AND TONY SAY TO EACH OTHER YESTERDAY AND WILL HE SHOW UP AT YOUR DAD’ S TRACK IN MADISON LATER THIS YEAR? “I hope so for my dad’s sake (laughing). I don’t really want to get into too much of what happened last week, but we did have a talk yesterday and I think we understand each other better after we talked. Everything is gonna be fine on the track. As you saw today we passed each other two or three times and gave each other room and did everything just like we did every other race before last week. It’s water under the bridge and this was a much better week for us.”

WHAT DID YOU THINK WHEN TONY’S ENGINE WENT AND CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE EMPTY SEATS? “I don’t think I should touch that one. I really loved Rockingham, so you’re asking the wrong person about that. I love coming to California, but when we went to Rockingham it’s just an awesome race track. You could really race there like we used to race — spinning the tires and short track type racing. It was like a week off after being in Daytona for two weeks. I love this place, but I loved going there too. I have no idea on the rest of it.”

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE OFF WEEK? “I don’t know what I’m gonna do this weekend. I have something to do a week from Monday and this week for the off week I’ve been trying to do some flight training and learn how to fly, so I’m gonna go to school to get my multi-engine rating — hopefully get it — so I’m going to school Tuesday through Friday and that’s basically my plan for the off week. My training is gonna be in a Piper Seminole to get my multi-engine rating.”

Read ROBBIE REISER and JACK ROUSH comments here.