While Chase contenders Kurt Busch, Jimmie Johnson and Carl Edwards had strong performances Sunday at Dover International Speedway, some of the other Chase contenders were left to wonder what could have been at the “Monster Mile.”
NASCAR Chase Contenders Sound Off On Dover International Speedway Results
Matt Kenseth (finished 5th):
I can only drive this car. We can only work on this car and can’t control what anybody else does. We had a pretty solid day today. We were able to lead a little bit. There were times in the race when we were pretty dominant. We didn’t have our worst run at the end and were able to drive back to fifth. My guys did a good job on pit road, so we’ll just keep working on it.
I was hoping for a little better (finish) at times, but it’s important. As good as everybody is these days and as equal as everybody is, it’s important to get a good finish every week. Then you have some of these tracks that you feel are your best, you need to be in the top five to be able to stay in the hunt.
Kyle Busch (finished 6th):
It’s hard to put it in perspective that we feel good about a sixth. You know, we came out of the pits there the last stop and were fourth and got up to third and I felt like if the car would just stay where it had been all day – just a little bit tight – we would have been able to hold those guys off. But we went so loose. We have no idea why it went that loose.
I was just barely hanging on the last 30 laps of the race. Lucky to come out of here with a sixth. It’s better that we got there than we fell further back.
Denny Hamlin (finished 18th):
We were pretty much tight all day, just couldn’t really get a feel for it. No matter what we did, really it stayed tight all day. We kind of didn’t have that good of a car today.
We couldn’t get to the throttle on exit because of it. With this racetrack, you really have to be able to put the power down and on this one we just couldn’t. Our front end wouldn’t hold it.
Ryan Newman (finished 23rd):
We just didn’t have it right all weekend. We didn’t have any grip, which caused us to have poor track position all day. We tried a number of adjustments and pit strategies but nothing seemed to work in our favor. We have to put this weekend behind us and move on.
Our Army Strong soldiers fight adversity every day and they expect no less from their team. We won’t let them down. We’re a much better team than where we finished today.
Tony Stewart (finished 25th):
Even when we got the balance half-way decent it didn’t have speed. So we just missed it.
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