Quotable: NASCAR Drivers Talk About Sunday’s Phoenix International Raceway Results

The following are some selected quotes from NASCAR Sprint Cup Series drivers following Sunday’s race at Phoenix International Raceway (if you landed here looking for the NASCAR Phoenix results, click here).

Kasey Kahne (won): “It’s tough...(Red Bull) is shutting down in eight days. Over the last three months, you have one of the top-five cars in NASCAR, (and it’s) shutting down. That’s crazy.”

Carl Edwards (finished second, leads point standings by three): “I can say completely truthfully this is the best Chase we’ve ever had. We haven’t gone out and got the trophies that we have in other Chases, but we’ve performed better than we ever have. If they’re beating us, they’re beating us at our best, and I think that’s pretty neat.”

Tony Stewart (finished third, trails Edwards by three points): “We both had to fight and fight and fight to get every point we can up to this point. I think it makes it more gratifying, the results, at the end of the day. I feel like I’m working toward something and I feel like if we accomplish this, we have worked for it – not had it handed to us.”

Jeff Burton (finished fourth): “We got really tight there at the end and (Tony Stewart) had a lot of momentum. I didn’t slam into him or anything, but I wasn’t going to give him the spot. He earned it and he got it.”

AJ Allmendinger (finished sixth): “(We switched pit crews with David Ragan because) we were bad. We were losing four or five spots on a stop. You can’t do that and win a race, and those (No. 6 crew) guys are pretty good. They did a good job.”

David Reutimann (finished seventh): “This team is capable of racing like this all the time, but for one reason or another, we just haven’t shown it much this year.”

Denny Hamlin (finished 12th): “Nobody could pass anyone, so it was really, really difficult from that aspect. We did the best we could with what we had. We just missed the setup pretty bad today.”

Brad Keselowski (finished 18th): “The track was really, really good, actually. I don’t see how anyone can complain about the track. It was a great race. It was a lot of fun, just disappointed we didn’t close it out.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. (finished 24th): “We changed the whole setup last night. We put (Tony Stewart’s) setup in – we didn’t even practice it, and we missed it. We didn’t hit it. The car was laying all over the racetrack. We just spent all day long trying to fix that.”

Jeff Gordon (finished 32nd): “The corners are not bad, but that dogleg in the back is ridiculous. It’s almost dangerous. I’m not a fan of that. But I think they are going to have a really nice racetrack here. The surface I liked as it moved into a wider groove.”

Kyle Busch (finished 36th): “(The track) is slick. Man, you’re on tiptoes all the time. It’s very tough, but some of us make it look easy – but it might be because we’re all considered the best in the business.”