#10- Patrick, #11-Hamlin, #13-Mears, #16-Biffle, #26-Burton and #46-Annett were involved in a multi-car accident during Wednesday’s first Daytona 500 practice session. Patrick, Annett and Burton will go to back-up cars and start at the rear of the field in Thursday’s Budweiser Duels. Hamlin, Mears and Biffle sustained minor damage to their cars. Some quotes:
#10-Danica Patrick’s comments:
Q) WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE ACCIDENT?
Patrick: “It’s unfortunate. I know it was a car. I know it was a good coming from the shop. And with this new format that we have with qualifying and the race and everything, we knew we were going to have to race hard through the Duels anyway. That’s not going to change. It just makes extra work for everybody having to get everything ready with the other car. Hopefully we’ll get out soon and we’ll go make sure everything is all right and we’ll make sure it’s good on time.”
Q) WE JUST SAW YOUR BACK-UP CAR COMING OUT IN THE GARAGE. HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE BEFORE WE SEE YOU BACK OUT ON THE TRACK?
Patrick: “That’s a good question. Hopefully we get out by the end of second practice. If not, we didn’t plan on running tomorrow, but I would imagine that would mean we might run tomorrow. But hopefully we should get out here in the second practice and we’ll have 40 minutes to make sure everything is okay. We probably won’t get through our list of things that we wanted to try to make sure on single car runs that we were getting the most speed out of it. But, at the end of the day when you’re in a pack, you see cars with damage all over the place and they manage to hang on just fine. So, we’ve just got to make sure everything is okay to roll for tomorrow.”
Q) WHAT HAPPENED? ARE YOU OKAY?
Patrick: “I’m fine. I’m obviously disappointed and I know that it was a good car and it’s never a good thing to crash. But, I was just riding along and it turned, so it’s the nature of pack racing and that’s what makes it challenging, too. Sometimes there’s not much you can do about it. I could have collected more people and it wouldn’t have been anything that they were a part of. But that’s just group racing at Daytona. That’s the gamble that we all face. That’s what makes it exciting and very frustrating. So, we knew we were going to have to run hard in the Duels no matter what, and that just doesn’t change.”
Q) DENNY HAMLIN KIND OF TOOK RESPONSIBILITY. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR CHANCE OF GETTING IN THE DAYTONA 500
Patrick: “I was following the #6 (Trevor Bayne). He (Hamlin) pulled out in front of me in our lane out of (Turn) 2; I was riding behind him and the car sort of started turning toward the right and the back end was coming around and then it swapped ends. So, it just looked like he was trying to pull out and make a third lane in the middle and it felt like it mush have caught my bumper.”(Team Chevy)
#11-Denny Hamlin’s comments:
Q) How aggressive were drivers in practice?
Hamlin: “People say in practice that you can’t make aggressive moves, but we also have to put ourselves in decent positions where we’re going to have to figure out what our car is doing. I went through the middle and it was really wide – it just closed as soon as I had already got inside of her (Danica Patrick) and the lane closed. It knocked me into the 13 (Casey Mears) and we had some attrition after that.”
Q) How much damage was sustained to your Camry?
Hamlin: “It’s nothing that we have to go to a backup car for, but it messed up other cars. That’s the tough part about it. You always have to give a little bit extra room in practice. There’s typically not a whole lot of blocking in practice and things like that – that you’ll see in the race. Also, you do have to go three-wide in those situations because you have to figure out what your car is going to do. That’s just a miscalculation one way or another on one of our parts. Unfortunately some cars got torn up.”(Toyota Racing)
#16-Greg Biffle’s comments;
Q) WHAT DID YOU SEE WHEN THAT WRECK WAS HAPPENING IN FRONT OF YOU?
Biffle: “That wreck wasn’t in front of me, it was all over me. It was in front of me, behind me, beside me, and then I got hit in the left-rear. I thought the wreck was done and I still got hit. It scared the death out of me because I already wrecked once pretty good and I don’t want to wreck again.”
Q) HOW DO YOU APPROACH THESE PRACTICE SESSIONS?
Biffle: “We feel good about the way our car drafts and does all that, so we’re pretty much done with all that. We’re just gonna work on single car speed. It looks like we’re off two or three tenths on speed compared to the fast cars, so we’re gonna work hard and diligently to see if we can find that little bit of speed left in our Fusion.”
Q) HOW EXTENSIVE IS THE DAMAGE FROM THE WRECK?
Biffle: “It’s very light, just some left-rear bumper cover damage, so it’s pretty light.”(Ford Racing)(2-19-2015)
