CLINT BOWYER, No. 14 Rush/Cummins Ford Mustang – Finished 5th – CLINCHED PLAYOFF SPOT
TO GET INTO THE PLAYOFFS MUST BE GREAT: “Well, winning would be better. There is nothing better than winning. Playoffs are obviously a good thing and you have to be in the playoffs to win a championship. I am looking forward to some of those tracks. I look back at Richmond and I should have won that race. I should have done what I needed to do and moved him that day and went on and won the race and drove off into the sunset. I didn’t and I still think about that. You can understand how important is. You still think about that a race and how easy the rest of our season would have been had I done that. That being said, we are going back to some of those tracks that are really good race tracks for us and they are good opportunities for a win.”
DID YOU HAVE HIGH ANXIETY MOMENTS IN THE CAR TODAY? “I bet you did and you weren’t even in my damn car. You are damn right I did. You knew it going in. You knew it was going to be high anxiety and crazy like that. But you just don’t know where it is going to be coming from. We qualified good but I still knew that was good but I was walking away from my car saying, ‘The worst is yet to happen.’ Literally Mike and I talked before the race and he talked about how if a caution came out around lap 10 it would present an opportunity for somebody and a mishap for somebody else. It presented an opportunity to the 6 car. I didn’t want to give those points up. We were able to get the exact same scenario flipped with the roles reversed on the next stage and got those points back and we got our eight points back to the good there and got a point on the 41, so we were up nine points. I was keeping track. Then the 48 had trouble. I really wasn’t worried about the 48 all day long. It was going to take something catastrophic for him to be able to catch me. The other two we just had to manage. It was a deal where we just managed the day. You could see pretty damn early on that it was going to be a war of attrition and it certainly was.”
“We have 10 races and look at the last three races where they have been single-digit finishes for us. That will get you a round or maybe two and builds confidence and momentum with our race team. That is what it takes. We are doing the right things and putting ourselves in the right situations to capitalize on other peopls mishaps instead of being the one that makes the mishap.”
YOUR TEAM ALMOST GOT ALL FOUR GUYS: “It was super close to getting all four in. Look where Kevin is at right now. A dominant run with him and the 4 car. We have to keep building man. We are working hard and digging and trying to get better. We are by no means the fastest group right now and we know that but we looked pretty damn fast today.”
— Ford Performance —