Kyle Larson — Winner: “I’ve had a lot of good cars since I’ve come to Hendrick Motorsports. It’s tough to say. But man, that was just great execution all weekend by the team. Practiced good. You’ve got to qualify good; we did that.
Yeah, just had a great car. Thanks to the whole 5 team. They’re the best in the business. We dominate a lot of races but we might not close them all out, so it feels really good to close one out here in this Hendrickcars.com Chevy. … Just a phenomenal car, could kind of manage my stuff and then really pass some cars there at the end.”
Chase Elliott — Finished 2nd: “Really proud of our effort tonight with our LLumar Chevy team. I thought it was a really solid night overall.
Had really nice pace and really thought our car drove really well. I don’t think I could have asked much more out of the car. I think Kyle did a really good job getting through traffic, and that was the difference.
I kind of got hung up and he was able to slice through there, so credit to him and his team. They did a great job. Nice to get a Hendrick one-two and nice to be moving on. Nice to be in the mix. It’s always more fun when it matters and you’re up front.”
Bubba Wallace — Finished 3rd: “I told Bootie (Barker, crew chief) that we are a seventh-to-12th place car, coming in here – and we ended up third. It is still not good enough.
We have to go to work to figure out how we can be two spots better, but all-in-all – best in class in multiple categories. Just appreciate the effort. It stings, running this well when you are not in the playoffs, but it just makes you hungrier for next year.”
Denny Hamlin — Finished 4th: “My aspirations were to win it – but it looked like (Kyle Larson) was better than all of us. Solid car. I thought we were really good towards the middle of the stages, and then at the end, got too loose and couldn’t hang onto what we had.
Overall, top-five day, good stage points – kind of in the mix, just not really as good as we’ve been here the last few times, but overall I want to thank this whole FedEx Toyota team for giving me something I can move on with.”
Christopher Bell — Finished 5th: “The way that the yellows played out in stage two, we did jump the stage, but I think the race was pretty straight forward. I’m happy we got out of here with a top five, but at the same breath, all of us got our butts kicked. The 5 (Kyle Larson) was the class of the field and everyone else was kind of racing to be best of the rest. Good day for our DeWalt Toyota team. Hopefully, we can go to Kansas and have a nice solid day and set us up good for the round of 12.”
Ryan Blaney — Finished 6th: “It was a good night overall. We came from not qualifying great and got up to the top 10 that second stage. I thought we had a really good long run car and the long run at the end was so many laps that we were guarding against blowing a tire, so I just kind of rode around the last 100 laps or so for that run and wound up with a decent finish. It was a good effort from not qualifying well. The speed in our car was pretty decent. It’s something to learn from and nice to go to the next round.”
Ryan Preece — Finished 7th: “We passed cars on the long runs and we needed about 75-100 laps before I could start passing. That’s when everybody would start coming back to me. I’m obviously proud with the gains we’ve been making over the past few months.”
Chase Briscoe — Finished 8th: “Honestly, it wasn’t really stressful. I knew our Rush Truck Centers Ford Mustang Dark Horse was really, really good and even when we had that bad pit stop, we came out 13th or 14th and I felt like I could drive back up there. At the end, probably bled three or four spots just trying to not do anything stupid. It felt like both arms got a Tetanus shot. Overall, it was a great night for us. Hopefully, people will start taking us serious. I truthfully feel like we can battle for the championship, so hopefully tonight proved that. I hate that we had to kind of dig ourselves out of a hole after Atlanta, but hopefully can go on to Kansas and start this next round strong. I feel like we can beat anybody on any given day when we put it together from start to finish. Obviously, tonight we had some hiccups, but we were still able to have a good finish and that’s what this championship run is gonna be all about, so go on to the next one.”
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