TONY STEWART, DALE EARNHARDT JR., AND DENNY HAMLIN
CHEVROLET NOTES & QUOTES
NASCAR NEXTEL CUP SERIES
BUDWEISER SHOOTOUT POST RACE PRESS CONFERENCE
DAYTONA INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY
TONY STEWART SAID WE WERE PROBABLY GOING TO KILL SOMEBODY OUT THERE. ALSO IT SEEMED LIKE OLD TIMES WITH MICHAEL WALTRIP OUT THERE. "Yeah, Michael gave me some help at times. We talked about it prior to the race. He had a great car in practice and obviously he expects me to run well. Aside from being on different teams, we are still great friends and want to work with each other if the opportunity arises. And it did on occasion. He's got to do what he's got to do for his own team. He did some moves that countered some of mine. It was a lot of fun racing with him. Again, he doesn't really put me in any compromising position. And that's what you like to race against. You like to race against people who know what not to do and what to do when you're racing close.
"If I had my way, we wouldn't be running this package and we wouldn't be running like this, but I don't have my way and it's not my decision. I get paid a lot of money to get in that car. It's not a 500-mile race. That'll totally have a different outlook and perspective from a driver's standpoint and you won't see that type of action from the entire field. You'll see it from some guys because that's just their mentality throughout. But that's just only a select few. When you have a 70-lap race, it's a sprint. Guys are going to race like that. I'm going to race like that. It's the way you have to approach it. If you want a shot at victory, you can't afford to give up spots easily or anything like that. You've got to race every lap as hard as you can go. Tony's got a point. It was dangerous in a couple of spots. It's hard to explain because you have to get real technical about it and most of you haven't drove race cars.
"But when I'm on the race track and I'm on the bottom and there are guys on the outside of me, I don't run as fast as I would by myself. Me and the car on the outside of me are fighting for the same air. When you get two cars together, it raises the ceiling of the air going over them. That slows them down. I've got three guys, two car-lengths apiece behind me. They all of a sudden can run up on me real easily because I'm choking my car for air. So if this guy gets behind me and he's pushing through the corner. The guy catches him and pushes him and so on. I'm starting to get turned sideways. The guy behind me starts lifting, but the other two don't know that's going on and they're still driving through the corner and we're all going through there crashing. It happened a lot of times tonight. I don't know how you fix it. I don't think you'll see it a lot except for in the Shootout. You'll have a couple of guys that don't understand what's happening and they don't know any better and they'll just drive right through it. For the most part, the drivers won't race that hard and risk crashing every lap. But the Shootout you can. Those cars are pretty safe. I don't want to try them out. You've got a lot of young guys in there that haven't been in the sport that long and they're climbing in these cars with all this safety equipment and they don't remember when they didn't have headrests and things like that. So to them, there's no way you could ever get hurt. That's what I thought when I first got in a race car was how could you get hurt? It has a little bit to do with the package. It has a lot to do with drivers driving like that and we're all guilty. It will not be like that in the 500. Everybody will be a lot more calm."
