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Talladega: Carl Edwards NASCAR Sprint Cup Race Quotes - Crashed At The Finish Line
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Claritin Ford Fusion (Finished 24th)
TV INTERVIEW: “First of all, I’ve got to tell my wife and my mom I’m fine. Brad was pushing, he’s doing everything he can. I saw him go high. I went high. He goes low right here and I didn’t realize he got that far, so I went low to block a little bit and he was already there, so I turned around backwards. At this point I’m thinking, ‘Boy, I wish this made out of liquid gel material,’ and then I’m very fortunate we hit the wall in a way it didn’t crush my roll cage down on my neck because that would have been a lot worse. NASCAR just puts us in this box. Brad did a great job. Congrats to him on the win, but they put us in this box and we’ll race like this until we kill somebody and then they’ll change it, but I’m just glad nobody got hurt today. I’m glad the car didn’t go up in the grandstands and hurt somebody. Most of all, I’ve just got to thank Claritin and all my guys. That was the smartest race I could run and I guess we ended up 23rd or something, but Brad did his job. We were just racing hard and we’re lucky nobody got hurt.”
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SO NO ISSUES WITH BRAD’S JOB? “No. That’s what Brad is supposed to do. He’s assuming that I know he’s inside. He was so quick that I didn’t know he was inside. We saw what happened to Regan Smith, you can’t go down below the yellow line or you lose the race, so he’s winning and I was doing everything I could to keep him from winning. I’m glad I’m alright. This (running to the line), I didn’t know if it mattered if I went across the finish line, but I just wanted to finish the race.”
HOW HARD WAS THAT HIT? “It was pretty hard. It was just a little bit scary because I saw the ground and then I couldn’t tell exactly which part of the car I hit the wall with and I was real worried I hit the roll cage and I had to wait a minute to make sure that there wasn’t something stuck in me somewhere or something. That’s a little nerve-wracking to hit the wall with something other than the side of the race car. That’s the first time I’ve flipped in a race car. That’s it, so we got that out of the way.”
RADIO INTERVIEW: “We were just racing for the win. Brad did everything right. He faked high, he went low and I didn’t think he was all the way in there and I tried to block and I got turned, but that’s racing at Talladega. NASCAR puts us in this box and I’m just glad nobody got hurt.”
YOU SEEMED TO RUN A SMART RACE. “It was looking pretty good. It would have been better if I would have gone across the finish line, but we do our best. Like I said, we’re put in this box and we’ve got to race that way. If you looked at how the final four cars were finishing, you had to be pushing the guy in front of you. So they can talk about aggressive driving zones – they can talk about whatever they want – but you aren’t gonna win the race unless you’re pushing a guy all the way around the race track and that’s where we’re at.”
OPEN INTERVIEW? “Brad was doing everything right. He was pushing and that’s what you have to do to win. I knew he was gonna try to get around me, I just didn’t realize how much better his car would be when he broke the plane of my rear bumper, so when I saw him turn down, I immediately started to turn down but he had already come up along my left side a couple inches, a foot maybe, so it turned me when I turned down. I mean, he did everything right. NASCAR puts us in a box. If he drives below the line, he loses the race, so what’s a guy supposed to do? So you end up having to wreck people or having to get second and none of us want to do that.”
WHAT WAS IT LIKE FLIPPING IN THE AIR LIKE THAT? “That’s the first time I’ve flipped a race car. I was a little nervous about where I was gonna end up and then I hit the fence and I never hit the fence with something other than the side of my car. I don’t know exactly which part of my car hit the fence, but I was real nervous that that was the top of the cage and that would have been really, really bad. Hopefully, they can do something somehow to change this style of racing. I just told the people on the network, I guess we’ll do this until somebody gets killed and then we’ll change it, but that’s the way it is.”
IT LOOKED LIKE BRAD WATCHED THE TAPE OF WHAT HAPPENED WITH REGAN AND TONY LAST YEAR. HE PROBABLY WANTED TO GIVE YOU ROOM. “Look, Brad is a great guy. He’s awesome. He’s one of my heroes. He’s a guy who has worked hard to get where he’s at, he can’t give up the win. He’s got to let me turn across his hood. That’s what I’d do to him. It’s what we have to do. I don’t know how I’d change this racing. I know it’s a spectacle for everybody and that’s great and all, but it’s not right to ask all these guys to come out and do this. What if the car goes up in the grandstands and kills 25 people? You know what I mean? At some point, they’ve got to say, ‘Look, we’ve got to change this around a little bit.’”
WILL THIS BE MOMENTUM TO CHANGE THINGS? “I don’t know. I was thinking about that out there. What’s the point? I ran around in the back all day. I didn’t race until the last 30 laps, so what’s the point of the whole event? It’s just a spectacle, that’s cool, I can deal with that, but it shouldn’t be worth points.”
THE TWO-CAR DRAFT WORKED TODAY. DID YOU PLAN THAT? “You aren’t gonna win unless you have somebody pushing you or you’re pushing someone all the way around the race track – I mean 360 degrees around the circle. That’s the box we’re in. That’s what you have to do, so I was extremely grateful Brad was pushing me. That was my only chance to win. I guess if I had to do it over again I’d just move over and let him go and finish fourth, I wouldn’t even try to win because you’re gonna have wrecks like that if you try.”
WERE YOU CONCERNED YOU WERE GOING IN THE GRANDSTANDS? “I saw some fencing at one point and that made me a little bit nervous. I don’t know if I could live with myself if I ended up in the grandstands.”
WHAT ABOUT RUNNING ACROSS THE LINE? “I just felt like I needed to finish the race. That’s too damn close to walk away. And I was very happy not to be hurt.”
IS THIS THE WORST WRECK YOU’VE EVER BEEN IN? “Yeah. That’s about it.”
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – No. 99 Claritin Ford Fusion – WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS. YOU HAD TWO GUYS ON THEIR ROOF THIS WEEKEND, YOU WON A RACE AND YOU LOST ONE RIGHT AT THE END? “This is the hardest place to race that we go to and it’s fast, the car’s handling is not an issue, it doesn’t separate handling. Most places that separates the cars. The cars don’t separate themselves. The only way you go fast is to push. NASCAR talks about the aggressive driving zone being all the way around the race track and everybody saw the same thing today – you see some drivers that push all day and cause multiple wrecks with no sanction and no recourse, and other drivers then when they push and do things that should have been controlled in the earlier stages, then you have something like this occur. The cars are so close. The drivers push trying to get an advantage. What happened to Regan Smith was just terrible last year. He won that race and they decided that he couldn’t pass below the line, even though he was looking at the start-finish line, which was not the way it was in the truck race, but, at any rate, it’s NASCAR’s deal and I think everybody that’s here enjoys being part of it, and when they throw a race at Talladega or Daytona or one of these places that are not our popular places in terms of the team being able to manage the risk, so we come and we race because we have to, but it certainly not what we’d like to do if we had some say about how the race track was configured.”
IS THERE ANYTHING THAT CAN BE DONE TO THESE CARS TO LESSEN WHAT WE SAW TODAY? “The race tracks were build in the fifties and they were built to the aero configuration of the cars and the tires of the fifties and the cars today are way different. If they were building race tracks from scratch today, they would not be configured like this. I’m sure neither Daytona or Talladega would be configured as they are, but they’re such pillars and such anchors to the sport and set such an expectation of the fans, I don’t know if they can ever be changed. Certainly Bill France made it clear he didn’t intend to ever change the configuration of the race tracks, but you go to the restrictor plate, you go in a situation where you have to run wide-open to preserve your momentum and where the advantage of having cars tied together aerodynamically is more of a benefit than anything else you could do to change the performance of your car, so you run stuck together. And if you get separated, you get stuck together again because it’s almost like a magnetism that pulls them together. So then they’re rubbing on one another, they’re pushing, the people that you push – like David Ragan won a race yesterday in the Nationwide Series and he got pushed into winning that race. He didn’t win the race because he was faster. He didn’t win the race because he had a better strategy. He won the race because he got pushed. Carl got wrecked today and he was in a position to win the race because he got pushed and he wrecked because he got pushed. It’s just what we do.”
ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT PEOPLE GETTING KILLED HERE OR SERIOUSLY HURT? “I am worried about hurting somebody on my team, about hurting somebody – and I’m talking about pit road and our crew men and mechanics – I carry a great burden, a great responsibility to keep my people safe and, in a broader sense, I feel a responsibility to do no harm to the spectator public. But this is a high-risk environment here.”
CAN YOU PUT INTO WORDS WHAT YOU FEEL WHEN YOU SEE ONE OF YOUR CARS GO UP IN THE AIR LIKE CARL DID TODAY? “My heart is in my throat until he gets out of the car. The cars are safe from the point of view of the way the roll cages are configured. They’re heavy. The race track is configured that under normal circumstances they anticipate keeping the cars out of the stands and that all worked today. Everything worked the way it was supposed to. We had a horrible wreck. It was real exciting at the end. Nobody got hurt. And I guess there will maybe be some greater interest in watching the next race like this for the fact that somebody else may get caught up in a situation where it looks like they were not gonna win a race, and they win one and that’s a happy thing – like what happened to David Ragan – or they looked like that they would win a race and then in the last one-sixteenth of a mile it all goes under.”
PaddockTalk Perspective
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