Q. Chip, you made a decision after a very frustrating year when Dario went to NASCAR to bring him back here. That was a tough year. Did you ever feel like there was no doubt in your mind he could come back and be what he was before, as he has now, or did you have concerns what happened that year was such a downer that it would affect him?
CHIP GANASSI: Yeah, you guys know me well enough to know, I'm not the kind of guy, if we make a mistake, OK, we make a mistake, we move on. If I thought Dario didn't know how to drive, he wouldn't be driving the car, no matter what happened in NASCAR. I knew he knew how to drive. I knew he was the best driver available when that seat became available, and I told him that.
His NASCAR experience, that was like a semester at sea or something that we did. We did it and we're glad we did it but we're glad we're back home, too.
Q. Chip and Mike, there's a lot of major changes in the way the 500 worked out today. Would another change of 10 gallons more fuel have been a help to you guys?
CHIP GANASSI: You can sit there and second guess any race you want. I don't care if you're in NASCAR, IndyCars, Grand-Am, I don't care if you have a fuel switch or you don't. If you have X amount of fuel in your tank, and with that X amount of fuel you can go X amount of laps, just pick a number, you have fuel to go 20 laps, and there is a yellow with 22 to go, you can bet everybody is going to come in and fill up and save fuel till the finish.
I don't understand why you guys don't do a better job of explaining that to the fans. Everybody is like, "We don't like fuel races." There's no way to stop fuel races no matter what you do. There's always going to be that case where there's a yellow right before the exact amount of laps that you need to get full to finish. Everybody keeps trying to put a switch in, take the switch out, have push to pass, all this stuff. It doesn't mean anything. There's always going to be a fuel race. I'm not saying every race is going to be a fuel race, but there's always that incident where there can be guys saving fuel to get to the finish. It's just that simple.
The only way you could legislate that is have everybody stop with 10 laps to go in the race and fill up and say fuel has nothing to do with it so the first part of the race means nothing. You're always going to have that no matter what you do. There's always going to be that instance. Does anybody not understand that? You're always going to have that case, 'cause we never know when people are going to crash. That's one of the things about sports, you don't know the outcome of it. You're always going to have that case. 10 gallons more fuel, yeah, would have helped us today, but maybe last week it wouldn't have.
MIKE HULL: At the point everybody pitted, 10 gallons of fuel wouldn't have made any difference. You still would have had to come back in. We have a 22-gallon cell. What you're saying is should we have a 30-gallon fuel tank. If we had that, lap 60, we all would have made it to the end, yes. We came in over whatever it was, 63 or 64. You're not going to make it. It doesn't matter what clever strategy you employ. If you're full rich and running with your foot flat on the floor at lap 163 at the Indy 500, you're not going to make it.