Juan Pablo Montoya said when he first came to NASCAR he could have asked you guys anything and you would have helped him, and now you don't help him as much, and he considers that a compliment. Can you talk about how you've seen, over the last few years, his team and really him as a driver and what he did today?
CARL EDWARDS: He's done a great job. He is a very fierce competitor, and he is fast enough that nobody is going to help him out. He did a really good job today, and he did a good job not only of driving the racecar, but he raced me really clean when we really had to battle for the lead right there after I came out of the pits, and I got by him on the outside. He got really loose but then gave me enough room and corrected his car. I've really enjoyed racing with him lately.
Jack, over the years with your championships, the mile-and-a-half tracks, the two-mile tracks, this has been your bread and butter. You have done it all. Does this build confidence for you, your team, Carl Edwards, everybody else involved, that you're ready to take charge, and this is your season, winning this race?
JACK ROUSH: Well, there were a lot of good cars out there. Tony certainly surprised me a little bit. I didn't realize he was as good as he turned out to be in practice, and, of course, the 42 car [Montoya] was really good. But the thing I worried about was the fact that we had been so good at mile-and-a-half racetracks, we assumed we'd be a factor there, and we'd concentrated in the winter on spending more time on speedway cars than we ever have and trying to test where we could for the short tracks, and I was afraid that the luster would be off for mile-and-a-halfs as we came to Las Vegas, and that's the reason I cautioned Carl. We ran great at Phoenix, but don't assume this necessarily means we can keep what we had going for us last year. But based on the way we qualified, it looks like it's still there.
You look at the way you spend your time as a race team doing your testing, you've got to work with your athletes to get your pit crew right, get your pit stops right, you've got to work with your brakes, you've got to work with your engine, you've got to work with your cooling system and your aero and your kinematic routines, and in today's world your software, your simulations and all your data acquisition or data reduction and analysis things. And, if you have any of those things that let you down, it'll affect you dramatically.
As we've concentrated on the things that we were weak on, it's been my fear that we would miss something that we assumed we were good at, and I feel more confident going back to Atlanta and to the other mile-and-a-half tracks than I did since we didn't have such good qualifying result with four of our Fords being up front.
Jack, can you talk about what Greg Biffle said over the radio, that they were trying to come up with a device that would help you guys with fuel?
JACK ROUSH: I didn't hear what Greg said. We'll have plenty of time to talk about it. He was frustrated with the fact that they apparently didn't get it full of gas. But there's a big challenge for the teams. This new fuel system is really a problem. It doesn't fill consistently from the bottom of the tank – or of the can to the top. We can get the first gallon or two of fuel out of the cans, two gallons in a second, and I'm not sure, but it's probably twice that long to get the last two gallons out.
And so for the gas man, for the crew chief, for the jack man, for everybody who's got to have a finger in this thing there is a learning curve that's not perfect. You need to know what your fuel mileage is before you have a reason to understand what it is. You need to be able to guess correctly about it, and my guess is that we didn't get the 16 car's gas tank full, and either it had something to do with the exchange on the cans or maybe the jack man let the car down too early. But either way we had some kind of a disconnect there that jeopardized Greg's result.
Early in the race, the 99 was obviously a good Ford, but early in the race the 16 looked like it was every bit the measure of it. Greg was really frustrated. But we'll get all that calmed down and we'll look at what happened there and look at the things going right with Carl's program, and we'll try to put it all together.
But as Bob said, it takes us longer to exchange the cans, and we weren't as slick as we should have been with our fueling operation even though we had a good result today.
Are you guys trying to come up with a device that will let you know how much fuel actually gets into the tank, or has this come up with NASCAR at all – just something so you'll know, since there's still this big unknown out there?
JACK ROUSH: I'm sure it's Bob's intention to comply with both the spirit and the written things that are involved the rules, and within the guidelines and within the parameters they've given us we'll work as hard as we can.