For us, I think the most important thing to do is to consider that there are two things that are important here in being at the front at the end of a 500-mile race. One is what Tim referred to in qualifying in the first three rows. Yeah, there have been winners come from there, but the second thing that you're qualifying for in this format is pit selection. If you're 10th, but that time ends up in pit selection putting you 20th in pit selection, you're going to reconsider that situation, because being toward pit out or being away from the drama that's created from pit in to pit center is something that's going to be critical in your decision-making process as you take that qualifying lap or whether you pull out and go again. So unless you're on the front row, unless you're in the first three, four, five, six spots, I think you're going to think about that."
(About possible pole speeds on Saturday) "We learned last year that Buddy Rice surprised us. That's probably a good lesson for non-tow laps during the week. Our guys from that have paid more attention to, these days we've got
guys who specialize in specialized software, and we've got somebody who has worked for us all week long, or up to this point anyway, on non-tow laps. If you did the same, which is easy to do these days with the IRL Timing & Scoring program, if you just use that as a baseline, you'd be surprised at what you may see there. That's probably what you really need to look at as a legitimate answer as to what people might do on Saturday."
(About tyre wear and durability) "In terms of qualifying you would prefer not to make another qualifying attempt on the tires, but what Firestone has done a fantastic job of since we started with Firestone in 1996 really is work on not only durability but not having the performance of the tire degrade through the run. If you watch guys run out here, if you sat out there with a clipboard and watched the tires like the IRL, they monitor the tires every day by bar-coding and scanning what goes on, the performance of the tyre doesn't really come off. We've run our tires, and I'm sure these guys have done the same, over 40 laps, and the performance hasn't really fallen off on the tyres. That is something that they constantly work on. It'd be great if we could just have 35 sets of stickers and do nothing but qualify, but we can't do that here."
