“Each person is going to have to take on a little bit of extra responsibility for their areas to take a little heat off of Darian who has stepped in as crew chief and allow him to do what is important to the team and that is call the race and set up that race car for Jimmie. That is going to be the task, but I feel that all my guys are mature enough, they have been with me long enough to know what I expect and they will do it without a hitch."
Q.
WHERE YOU YELLING AT THE TV DURING THE RACE.
CHAD KNAUS
"No I wasn't yelling? I wasn't physically kicking the TV. After I thought about it, I probably could have done that but honestly, I was sitting back just watching it. It was getting kind of dark in Charlotte and the lights were off and I was just kind of sitting back in my little TV room watching the race. Just chilling out."
Q.
WAS IT VERY, VERY HARD?
CHAD KNAUS
"It was extremely painful. This team is the most important thing in my life and Jimmie is one of the most important people in my life. That is whether he is driving my race car or we are going out to eat. To see those guys go out and do that was an incredible feat and I loved it for them. But damn, I wanted to be there with them."
Q.
HOW MUCH HAS THIS FUELED YOUR DESIRE TO WIN THE DAYTONA 500 NEXT YEAR?
CHAD KNAUS
"That would be pretty nice wouldn't it? I want it pretty bad. You know we have focused this winter on a car that would race and win the
Daytona 500, not necessarily qualify great. We had a car that qualified really well and had a car that raced incredibly. We followed through with our plan and that was to try and win the Daytona 500. Jimmie had a lot of reality last year with a lot of things that happened to him during restrictor plate races. The badgering he had to deal with and he and I had some long discussions over the winter about how we thought we could go out there and win some of these plate races.
