Kyle Larson, driver of the No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, on going to Bristol: “I’ll be interested to see how the tire wear is this weekend. We had a pit road penalty, restarted from the rear and still managed tire wear to battle back for a top five earlier this year. I really enjoy this track and this race under the lights, so I am looking forward to Saturday night.”
Chase Elliott, driver of the No. 9 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, on heading to Bristol Motor Speedway this weekend: “I’m super curious because I don’t really know what to expect, right? The spring race was such an oddball from what we had, had. But it really sounds like that people, the higher ups, want that again, that the fans really enjoyed that. And it seemed like, from what I heard at least, they went and had a tire test there here in the last few weeks, and they were trying to recreate that same environment of tire fall off and life and so on and so forth. So, if you throw that into the mix and they successfully achieve that chaos again, that’s going to be pretty nuts, right? Especially this time of year. And truthfully, with this date being moved back another month or so, you could get cool enough temperatures on a Saturday night to maybe achieve that. So, I’m really curious. But like I’ve always said, I think you give teams a second try at something and, you know, if you just take away everything and it was the exact same as it was in the spring, I’d say it probably wouldn’t quite be as chaotic because it’s a second try.”
William Byron, driver of the No. 24 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, on his experience of racing at Bristol Motor Speedway: “I don’t really feel like we’ve ever been the dominant car there. So that’s the goal; try to inch up on that and figure out what we need to be more competitive at Bristol. We’ve had some really good runs, like top threes, but never like leading laps. So yeah, I think going to Bristol, there’s definitely going to be a lot of studying this week to figure out what it is that we need to be a little bit better yet. And then you have the tire, so you’re not really sure what that’s going to do. For us, it would be nice to be under less pressure going there and hopefully have a larger buffer but we can’t change that now. The spring was just a fluke situation. We got put into the wall there and broke the toe link. That was tough. But yeah, I think we’re usually pretty solid there. We’re usually like a top-10 car, we just have to figure out what it takes to have winning speed.”
Alex Bowman, driver of the No. 48 Ally Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, on Bristol Motor Speedway: “It would certainly mean a lot to visit victory lane there. Being 41 (points) good on the (Round of 12) cutline is certainly better than being on the other side of it. Myself and our Ally Racing team just need to get there (Bristol Motor Speedway) and execute and do our jobs. I think we all have this big question mark going into the weekend on what the tire is going to do and if it’s going to look like it did in the spring. That was such a crazy race. I would expect the same again since we haven’t changed anything, but I think we all wonder how that happened in the first place. It will be interesting and with the extra practice and maybe we’ll have more of a heads up on what’s going to happen. I think our No. 48 team is sitting in a good spot.”
