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Notes and Quotes from Daytona

Jeff Gordon was asked several questions about his new teammate, Dale
Earnhardt, Jr. Does he think the pressure will be on Earnhardt to win a
championship? “Isn’t that why he’s here? I thought that’s why he came
to Hendrick. I don’t think he came to Hendrick to think oh boy, the
pressure will be off me; I won’t have anybody looking at me and having
expectations on me any more. He’s at one of the best organizations
that’s synonymous with championships. It just won back-to-back
championships. And the pressure has never been higher on him in my
opinion. Everybody is waiting to see. They’re going okay; here’s his
time. He’s in one of the best cars and with one of the best teams out
there. Now he’s really going to show what he’s capable of. And I think
he’s going to have a great year. In this sport, if you don’t have the
team behind you, I don’t care how good of a driver you are, you’re not
going to stand out. You’re not going to do anything over the top for
excitement. And that holds true for (Tony) Stewart, (Matt) Kenseth,
Jimmie (Johnson) and for me. The one thing I think is in common is that
all these guys is they are with good organizations and good teams. But,
do they bring something to the table that makes that team even excel
more? Yeah, I think they do. And I think this is going to be the real
test of whether Junior is capable of doing that.” Do you remember when
you first met Junior? “(It was) at North Wilkesboro, I think, was the
first time I met him. He was driving a Late Model there and I was
talking to his dad on pit road and he brought him over and introduced me
to him. Or, maybe I walked up to them. I’m not sure how the meeting
went. I just remember giving Senior a hard time because I looked at the
jalopy that Junior was driving and I was like, I can’t believe that
you’re going to put him in this equipment. And he said, well he was
going to have to work at it the hard way. And I respected the heck out
of that. I thought that made a lot of sense and it was great that he was
going to make him work for it and wasn’t just going to be handed to
him.”

Roush Racing driver, Greg Biffle was asked bout Ford’s long-term
stability and how Roush Racing is the flag bear for Ford. “We’re not
worried about the stability of Ford, for sure. I get a little concerned
when you have all your eggs in one basket and at Roush Fenway, we’re
kind of carrying the flag for Ford. With the opportunity kind of
hanging out there, we’re gonna take Yates under our wing – which we’ve
done – and possibly the Wood Brothers. That puts all of the Ford teams
under one umbrella. So then Ford’s ability to have somebody come up
with innovative things or ideas, sometimes in cases it would be better
and in some cases it may not be better. When you send three people off
to find a solution and you say what’s the best way to do this? And they
all come back with different answers, sometimes there’s a conglomeration
of the two that makes an even better solution than any one of the single
three. Right now, we will have more engineers at our disposal, but
we’re all gonna be in the same camp. I don’t know what I’m trying to
say. We’re gonna have all those people under one umbrella. We’ll be
able to control all of those people, but there won’t ever be the
opportunity for somebody outside maybe. It’s all gonna come from us.
We’re still probably gonna have the same amount of people in engineers
whether the teams were under one umbrella or not, but I don’t think
we’re worried about anything. Ford’s gonna be racing – period.”

Why is Bill Elliott still racing? Is he still having fun? “I have a
good time. To me, it’s a lot of fun just to come out and hang out. To
do it full-time, I don’t think I could ever go back because I’ve had a
taste of the other side of life. Now it’s just a pretty good balance.
Last fall I ended up running a little bit more than I wanted to run, but
I was trying to help Len and Eddie out and trying to get things sorted
out from that standpoint, and now I’m just trying to help them out a
little bit at the start of the season. They’ve got some plans as far as
Jon (Wood) and Marcos (Ambrose) and trying to get all that done for the
rest of the year, so, hopefully, we’ll transition them in and it all
works out.” Elliott was asked about the young guns he races against.
“Let me say this, the youth of today – the guys that will come in –
they’ve been exposed to more racing than I ever thought about doing at
their age. Take Jeff Gordon, he was racing at three or four years old,
or whatever it was, racing go-karts. Those cats could run 160-170
sprint car races in a year. Granted, by the time I started running Cup,
maybe I ran 30 races or 40 races, but they’d run 150-160 a year since
the age of three. Do the math, as Michael (Waltrip) would say. You
look at these kids today, they’ve been exposed to so much and now you
look at the stuff that they’ve been able to come up in, they learn fast,
they do what they need to do. Granted, I can’t tell them anything
because I don’t know what to tell them. They know more than I ever
thought about knowing at their age, so from the standpoint of looking at
the youth and what they’ve done, my hat’s off to them. They’ve done a
hell of a job.”

David Gilliland and Robert Yates Racing received some good news when
they were able to announce a sponsor. RYR announced that Experian
Consumer DirectSM, the leading provider of online direct-to-consumer
credit reports, scores, and monitoring products, will sponsor the #38
entry for seven races at the beginning of the 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup
Series season. Gilliland had a relationship with the company dating
back to last year in the Busch Series (now Nationwide). Gilliland
exclaimed, “Yeah, we’re real excited. Everybody at Yates Racing has
worked real hard over the winter and we were able to put a deal together
with freecreditreport.com for the first seven races and everybody is
real excited. It’s really brought a lot of life into the shop and,
hopefully, this is the first thing of many things to come. I had a
relationship last year in the Nationwide Series with them. They’re a
California-based company. I grew up right down the street from where
they’re at and we really have a great relationship with those people.”

Gilliland is excited about the new year. “I feel like we’re ready to hit
the ground running. I feel like Travis and I were both competitive at
all the tests we’ve been to and with a little bit of engineering help
from Roush and getting our chassis from them is really gonna put us
ahead of where we were last year. Last year we were behind and never
could catch up and I feel like we’ve taken five steps forward over the
winter. We’ve built all new race cars and with the way they’ve
performed the last couple weeks in testing, I feel like we’re ready to
unload and be competitive week-in and week-out.”

So with the #38 RYR Ford getting a sponsor, what’s that status of the
#28 team car with Travis Kvapil as the driver? “I do feel like we are.
The 38 with David got a number of races with Free Credit Report, so
we’re looking to put something on the 28 for at least the 500 for sure
because that’s right around the corner, but definitely throughout the
year and for a couple of years down the road. I think that’s really
what we’re looking at is to build a relationship and a partnership with
a company that’s more than just a few races. I think we’ve got a lot of
exciting things happening, a lot of leads, and there’s definitely a lot
of companies looking at what Yates Racing is doing. I think we’ve got
an attractive package to offer somebody, I feel confident that if we go
out there and do a decent job – keep our car in the top 35, perform well
early in the season, we’ll be able to put something together.” Kvapil
was asked if the preseason testing has benefited the RYR team. How he
is adjusting his return to the Cup Series? “This is probably the most
comfortable I’ve felt in a Cup car, for sure. We have a strong alliance
with the Roush Fenway group. We basically have the same equipment and I
was feeling something in my car at Daytona and wanted to put a veteran
in there to see if that’s what he was feeling too and we just tried to
bounce ideas off each other. We did the same thing at Fontana. The 28
was struggling finding speed and the 38 was doing OK, so me and David
swapped cars and did the same thing there and we drew the same
conclusions afterward. I feel like having that opportunity to have
David or Carl or somebody jump in my car is gonna help me out a bunch.
Anytime you can test you’re learning lap by lap and with what I’ve known
for setups and stuff like that for the last couple of years is
completely new with the new car, so I’ve really been trying to study the
car hard and study the setups hard and figure that out. I feel like
I’ve always been pretty good at what I feel in the car and I can usually
tell the crew what the car needs, but I’ve got a lot to learn with these
style of cars right now. I’m just trying to be a student of the COT and
figure them out and the best time to do that is in preseason testing.”

Jamie McMurray had the opportunity to be on jury duty. McMurray
expanded, “Jury duty was life-changing. I told my girlfriend and she
just kind of looked at me with a dazed look and I’m like, ‘You just
don’t understand.’ The case that I was on was very intense and I woke
up this morning thinking about it because it was just an incredible
case. It’s incredible to me that they put 12 people in charge of
someone’s life or someone’s future, but I was a part of that. We went
into the room afterwards to decide whether he would be guilty or not
guilty and we were sitting around and there was a first-grade school
teacher, there was a truck driver, there was a dairy farmer. It’s
incredible with the people that were in there because it was almost like
a movie. I watched the movie The Runaway Jury and as I’m really living
this I’m like, ‘This really is like what happened,’ but you’re actually
in charge of someone’s future. I wouldn’t trade it, but I don’t want to
go back. If I ever get put back in that, I’ll tell them I don’t want to
do it because I didn’t realize how intense that was going to be. You
certainly pay a lot of attention. It was for four days. If it was a
civil case, I probably would do it, but being a criminal case, I’ll
never do that again.” McMurray expanded on the case. “The case
consisted of a grown man who was accused of assaulting a 10-year-old
girl at the time, so you can imagine. The testimony was, I don’t know,
touching. It’s just stuff that you read about or see on TV that you
don’t ever think you’re going to experience or be a part of, so it was
just super-intense.” YOU WERE THE FOREMAN? “I tell you what, I’m on
the jury and there were 11 women and me. When the attorneys were done
we went into the room to decide and there were only two restrooms – a
guy’s and a girl’s. So I was trying to be considerate and I let all the
girls kind of use the guy’s room, so I went last. So I went into the
restroom and when I came out they said, ‘You’re the foreman.’ I was
like, ‘OK, I guess I’ll be the foreman then.’ That’s incredible to see
how all of that works.” Is jury duty anythjing like what he sees on the
track? “Well, it’s two different things. When you race and it’s
intense, it’s fun. That’s what you live for and that’s what you wake up
for every single day. No one wakes up and asks to be put in that
situation of being on a jury and on a case like that.” Guilty or not
guilty? “The guy was actually found not guilty. When I was selected as
jury foreman I thought, ‘I’m gonna have to read whatever we decide,’ and
you don’t know if there’s gonna be sighs or cheers. You don’t know
what’s gonna happen from each side, and I was fortunate that the clerk
actually read the verdict of the case, so I didn’t have to go through
that. But you never know what the emotions are going to be in something
like that.” Anyone ask you for your autograph? “We were in the room
the very first day and they ask you what you do and can you be here for
so many days. I told the prosecutor. I said, ‘Look, I’ll give you all
I have until Friday, but I’m leaving Sunday to go to Las Vegas to test.
I’m gonna miss media day if I do this, but I can miss that because
that’s not going to alter my career. If I miss testing in Las Vegas,
that could be big. I’ll give you all I have until then.’ So they found
out I was a race car driver and everyone kind of giggled in the
courtroom. So it was the second day and we got ready to go to lunch.
They let the jury leave first to exit for lunch, so I had to use the
restroom. We left and I went to the restroom, I washed my hands, and
when I came out the little girl’s father was standing outside with her
and I don’t know if he didn’t know at the time who I was, but it kind of
hit him when we got outside and he’s like, ‘Do you know who that is?’
And he’s like, ‘It’s Jamie McMurray.’ This was in Statesville, North
Carolina so it’s all NASCAR country and he was like, ‘Can I have your
autograph?’ And I’m thinking, ‘I can’t talk to you. You don’t
understand.’ So I said, ‘I don’t have a pen,’ because I really didn’t.
And I said, ‘Maybe when I get back we’ll do this.’ So when we got back
from lunch, the jury is in a separate room waiting to go into the
courtroom and the judge calls me in and says, ‘Did you talk with one of
the people on the prosecutor’s side?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, it wasn’t
really talking,’ so I explained the whole story to her and she was like
‘OK.’ They asked if that was going to affect my decision and I was
like, ‘No.’ But a couple people on the jury brought some Crown Royal
bottles in and asked me to sign, but, I tell you what, it was really
neat because I was in a room and I was a normal person. Even though
they wanted me to sign stuff I was a normal person and people didn’t
really talk about it. Yet, you’re with a group of people that all have
different occupations and it was nice to just sit there and listen to
their stories and hear them talk about their families. It was a good
experience.” Did you learn at lot about the legal system? “I did.
Everyone has somewhat of an idea of how the judicial system works, but I
think until you actually sit through it and you watch the emotions from
both sides. For me, I’ve watched Perry Mason or other shows that have
been on forever and it’s kind of like that but it’s not. I think until
you deal with the intensity that goes along with it, it’s just hard to
explain.” Was it like the movie, ‘My Cousin Vinny?’ “It wasn’t
anything like My Cousin Vinny.” How many people did they go through?
“They took half the people and they let them go immediately. You were
either in group A or group B and they let group A go immediately because
they were supposed to be on a civil case. In that civil case they came
to a decision over the weekend, so the criminal case was gonna go ahead
and go to trial, and they chose 12 people. They weed out the ones they
don’t want and I was like the seventh or eighth alternate. Of course
when I got up there I didn’t have any history of anything. I was like,
‘Man, I’m just the most normal guy that you guys could get because I’m
not biased and I have no opinion of anything.'” So it ended on Friday?
“Monday was Martin Luther King Day and we went in Tuesday and they
selected, and then we were in court Wednesday, Thursday and then
finished up about 6 o’clock Friday night. It’s something that I’ve
never been on a jury and I’m 31 now and I think it’s good for people to
go do that because it just makes you see how the world works. I never
complain about taxes. I’m not a guy that ever complains about that
because I’ve been to Moscow and I’ve been to Mexico City and I’ve seen
the way other countries are and we’ve got it pretty good here.”

Chevy Racing and Ford Motorsports media services contributed to this
report.

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