Dale Jr Race Quotations

Me and Denny are good friends. He came down a couple years ago and hung out in the bus. I knew he was a pretty good race car driver. ... I tried to get Joe (Gibbs) to give him up, if you will. But they hung onto him and that's probably the smartest move they made because he's going to make them a lot of money.

I cried a little bit in the race car on the way to the checkered flag. Well, maybe not cried, but at least my eyes watered up.

We were just out there drafting together. He's a good teammate. Some guys have their own agenda. But when you put him in the car, he knows how good a race car driver he is. He doesn't have anything to prove. If you give him a good car, he's going to run good. He's out there to help us and we're going to help him.

I was pretty optimistic last year going into the season. The only thing different this year is I have my cousin working with me again. So, there is that comfort aspect and familiarity. It is easier to know what to expect this year, whereas last year, we were optimistic but uncertain about how well we were going to do. He (Tony) is really good at what he does. We are family and just communicate well, even though we don't always get that right either. For the most part, he is one of the best crew chiefs in the garage. He builds a great race car.

We had enough race car, just not enough time. We started off tight, and we've been fighting it in our practices. We still have some work to do on it.

This test right here is very important, very key for our team, not only just for this race (March 12 at Las Vegas), but for a lot of tracks. We'll need to learn as much as we possibly can, not only for Las Vegas, but for other tracks that are similar.

When you go into California and don't run well, and come to Vegas and don't run well, it puts a lot of pressure on you. But we finished 11th at California, and that's our goal this week. And if we can do that at these two race tracks, which have been our biggest nemesis, I think we can expect to have a pretty good season.

Target is to run as good as you can every week. Everything else kind of takes cares of itself. We just go out there and race as hard as we can, take the car we got, do the best we can with it every week.