10-07-2006 | TruckSeries.com Report
Johnny Benson, Bill Davis Racing, No. 23 Exide Batteries Tundra: A.J. Allmendinger, Bill Davis Racing, No. 24 Tundra: "When you walk in here it's enormous, I can't believe how big the track is, and then once you get on it by yourself you wonder what the big deal is. Then, when you're with a pack of 16 other trucks with you, you understand. I think even more amazing than the track is all the fans camping out around the track." Mike Skinner, Bill Davis Racing, No. 5 Toyota Tundra: Todd Bodine, Germain Racing, No. 30 Lumber Liquidators Tundra: "You can't imagine how smooth it is out there. You have no concept of speed, whatsoever. The truck is as good as it was in Daytona, no doubt. With as smooth as this track is, it could be an exciting race. An 80-year old grandma could probably win it if we strapped her into a good truck because it's so smooth and so easy to control these trucks out there. Saturday should be a lot of fun." Ted Musgrave, Germain Racing, No. 9 Team ASE/Germain Toyota Tundra:
"It's 'typical Talladega', you just drive around and look at the scenery because it's only going to run so fast in qualifying. You're 'flat-out' here all day long. Any time you come down here, the only time you aren't on the gas pedal is when you're on pit road. Once you're on the race track it's 'wide-open' every lap, and hang on. It looks like you can fall back here in the trucks and still be able to catch back up because of the draft. With the cars, if you start to lose the draft, you're in trouble. It's not the same with the trucks. They did do an awesome job on the track. It's the smoothest track that we've ever run on. Hopefully, it will be a good race. It looks like you can run four abreast, which will be exciting for the fans."
"We're already better off than we were at Loudon (NH) because we didn't crash in qualifying. I didn't think we'd be very good in qualifying based on what we had yesterday in practice, but the truck is really handling well and I feel pretty comfortable in the traffic. Yesterday, it was a lot of fun trying to find the experienced guys and get behind them. I talked to Johnny (Benson) and Mike (Skinner) and Mark Martin, just trying to find out what the etiquite is out there on the track. I don't want to be the rookie cutting people off and doing something I shouldn't be doing."
"That was a really, really slow lap. I just hope the draft is good tomorrow. Yesterday, in the draft, my truck was really, really good. We made a couple of little adjustments, obviously they were the wrong ones to make. We got what we got now. I think it will race better than it qualified."
"That was a good lap, I just held it wide open. Don't think that will keep us on the pole, but that should be good enough for the top-10. It's Talladega. It's different. It's really smooth out there, except for the bottom of the tri-oval."
"They did a phenomenal job of repaving this place. Going out there, you can drive anywhere and do anything you want. In the past, if your truck wasn't handling right here you couldn't do this or couldn't do that. Right now, everbody's truck handles so well you can do just about anything you want. That's neat because nobody will be out of control. It seems like nobody is going to be able to get away from anybody. What you are going to see during the race is people running anywhere, it should be an exciting race."