Roush Fenway Teammates Have Frustrating Afternoon

TALLADEGA, Ala. — For Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth, the Aaron’s 499 was tiresome, to say the least.
Both drivers were eliminated from contention after right-front tires went down at speed. Kenseth popped his on lap 21, and Edwards lost two before 50 laps were in the books.
“We can’t get anything to go our way,” Kenseth said. “We just blew the right-front tire with our DeWalt Ford Fusion. It amazes me that you can blow a tire at Talladega, but I guess you can. We did everything to Goodyear’s specs and everything. We had a tire problem, for some reason. We just can’t seem to get anything to go our way, so far.”
Edwards had the problem in practice and thought it had been fixed.
“We had a little bit of a tire trouble at practice, and I guess we didn’t fix it well enough,” Edwards said. “The same thing happened to Matt, it looked like. I’m just glad we didn’t take anybody else out in that deal. It’s just too bad we didn’t get that right for the race. This is a great race car, and it would’ve been great to have a good run. Not good for the points, but I appreciate all the fans coming out, and hope a Ford goes to victory lane.”

• How much worse can Reed Sorenson’s season get? Just five laps into the race on Sunday, the engine in his Polaroid Dodge went up in smoke.
“We had a good car coming into today, and it looks like we might have hurt a piston in the engine,” he said. “It’s a weird deal because we usually won’t hurt these restrictor-plate engines on superspeedways. It stinks for the points.”

• Ken Schrader loves to read NSSN every week, so now he can read about himself.
After putting his Hunt Brothers Pizza Chevrolet on the inside of the second row as the last car out in qualifying, Schrader was asked if his deal with the Haas/CNC team was a one-race deal. The answer was vintage Schrader.
“No, we’re going to run it some more,” he said. “We’re definitely going to run it some more. We’re working on the schedule, but we are going to run the car some more this year. I know that Johnny Sauter is going to run it next week, and we’re working on that stuff now.
“That’s the only real good advantage I’ve found to being old so far. I told them to just let me know if I need to be there.”

• Qualifying at Talladega is an exercise in patience. If you’re watching, pack a lunch, because it takes 50-plus seconds to complete a lap. The drivers aren’t really into it either.
“My dad could run the same speed here,” said Matt Kenseth after putting his DeWalt Tools Ford into the field. “Everybody just holds it wide open, and anybody can do that. So, qualifying has absolutely zero to do with the driver here. I just held it wide open and whatever it ran, it ran.”

• Jon Wood, who put the family’s No. 21 Little Debbie/Motorcraft Fusion into the race in 12th, was out of the car and into an airplane headed to Kansas, where he was racing in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event at Kansas Speedway.
“The way I’ve been looking at it, if the day didn’t go well I could at least say, ‘I’ve got Kansas to go to,’” Wood said after getting out of the car. “Hopefully, I’d have a good day out of one or the other, but this is obviously the important thing. I believe that we did – they did what they needed to do, all I did was just drive.”

• On Friday, the U.S. Navy and NASCAR’s five-time most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., announced the formation of the Dale, Jr. Division, an 88-person boot camp division at Recruit Training Command. Potential sailors will be able to start signing up for the division on May 24 at their local recruiting station.
To officially launch the division, Earnhardt will drive the JR Motorsports No. 83 Navy Dale, Jr. Division Monte Carlo SS in the NASCAR Nationwide Series CARQUEST Auto Parts 300 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway on May 24.
Recruits who sign up for the Dale, Jr. Division will ship to Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Ill., in late August and the division will be commissioned by Earnhardt after initial in-processing. Earnhardt will again visit his recruits upon completion of their seven-to-eight week course.

• Apparently, Carl Edwards doesn’t translate all that well south of the border.
While in Mexico for last week’s Nationwide Series event, Edwards saw an Office Depot location and decided to stop in — with a camera crew in tow. The reaction wasn’t what he expected.
“We’re driving down the street in Mexico City, and it’s like, ‘There’s an Office Depot!’” he said. “So we get the driver to pull in, and we go in the store. I was curious to see if they had Carl Edwards stuff there.
“I’m telling you, they had no clue who I was. We had a language barrier, and they couldn’t understand why we had a camera. They said, ‘You have to stop filming. Stop filming!’ It ended up being funny, and kind of surreal, because that place (Mexico City) is so different, but you walk in the door, and you could be in an Office Depot in Columbia, Mo. Everything looked the same, except it was all Spanish. . .
“I got out my phone, and I got on the Internet and showed them OfficeDepotRacing.com, with my picture and all that, and they were like, ‘Si. Si. No camera!’”