THE MODERATOR: We are now joined by Ryan Newman, driver of the No. 39 Outback Steakhouse Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing. Newman picked up his first victory of the 2012 season at Martinsville Speedway, moving him to 8th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings. Stewart-Haas Racing has won three of the first six race this is season, and eight of the last 16 overall.

Ryan, Sunday’s finish in Martinsville was one of the most exciting of the season so far. Talk about how your team refused to give up even after falling a lap down early on, and fought hard all race to be in the position to win when it mattered most at the end?

RYAN NEWMAN: Well, it was an eventful day for us off the racetrack, I guess you could say, just because I got the speeding penalty on pit road and put myself in a bad position. The guys did a good job of fixing the balance of the race car first and standing behind me and having good pit stops and things like that, and using the right strategy at the end of the race to put ourselves in position to be in contention.

Glen was a part of our success, but (Indiscernible), I was happy to bring the Chevrolet home and in first.

Q. Ryan, near the end of the race Sunday, at the start of the first green/white/checker, you had maybe half a second to respond to what was happening there going into the first turn. Was it your plan all along to follow Bowyer, or did you see something happening as everybody went into that turn that made you take the direction you took?

RYAN NEWMAN: Well, I knew that the front two didn’t have tires, and there was a better chance of them spinning their tires than us, at least with two tires. My intention was to get a run on Clint, which I did, then having the entirety of him blocking me and getting down and getting a run on 24, because I couldn’t see that.

Once he did, I just kind of backed off, and I gave him, I guess, enough courage to try to stick his nose up in there. It didn’t work for him, and it worked for us. So that was just the sum of it.

Q. As a father that’s been around the sport now for a few years, what do you think the environment in the garage area maybe differs for young kids growing up now as opposed to the way it might for say someone like Kyle Petty who practically grew up teething on a tire?

RYAN NEWMAN: Well, I think it’s a little bit different in the essence that we have great people like the MRO who bring facilities for us to bring our kids at, and that makes a difference. I don’t think they had that so much. I think it was more of a picnic basket back in the Kyle Petty generation of kids.

For us, it’s hard for me to answer that not knowing exactly what it was like. It’s still a great environment. NASCAR has given us the opportunity to bring our kids and keep them within our family whether they’re in the bus or in the garage.

Q. Just to follow up real quick, could you ever see your daughter being a driver? Would you support that if that’s what she wanted to do?

RYAN NEWMAN: I will 100% support whatever she wants to do. That’s her goals and her dreams. I think it’s important for a Parent to assist their kids in that, but I think it’s also detrimental if a Parent tries to persuade their kid to do something.

So I will do whatever and stand behind her in whatever she wants and help her along the way. I’m probably not going to be the guy that holds her hand. But I’ll be there when she needs me to held her hand.

Q. When you were going into that what turned out to be the next to last race start, what were you hoping for as far as where you would finish? Did you think you had a really good shot at the win? Were you concerned if anyone wrecked that you were just going to get collected in it? What was your mindset going into that first initial green/white/checker?

RYAN NEWMAN: We got the one to go before that green/white/checker you’re talking about and crossed the start/finish line. I remember coming out of turn two and hit the radio button and said listen, guys you’ve done a great job today. If I don’t bring it back, I just want to tell you beforehand. Just because I know that anything can go or anything usually does go at Martinsville when it comes to restarts.

I didn’t have a specific plan other than just going forward. Obviously, I wanted to win. That was a goal. But I figured I had a shot of maybe getting two of them and getting underneath Clint and getting into one. When that didn’t work out, Clint took himself and a couple others. And I’m not blaming Clint for the product of three-wide at Martinsville. I could say it was just as much as Jimmy and those guys down as it was Clint and the pack getting in there. But that’s racing. It happens at Martinsville. It happens at every short track across America. There is a time when somebody will go three-wide and it doesn’t work.

Q. Did the win give you more of a feeling did you want to celebrate or just breathe easier? Was it more relief than exuberation or the other way around?

RYAN NEWMAN: The relief was when we got the white flag, and I saw A.J. on the outside. I didn’t know how A.J. was going to race me, if he’d try to take me out or anything. You never know. You can never anticipate that emotion.

But I knew I had purposely raced him clean and never got up and leaned on him because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to race me that way. I figured we had plenty of racetrack to work with. We both needed a good finish, and we both got that. Somebody has to win, and we were fortunate with our Outback Chevrolet to do that.

There was a sense of relief there, but the emotion was, man, we did it. I’ve tried so many times there, and I enjoy short track racing. I enjoy Martinsville, and I didn’t used to. So it made it more sweet for me than maybe another racetrack.

Q. I guess the question was maybe relief for the fact that while Tony has won so many races, it seemed like you guys with –

RYAN NEWMAN: I don’t look at it in that respect. I can’t compare myself to the 14 or Tony Stewart or anybody else. All I know is I can go out there and do the best job that I physically, emotionally, and mentally can. If that gets us to victory lane, then it does. If it doesn’t, we need to sit back and figure out how to be better. Comparing yourself doesn’t get you anywhere in my opinion.

Q. This is a little off the subject of Martinsville. I read that believe Martinsville you went hunting with Martin Truex; is that correct?

RYAN NEWMAN: Yeah, Martin Truex and I and we were down in Georgia doing a little turkey hunting.

Q. How’s Martin out there in the fields? As a guy from Jersey, I don’t know, you put a weapon in his hand and you might be a little nervous?

RYAN NEWMAN: I guess if it’s a turkey it’s okay as long as they’re in season. But we had a lot of fun. Martin has become a closer friend. I enjoy my time and experience with him. He’s much more of a hunter and more experienced of a hunter than I am. I’ve learned some things from him. So we have a lot of fun together.

We enjoy fishing as well. We go fishing at a lot of different racetracks. It’s tough in any sport when you compete against a friend, but we do a good job of separating it.

Q. Did you say at the beginning of the call that you were feeding deer when you came on?

RYAN NEWMAN: Yeah, yeah, I was putting some corn out and taking care of them. They’ve got to eat too.

Q. A lot of times for as much as drivers win and how significant the wins can be, a lot of times drivers will remember as much the one that got away as much as the ones that they want or the ones that they pulled out. Is there a race in your career that you think back at times as the one that got away? Kind of that one that stings a little more, and if so, what were the circumstances of that?

RYAN NEWMAN: The one that comes closest to mind timewise was the last Martinsville spring race that we had when we had a really good race car. Ended up breaking apart on the race car and losing the cylinder. Just not getting what we felt like we deserved. We had been so good there at times. I think the previous fall or spring, I think we ended up running fourth because we got booted out of the way. And that’s why it was so bittersweet and nice to be on the flip side of the coin, and be able to go through those green/white/checkers and get the victory. That was a true relief.

Q. I also know some tracks with the pre-race introductions, and sometimes you’re paired together with another driver in the back of the pick-up, sometimes you’re in the pick-up alone. When you’re in there with another competitor and I know sometimes it can depend on who it is, but to be in there, what do you talk about? Obviously, it’s a guy that you’ll go race against and compete against in just a short while. How comfortable a situation can it be? How uncomfortable can it be if it’s somebody you’ve had an issue with or maybe not the best of friends what’s it like? What do you talk about in the back of the pick-up as you wave to the crowd?

RYAN NEWMAN: Lately, it’s been kids. With the increased population of drivers and kids, whether it’s McMurray or Jimmie Johnson or Kenseth, there are a couple of others out there, Harvick and guys like that that are living the same lifestyle and changes that my wife Krissie and I are. So that’s something that we typically will talk about. Because you might throw in, How’s your race car? Is it good or bad? How are you in practice? Or you might say man, your car looked good in happy hour or something like that. But usually it’s something non-race related like, hey, have a good day. I’ll talk to you later.

Then there are times that it may be somebody that is your nemesis or somebody you just got into it with the week before. That is the dramatic irony of what we do. You have to get through those things.

Q. So when you’re talking about kids, is it talking about diaper changes or what my kid did?

RYAN NEWMAN: Anything. Sometimes it’s as simple as a diaper change, and sometimes it’s how many air planes did it take to get your wife and kid to the racetrack. It’s just different.

It’s a different lifestyle than we were used to. Like for us, at least Krissie and I right now having a kid and having another one on the way is definitely different than just having one.

Q. What is that? Can you expand on that, please?

RYAN NEWMAN: Morning sickness, a little bit of everything. Just the differences. Really, we’ll talk about anything. Sometimes it will be how many fans are in the stands. Sometimes it will be, hey, are you feeling that bump in the middle of three and four? It could be anything.

Q. Ryan, we were pouring over the stats a little bit. 11 of your 16 wins have been on different tracks. So pretty much that makes you a jack of all tracks versus a jack of all trades. Can you expand on being so diverse on the NASCAR circuit?

RYAN NEWMAN: I said this in the media center, so I have no problem repeating it. The fact is I enjoy most all racetracks. There are tracks that I prefer over others, but there are no tracks that I truly dislike. It’s not like I say I hate going to this racetrack this weekend.

So I think that helps in giving me an opportunity to be successful at most, if not all of them. Just from a driving standpoint, I always said that one of my heros was A.J. Foyt. The modern day A.J. Foyt is a guy that can drive anything, anywhere, anyplace. So, hopefully, I can create enough stats and increase the 11 of 16 into like 20 of 40 or something like that. So we’ll keep working on it.

I like all kinds of different racetracks. I haven’t won on the road course yet, and in the Cup Series and in the Nationwide Series, but it’s something I’d love to do this year.

Q. Ryan, Sunday’s late caution certainly won’t be the last one to change race results. Could you talk a little about a driver, a crew chief and a team’s ability to adapt and take advantage of changing situations?

RYAN NEWMAN: Well, the situation the way it played out, the 24 and the 48 stayed out and gave us the opportunity to create an advantage on them, and we did that. They still had the full opportunity to come down pit road and take two tires. Maybe everybody behind them wouldn’t, but it was a difference in strategy and a difference of opinion. There was no known factor of like the 24 running out of fuel at the end. For us, it was just get a splash of fuel and see if we can create a performance advantage with tires.

We had 130-plus laps, I believe, on our tires. So there was a true advantage to new tires at Martinsville. We did what we thought was right. And did a good job of making the call, put us in position, and it all came through.

Q. Basically in racing would you say that’s a common thing?

RYAN NEWMAN: Well, it is a common thing. It’s a common thing in every car and every race I’ve driven that we’ve had the ability to come in and make a change. Back in my Silver crown days, you could run a flag in the race, and you’d be putting a spare tire on, if you were fortunate enough to have a spare tire and that’s what sometimes won a race back then.

So taking that perspective into what we do on a Cup series, yeah, there’s always that ability. You see guys doing it in Sprint cars and things like that even on 30-lap races. So you throw in another 470, and there’s the potential for it to happen all wait through the race.

Q. What did you and Tony do and what did you learn during off-season to start off with such a quick winning season?

RYAN NEWMAN: We actually found a genie in a bottle. My first wish was for unlimited wishes, and we’ve used up three of them now. So we should be good for another little bit.

Q. Also, you talked about going to different tracks and not caring which track you go to. How do you get a feel back as a driver of tracks after they’ve been repaved. Like in June, the Michigan track that you’ll be racing on has been repaved totally.

RYAN NEWMAN: The thing is you’ll feel the same types of feelings in the race car with respect to your seat. But you’re not going to feel the same things on the steering wheel because the tire will be different. That part changes more so than the actual racetrack does.

You have to remember the things that you’ve learned in the past, but you can’t rely on going back to those. You have to be able to adapt. That’s why I look forward to going to Kansas in the fall and Pocono and Michigan and places like that. I say that now, and hopefully I can adapt and be successful, but I look forward to it. It’s a challenge.

Q. How does winning a race early in the season help your confidence throughout the rest of the year?

RYAN NEWMAN: Well, it’s big for us from a points standpoint because we gain an advantage in the points, but primarily to give us something to fall back on if we need to to make it into the Chase. That is a sense of relief. But that relief doesn’t get you anywhere when it comes to performance. It just gives you something to fall back on.

So our job is still to go out there and win each and make the effort to win each and every race and keep moving our way up into the points so we don’t have to rely on the win.

It’s a relief and that’s what we shoot for. But realistically it doesn’t matter if it was right now or if it was three races before the Chase.

Q. Going into (Indiscernible) Speedway in a couple of weeks, do you feel it will be important to have a good day there especially being on mile and a half tracks because they dominate the schedule on the Sprint Cup circuit?

RYAN NEWMAN: I look forward to it because of that. Stewart was strong in Vegas. We finished fourth. Stewart won last fall. So there are a lot of things that we have going for us. Doesn’t mean we’re going to be the team to beat or organization to beat when we go down there.

We’ll have to stay focused and get our job done. I look forward to it, like I said. But each and every race, I feel the same way about. We have to go do the exact same thing.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you for joining us. Hope you enjoy your off weekend and best of luck next weekend in Texas.

THE MODERATOR:

Q. Tony, I just wondered, you probably are talked out about this whole thing, but after you finished 25th at Dover and 15th at Kansas, were you seriously thinking you were still in contention? Were you pretty optimistic throughout?

TONY STEWART: I felt like we still had an opportunity to maybe salvage a Top 5 out of it, but I’m not sure that I really felt like we still were a championship contender at that point. I think the turning point for me was the win at Martinsville. I think that’s when I felt like internally myself and the organization we were a contender at that point, and I didn’t think anybody should overlook us yet.

Q. I have a question for you that maybe only you can answer, and that is you were so brilliant in the driving up on the wheel. One we’ll be talking about forever and others seemed to have raged at that point, even when they get out of the car and even up on it. How close is that line between I’m going to get this and being in control, and having that rage turn into rage? You know what I mean?

TONY STEWART: I think the fact that we were coming from behind let us stay calm during the drama at the beginning of the race. It just seemed like once we were able to overcome that, it just gave us so much confidence that we did have a good race car and we were able to battle back right away. You just kind of had the confidence on your side and it was about staying focused.

I don’t think there was any part of the race where I actually felt any kind of anger other than when I made contact with David Reutimann. After talking to David, I was the one that made the mistake there, not him. So it was more just not putting yourself in any bad positions, and other than that it was just staying focused and having fun driving the car.

Q. Your two Chase championships, looking back at 2005 and this year, you won them in two very different ways. In 2005, had you five regular season wins, but you didn’t win any during the Chase. Then of course this year you didn’t have any regular season wins and got five Chase wins. Can you talk about the difference in your mindset between those two championship runs?

TONY STEWART: Definitely. When we came to Homestead for the finale in 2005, we had a lead. I think the scenario in ’05 was we had to finish 22nd or better to lock it up. At that point, you’re not worried about where everybody else is running. All you’re focusing on is making sure can you stay in the top 22.

I think there are a lot of opportunities in those situations to make mistakes because you just get out of your rhythm of what you need to do. Where this year’s Chase, we were in a unique position to not have to worry about going backwards. I mean, we couldn’t go any further than second in the standings backwards.

It really, honestly, put us in a position where we just didn’t have anything to lose, and we had the opportunity to gain and win the championship.

For us, I guess it took a lot of the pressure away that we had. We had a lot of pressure in ’05 to keep that lead and win a championship where this year there really didn’t seem that pressure that we had before. It just seemed like we had a great opportunity, and our performance was really good going into Homestead. So I think that took all the pressure away and made it feel totally different.

Q. I was wondering, you had mentioned that over the course of time you felt like you had found something, some advantage over Carl, and that you wouldn’t tell us until after you won it or whatever. Was it mental? Was it some sort of strategy play? Can you shed some light on that?

TONY STEWART: I think I’m going to keep that a secret. I may want to use it down the road again.

Q. All right. How about if you make a deal with us, if you do the same thing next year, then can you tell us?

TONY STEWART: We’ll review it.

Q. Okay. Keep it under review. Thank you.

TONY STEWART: Thanks.

Q. Penske Racing announced that Steve Addington won’t return to its organization next year. Are you interested in him being your crew chief or have you changed your mind at all as far as Darian is concerned?

TONY STEWART: We’re looking at all of our options right now. After we get through with all the media obligations today, I’ll getting to back to the shop and we’ll sit down as a group and try to come up with a decision and figure out.

We already know some options that are available, and we’ll try to sit down and see what we think is the best option and decision for the company.

Q. I just wanted to follow up on something you talked about on Sunday night when you and Darian were sitting there next to each other and you were talking about Atlanta and whether or not he made a change on the car, and he said he didn’t. You sort of seemed surprised by that. Did you have any further discussions on that? Can you clarify exactly? Did that thinking that maybe he changed something, did that play into your mindset at all? Give you some confidence in terms of just a confidence boost rather than just a simple performance boost?

TONY STEWART: Well, obviously I didn’t know about that until after the race on Sunday night. That was on a race that happened before the Chase even started. From what I gathered out of that, he didn’t make an adjustment all day on the car, and we just found something at the end there and got going.

I was under the impression that we had made changes all day, so that was a surprise to me. Had we had anymore discussions about it? No. Literally, when we got done with all the photos, with sponsors and the media interviews, we didn’t get done until 2 a.m., and it was straight to the airport and fly to Connecticut to go to ESPN yesterday.

So I haven’t even talked to the guys or seen them since we were on the stage doing photos and everything. So I’m hoping I’ll get a chance in the next couple of days to see or at least talk to these guys.

Q. There’s been a lot of talk, and I’m sure you probably were questioned a few times about having a new face or a new champion, anyway, and how that can help promote the sport. I’m just wondering how you think that will have an impact on the sport or what impact you think it will have?

TONY STEWART: I’m not really sure I understand what it will do. Obviously, it’s been a long reign the last five years of having Jimmie win the championship. Obviously we’re not oblivious to listening to the fans and them saying they want to see somebody else win.

So hopefully no matter who it was, it is the shot in the arm the sport needs right now. I think looking at TV ratings from this weekend and the attendance numbers the last couple of weeks, I think it’s hopefully a sign that we’re starting that road of recovery.

Not that we were in dire straits by any means, but I’m glad to see the numbers going back up again, and I don’t know if we’re going to be responsible for it because of winning a championship. But we’re all just hopeful that it’s going to keep going the direction it’s going right now.

Q. Tony, congratulations from Columbus, Indiana. Your hometown was buzzing Sunday night and is continuing to buzz. I guess have you talked to people and do you have a message to maybe some of the folks that you haven’t who have been following you from the beginning?

TONY STEWART: I haven’t had a chance to talk to anybody. As we sit here now, I have over 300 text messages that I haven’t been able to answer yet. I’ve got a lot of replies to send back, but I’m excited about coming home in the next couple of days.

Especially there is something about coming home, and the childhood friends of mine that I’m still friends with and people that I know in town, I’m excited to be able to come back and celebrate a championship with them. That’s something that’s really high on my priority list right now is getting the chance to come home here in the next couple of days.

Q. Will we ever see you in the Indy 500 again?

TONY STEWART: I don’t believe so. Not because of lack of desire or anything else, but honestly, it’s the logistics of having the time to prepare for the race and getting the seat time and run races before the 500.

I don’t think that after being out of those cars for 11 years now, I’m not sure that I can just go sit in one in the month of May and feel like I was up to speed with the technology and everything that’s going on with those cars to compete against the best in the sport there.

So I would think that we’d have to do a lot of testing, and I think we’d have to run some races before Indy to really feel like we were even remotely up to speed and up to pace with those guys.

Q. How much did being a past champion help you deal with the pressure of this particular Chase?

TONY STEWART: I think I feel like quite a bit, to be honest, really only from the pressure standpoint. You know what going into that last race is like. You know the strains and the pressures that go along with it.

But I’ll be honest, Carl Edwards I thought did an excellent job of going into Homestead also. With the fact that he hasn’t won a championship, I thought he dealt with the pressure very well. I firmly believe that he’s going to get one pretty soon here.

But I felt like from our side, I thought it was just a little bit different from the standpoint that we just didn’t have that pressure going into it like I thought we would.

Q. I was curious. In the last couple of days, is it a big deal to be a three-time champ and the people that you kind of join on that list, virtually all Hall of Famers?

TONY STEWART: It is. I’ll be honest. I feel very flattered and very honored just to be a part of that list. Those are guys that every one of those drivers that have won three championships are icons in this sport.

I somewhat honestly feel out of place being on that list. At the same time, I feel honored to be in it with them. I feel like it’s an episode of Sesame Street when you read that list: Which guy doesn’t belong and which is not like the others?

Those are some of the greatest names in this sport, and it truly feels like an honor to me to be a part of that group with them.

Q. What we’ve seen out of you in the last couple of weeks is just unbelievable determination, confidence, and what resulted is one of those rare sports moments like we see out of Michael Jordan back in the day, a Game 7 kind of stuff. Did you see it unfolding like that, or were you just in the moment and you had to get the job done?

TONY STEWART: I think it was more in the moment. I think looking at Texas, to me, Texas by itself was kind of surprising that the top two guys in the point standings ran first and second in the race. I don’t think that I would have been able to predict that we were going to run second and third at Phoenix, and actually run first and second at Homestead.

I’m just blown away by that stat really. I think it truly was one of the best battles, I feel like, in the history of the sport because of that. Not just because of the outcome of who won, but just the fact that you had the top two guys that literally fought it out. And rather than Phoenix, we ran second and third there, but we virtually raced the wins to race to the win to win a championship at the same time.

It wasn’t just a head-to-head battle and who got more points than the other by finishing ahead. We were winning races and finishing in the top three to do it. To me, that’s the part of it that kind of brings out the race fan in me. That it was just that competitive in the last three races of the year, the most important three, that it was that competitive and that tight up front to get it done.

Q. You talked about getting the chance to go home a little bit. But can you take us through a little bit of this off-season? It doesn’t seem like because of the championship and all the obligations, when will you finally get time to kind of catch your breath and relax a little bit in between all the hoopla, if you will?

TONY STEWART: Like I said, I’m looking forward to being able to go home to Thanksgiving for a couple of days. Obviously Vegas is a long, but important week at the same time.

Honestly, I haven’t even looked at my schedule. I know we still have stuff booked for the rest of the year that are obligations that we have to get done. Obviously, we’re still trying to fill the competition director role, and we’re still active in trying to help get sponsorship for some of Ryan’s races next year.

So as much as I’d love to just go and take a break, I still have a lot of things that are on the to-do list with the organization that need to be done before the year’s out. But we’ll find the time.

I’m not really concerned about having time off right now. I’ve actually enjoyed being up here in New York today. I’ve enjoyed being on the ESPN campus yesterday, and I know that probably just gave half of you guys heart attacks hearing me say that. But I truly have enjoyed talking about it. I feel like I was a part of something Sunday that was really special, and I’m very proud of that fact.

Q. Have you learned any more since the race about what happened with your grill there early on? Was it apparent to you that something was wrong there immediately?

TONY STEWART: It wasn’t apparent immediately. Honestly I didn’t even feel the impact. The impact came and hit the screen which is just a wire mesh. It’s pretty vulnerable when it comes to an impact in the radiator duct work. Basically it was the part in between the joint of the transmission and the drive shafts. It was a pretty large, substantial piece and thinking back to it, that was a large piece of luck that we had in the race that it did not find its way to the core of the radiator. It very easily could have broken the radiator and taken us out of it.

Q. Have you been able to go back and watch a replay of the race where you were wild about some of the things that you did as much as we were?

TONY STEWART: I actually did get a chance last night to see the last half of the race, and it was fun to watch. Obviously, we knew from the driver’s standpoint what was going on, but it was fun to listen to the commentary and to listen to them trying to analyze what was going on and what everybody was thinking.

It was fun to watch. It was fun to watch what Carl was able to do in the car. It just, I guess, added to the experience of what we went through. But to see it from that angle and see the highlights of it and watch the race, ironically enough, I was just as nervous watching. I was more nervous watching the race, even though I knew what the outcome was, than I was being in the car. It was fun to watch last night. I enjoyed it.

Q. I wanted to ask you a little about your relationship with A.J. Foyt. When did you first meet him in person and tell me about that experience.

TONY STEWART: I think I met A.J. the first time I believe around ’91 or ’92. I got a chance to go to the speedway in Indianapolis during the month of May, and I got to meet him in the garage. Then when I was racing in USAC around ’94, I got the opportunity to be a crew member.

I’m sorry, I take that back, it was ’95. I was a crew member on the 14 car, and that was when Eddie Cheever was driving the car. That was when they had the big wreck on the first lap with Cheever and Stan Fox. I didn’t get to do anything during the race. My job was to work what they call a dead man valve on the fuel tank. So it’s not a real high-tech job or important job, but nonetheless, I got an opportunity to work on the crew. But our race lasted eight seconds, unfortunately.

But since then I got a chance to drive a Silver Crown car for A.J. and George Snider. I got to be around him a lot more and that friendship kind of grew, and then he gave me an opportunity to test for him in Phoenix in ’95. I did a test with him and got a job offer with him.

Then I was working with his son on a bush grand national program at the time also. Was just about finished with that when my test with A.J. came up. A.J. wanted me to make a decision of not doing both. I tried to do both divisions and Ranier was willing to let me do that, but A.J. wanted me to focus strictly on the IndyCar.

I actually ended up not taking the IndyCar offer because of the relationship I had with Raniers too at the time.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you again for joining us, Tony. We appreciate it. Congrats again on the championship.

Darian welcome and why don’t you talk about your thoughts and strategies on winning the championship this weekend at Homestead Miami Speedway?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Thanks for having me on.  Just trying to do the same thing we’ve been doing the last half of the season.  Just going out there for maximum points.  We know if we win the race, that’s our goal.  We can’t finish any worse than second.  That’s what we do.  We go out there for the win.

Q.  Darian, you had a good run last year even though Tony’s history there has been kind of hit and miss since they reconfigured the track.  Where do you go for your baseline setting there?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It’s a good thing for us that we did run good there last year because that is a very similar set-up to what we’ve run good at with the mile and a halves this year.  We’ve hit on that set-up last year.  We’ve been doing it ever since.

We felt like we should be faster.  We felt like we had a definite Top 5 car.  We feel like it’s worked out this year at Vegas, and all the tracks that are fairly similar where we feel we can take a lot of that data over to Homestead and have a good year.

Q.  Given how close Tony and Carl are at this point, can you tell me what kind of pressure is on a crew chief at this point to really hit the set-up, given even a couple of positions can cost either driver here?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It’s about the same as it is every other week, honestly.  We want to go out there and have the best set-up we possibly can have, and also have the adaptability to it where if something goes different with the track condition we have to be able to adjust to those changes as the race goes on.  Make sure the car was fast enough all day long regardless of the situation we’re put in.

We go down there like we do week to shoot to be the fastest car off the truck, fastest car in qualifying, and fastest car in the race.  The pressure is the same.  This week there is a little more on the line, but the majority of that we just put on the driver’s shoulders because we still do the same job in the pits every week.

Q.  I asked the same thing of Bob.  It’s just a back grounder question.  But you have a mechanical engineering degree from Virginia Tech, I read.  When you were studying for that, was your career plan toward NASCAR or in a different direction?  If it was in a different direction, how did you veer into what you’re doing now?

DARIAN GRUBB:  That’s pretty funny.  I’m just very happy working with anything mechanical.  I worked in my dad’s construction company growing up and have a mechanical mind.  I took all my toys apart, destroyed them and put them back together all those things.  That’s how I got into the mechanical engineering kind of thing.

Racing, was kind of a byproduct of that.  I just had a lot of friends that were involved in Friday and Saturday night shows around home and I got involved in that.  I was doing it as a hobby all the time on weekends.  Leaving classes early to make sure I could make it to the tracks in Florida if that’s where we were running that weekend and things like that.

I put my resume on the internet and got a job doing my hobby as a full-time job.  I can’t ask for anything better than that.  I was paying my own way and doing everything for it, and now I get to do the best thing in the world having a job as a hobby.  So it’s pretty cool.

Q.  What was your first job out of college?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Product design engineer with a heavy trucking industry.  I designed aerodynamic devices and stuff for Volvo trucks.  The big rigs you see on the highway.

Q.  What did you most bring from the Hendrick operation over to Tony’s?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I would say probably just the mentality of empowering the people around you to do the best they can do from the positions.  Mr. Hendrick has instilled that in the organization.

Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned from him is making sure the people around you are strong enough to do what you want to do so you don’t take all that load yourself.  Jeff Meendering and Jonathan and Scott, and all the guys we have here on the team do a great job taking their workload, and me not having to babysit all the time.  They do a great job of getting the job done.  I’m able to concentrate on what I need to concentrate on to be a good crew chief.

Q.  I saw you on NASCAR Now on Sunday morning, and I thought you said something interesting.  You were talking about how Stewart-Haas, the cars have been good for some time now.  Then you said the driver is now up on the wheel.  So has something changed with Tony over the last nine weeks in the way he’s driving or the way he’s attacking races?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I really think it has.  I think it’s now more that we are in the Chase, we are in contention, and just that little extra fire is there in every person on the team.  Everybody’s trying that extra 10% to make sure everything we do is topnotch.

We try to do that every week, but now that everything is on the line the last ten weeks, that it’s a little bit easier to know what your goal is.  You’re always wanting to run good, but now we know the championship is the end goal, and it’s within our reach.  So that extra little bit of fire and desire is what you’re seeing on the racetrack.

Q.  There’s been so much speculation about the team.  You guys have been without a competition director for half of the year.  Are you going to be back with Stewart-Haas next year?

DARIAN GRUBB:  We’ll leave that to after Sunday and figure out what’s going to happen there.  Our goal is to win the championship and we’ll decide everything else after that.

Q.  Along those same lines, has it been difficult at all to work through the last few months with all the rumors and uncertainty and not knowing necessarily who is going to be in what position where next year?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Definitely not.  We’ve still got the same goals we’ve always had that we want to go out and win the championship.  Winning races is the way to do that.  What we’ve done the last nine weeks, we’ve shown that we have the capability to do that.  We’re almost 50-50 on that, so hopefully we can continue that streak and get it to be a 50% deal and win at Homestead.

Q.  Is there anything – have you guys found a better set-up with this new tire the last couple of months?  Or is there something – I mean, have you found or just hit on something that you feel has caused this kind of turnaround?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I really don’t think so.  There are tracks that we’ve had new tires and tracks that we’ve had the same tires.  A lot of it is continuing to build on that notebook that we’ve been building for three years now.  We’ve gotten better at some tracks and gotten worse at some tracks with the things we’re trying.

A lot of things just stacked up to where we’ve had the good data we’ve needed to have for the last ten races and being able to apply that to the racetrack.  Everybody’s just digging in a little deeper and working a little bit harder trying to find whatever’s left out there for performance.

The competition level is so high that you have to be on top of the game.  You can’t settle on what you’re doing before and think you’re going to be competitive.  You have to progress every week.

Q.  I think I’ve sort of asked one of my questions.  I haven’t been able to figure out a specific thing that turned it from you at the time Tony was complaining in Michigan to the start of the chase.  So there is nothing specific you can point to in that time period that turned it this season?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Definitely not.  We haven’t changed anything in the game plan and they way we’ve been approaching every week.  We’ve been doing the same job since the start of the season.

We’ve had chances to win at least four out of the first five races, and it always still kind of gets on my nerves looking back and seeing how we didn’t win in Vegas.  That was the one win Carl got.  Those are the three points he came into the Chase as a bonus over us, so that is the gap right now.  That is the definite six-point turn around.  We would have had three, and he would have lost three at that point.

Everybody has those what-ifs all the way during the season.  So we’ve had fast cars, and we’ve had chances to win races that we didn’t capitalize on.  Now all those things seem to keep rolling our direction now that we seem to not have the bad luck and the issues that we’ve had mid-season.  So now we’ll try to keep that momentum and that ball rolling.

Q.  One other thing I was wondering about is this a sign that Hendrick equipment is still sort of the dominant equipment – that Hendrick equipment is still the best in the garage?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I have to think so.  That’s what I’m used to and familiar with.  So we were able to perform year-in and year-out with what we do.  With what Mark Whitman and the guys in the chassis shop do and Jeff Andrews the guys in the engine shop.  I don’t think we’re lacking for anything.  We’re able to go out there and compete with the best of the best every weekend.  90% of the time we’re able to come out on top.  I feel like we’re definitely not lacking anything there.

But I think the competition level has definitely stepped up between all the programs.  It’s a definite battle every week.  You’re going to see the strengths of every organization every week, and we just hope we can capitalize on it when the time comes.

Q.  I know you’ve talked about this some in the past but could you talk about winning the Daytona 500 with Jimmie and 2006 and that whole experience of jumping in with him and how that may compare with what a championship might mean to you in this role?

DARIAN GRUBB:  That was really cool being able to step in that week.  That was a team that I had been with for several years at that point and got a lot of friends.  It was a friends and family atmosphere, much similar to what I’m in right now with the guys I’ve surrounded myself with here at Stewart-Haas Racing.  To where if you can go out there and pull off the win at the Daytona 500 against the obstacles and now we’re trying to pull off this championship against the obstacle of competing against that 99 team, if we can do that, it makes it that much sweeter because the people around you are the people that helped get you here and helped actually build the team into what it is today.

It’s very similar in that aspect, and it’s much cooler knowing if we can pull this thing off, we did it as a team effort.

Q.  Could you speak to the dynamics of working for Tony as an owner as well as having to balance the driver-crew chief relationship with them?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It’s definitely got its ups and downs with that, because Tony does a really good job at separating the two on Monday through Thursday.  He puts the owner hat on and does what he has to do to try to help run the organization and those things.

When Friday through Sunday comes along, we get to the racetrack, and he switches into driver mode.  He works for me at that point, and we do a really good job separating the two to where we get to the racetrack, and we have a common goal.  We run towards that every week.

Q.  Darian, now that it’s down to the two of you guys for the championship, when you sit on the box and decide on pit calls, is it easier because all you need to do is focus on the 99, or is it more challenging because you’re still focused on winning and everybody could be doing all sorts of other things out there?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I’d say it’s more of the latter there.  We planned to go down there and do everything we can do to win the race.  We are, of course, competing against the 99 for the championship, but regardless of what else happens out there no matter where he finishes, if we can win the race, it’s a guaranteed championship for us.  Even if he finishes second and leads the most laps, we have the tiebreaker at that point with the number of wins.

So knowing that, our goal going down there is to be in front.  That is all that matters.  That matters for all 42 competitors that we’re running against, not just the one.

Other than that it comes down to if we’re running 5th or he’s running 8th, it becomes a matter of position and trying to wonder what the 99 is doing and those things.  But we have nothing to lose.  We’re coming in second.  We can’t finish any worse than second.  All we can do is go out there and shoot for the win.

Q.  That being said, how challenging has this season been?  I’ve had crew chiefs talk about there’s been so many Hail Marys thrown out there and how many risks are being taken by other crew chiefs.  How do you deal with that?  How do you not get sucked into that or how do you be a part of that and play a part of that game?  It seems there are so many different decisions being made out there, especially with the what the tire does.  How does that factor in and how does that play a role in what you decide to do?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It definitely decides that every week.  We always have those options of what you’re going to do and how bold you’re going to be as far as the calls go, but that is the nature of the sport.  The competition level has gotten so close, those calls make the difference now whether you can win or finish 10th.  That seems to pay off at times for certain people but then other weeks it doesn’t.

But thinking back to the first Phoenix race, I came in for a two-tire call and everybody else who did four.  We had a 4-second lead with 27 laps to go, and then the caution came out, And that forced us back in to the guys with four tires ran all over us and we finished seventh.  But we were going to walk away with the race on that one if things had played our way.

You have that every week.  You have those scenarios where you have to play the game.  It’s another one of those where Phoenix I waited for everybody else to pit and made a decision to do fuel only so we could make up time on the racetrack.

It’s a game everybody’s playing.  You sit there and watch the 22 car stayed out, and the two tires and all these things.  That is the topsy-turvy racing.  You see the guys from the back come to the front the way the strategy plays out.  It’s even more of a game and deciding factor every week.

That is part of what makes this job so fun.  Now you can affect the outcome a lot more with the decisions you make, and the calls you make on top of the box with your experience.  It’s just a matter now of making sure you have all the data you need to have to make the correct decisions.

Q.  How much does your stomach churn when you’re waiting to make those calls or making those calls?

DARIAN GRUBB:  A little bit.  It’s almost one of those things that that’s what we live on.  Your stomach doesn’t really churn because it’s on an adrenaline high at that point.  You’re making the call and feel like it’s 100%.  The stomach turns afterwards when it doesn’t work out or something like that.  It’s the heat of the moment.

You have to go with what your gut feeling is and what you think you need to do to try to win the race.  The best finish possible.  Then afterwards is when you have to deal with consequences.

Q.  Could you describe what your relationship is like with Tony?  How would you describe it and how would you say it’s changed or grown over the two years you’ve been working together?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I would say it’s good.  We’ve gotten to be pretty good friends on and off the racetrack.  We’ve spent a lot of time together.  We know each other a little better than we should at times.  We eat, sleep, and live together pretty much half the time at the racetrack, and try to accomplish on the racetrack.

So it’s a tough dynamic, kind of a love-hate brother relationship at times.  When you feel each of you needs to do something, but it’s the best of times when you can go out there and make things work and get on top of the victory stage and take those pictures with the trophy.

Q.  When he hired you, did he explain what he’s looking for?  Because he’s only had a few crew chiefs.  Was he looking for something specific in a personal relationship with a crew chief?

DARIAN GRUBB:  No, not really.  As I said, with me it’s more one of those things that they already had some discussions with what they were going to do.  They were looking more for the comfort level of the Hendrick chassis, and the Hendrick program and what we were doing here.  Needing somebody that knew what was going on with this side of the organization, more so than just a crew chief type or anything. (Indiscernible).

Q.  Kind of following up on that.  What can you take away from your time at Hendrick in terms of the championships won with them and what Tony’s experience has been winning the two to apply to this weekend?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I think a lot of it is just like I said before, just letting the people around you do the job that they know how to do and making sure that everybody does pull their weight and everything else should come into play.  You shouldn’t have to change your game plan to go out there and win a championship.  Because if you have set your team up properly before that, that’s what puts you in contention.  The more you have to change things to try to win it, that’s when you dig yourself a little bit of a hole.  Hopefully we’ve got a championship winning team.

I know I feel like we have that.  All the guys surrounding the 14 team, we’re really looking forward to going out there and trying to get the job done.

Q.  Tony has said over the past few weeks post race that he’s not really feeling pressure right now.  You guys have nothing to lose.  I know you said that yourself during the course of this teleconference.  Do you feel that way?  Do you not feel pressure on this?  Do you not feel like you guys have something to lose?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Not at all.  We can’t finish worse than second.  It’s the best we’ve ever run in the three years we built Stewart-Haas Racing into being a championship contender.  Now it’s about going out there and getting the job done this week.  We’ve got one person that we really have to beat to win the championship.  Other than that, we’re competing against the other 42 competitors like we always do.  We’re trying to go out there and win the race, and that controls our own destiny.

There is really no pressure.  We feel like we’ve already accomplished what we need to accomplish, but bringing the trophy home would definitely put the icing on the cake.

Q.  When you talk about that one person you have to beat.  How focused are you on the 99?  Will you be very aware of what they’re doing on pit stops and all of those other things?  Or do you have to balance that with making sure you guys run your own race?

DARIAN GRUBB:  We’re going to concentrate on running our own race.  We’re going to pay attention to what they’re doing, and they’re going to be paying attention to us.  The more you try to play the game and outrun that guy when ten other guys are going to sneak by you and pull off a Top 10, you’ll be sitting back there trying to figure out how many positions do I need to be in front of him.

We want to go for the win.  That is our goal from the time we unload.  It doesn’t matter what anybody else does at that point.

THE MODERATOR:  Darian, thank you so much for your time today.  We appreciate it, and best of luck this weekend in Miami.

DARIAN GRUBB:  Thank you very much.

THE MODERATOR: Welcome to our NASCAR teleconference and NASCAR CAM today featuring our two-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champ Tony Stewart in advance of Sunday’s race at Martinsville Speedway. Tony drives the No. 14 Office Depot Mobile One Chevrolet, is sixth in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, 19 points behind our leader, Carl Edwards. Tony has got two career wins at Martinsville.

We appreciate your time and your patience today. Got a couple of lead questions for you specific on and off the track. First of all, your Stewart-Haas Team has announced some good news on the sponsorship front, can you talk about that?

TONY STEWART: We have re-signed Kraft. So really excited to have them on board again coming up this year and very appreciative of their support and everybody at Stewart Haas Racing. It’s been a lot of fun to work with them. And they are not to the level of Office Depot and Mobile One on the car obviously, but nonetheless they are very important to us and we value their partnership.

THE MODERATOR: Before we go our media questions, we have one fan question for you via our @NASCAR account on Twitter, and @ChrisMeyers (ph) would like to know, if you were not driving in NASCAR, what else would you be doing?

TONY STEWART: That is a really good question. You know, I’ve been really — I had a lot of fun this year. I ran the Talladega short track Saturday night before the big race on Sunday and ran in the World of Outlaws Sprint car series, and I guess if I were unable to drive at the NASCAR level anymore, I would love to go back and race the Sprint cars as much as possible. We ran 25 races with the wing Sprint car this year and had a lot of fun doing it.

So I guess if we were not running NASCAR, I guess that’s what we probably would do.

Q. What was been the biggest difference in the performance of the old car versus new car at Martinsville?
TONY STEWART: I’m not sure that it’s been a huge deal other than the fact that we are running on bump stops now on the front that have really changed the ride quality of the car, the way it transfers weight to the front and when you go into the corner, under-braking is a lot different. And depending on which side and whether it’s the left front tire or the right front tire, that engages the bump stop first, changes the way that that feels and that transition.

I think once it gets down to them, it doesn’t feel a lot different other than the ride quality. But definitely the transition of being on the gas, on the brakes and sitting on those bump stops is probably the biggest thing that we have seen.

Q. Martinsville this weekend, is it drastically different for your mind-set going in? How hard is it going from restrictor plate racing down to a short track, or is it just a switch?

TONY STEWART: It’s just a switch. We, you know, we still have got in street cars when we got out of the airport and drove ourselves home and that’s a different deal than driving at Talladega, too.

A week in between, you start practice on Friday and you remember where you’re at and what you did at Talladega really doesn’t — you don’t think about the driving style differences. When you pull in there you realize that you are at a lot different place and you is settle in really quickly and the mode of back to what you have to do to be fast at Martinsville.

Q. What happened with Ryan Newman? It seems like a lot of different teammates were having issues with their other teammates.

TONY STEWART: Yeah, that’s the risk of running with your teammate. Obviously Ryan didn’t do anything wrong there. I got out on time there as far as where we were at, a tri-oval and I got out of sequence with him and got moving around on the rear bumper trying to get caught back up to him. It just happened that when we caught the double zero car, that I was coming back to the right, and you know, it got Ryan turned sideways.

So you know, I have to take 100% of the blame there. Ryan was doing a great job and I was very comfortable running with him. I just made a mistake and like I said got out of timing with him going through the tri-oval and cost him a bad day.

Q. After you get through Talladega, to any degree, do you feel like you’ve got three guys in front of you where you want them? In the last ten races, you guys have got seven Top 10′s, started with two wins and had a couple bad races and now you have two more Top 10′s. Is the team in a position to take it up another notch? How do you see these last four races?

TONY STEWART: Honestly, I mean, I sound like a broken record. I know when — I know it frustrates you guys, but literally we are taking it one day at a time.

We are going to Martinsville this weekend with Ryan’s package that he’s been running really well with and we have kind of struggled there so we are going to start with Ryan’s setup and work our way from there. We know it’s going to be a little different for me and our driving style. Mine and Ryan’s are a little bit different. But I feel that’s a good place to start for the weekend.

The last four weeks are tracks that I like and that I’ve had success at, but you know, every time you go to a track, it’s a little bit different than the time before. You know, your setups change, your packages change and you hope that you’re staying ahead of it.

So it’s hard to tell whether we are going to be able to be where we need to be, but we are going to do everything we can to be as good as we can be in all four of those races.

Q. I’m working on something with Hendrick Motorsports about to get their 200th victory here somewhere in the future. You have seen them from a pure competitor standpoint, and now it’s still a competitor. What’s your perspective? Have you tried to emulate that Hendrick Motorsports model at all, and what’s your perspective on how long they have been able to be so successful?

TONY STEWART: It’s hard to pattern yourself off of them because I have not been internally involved with Hendrick Motorsports. Obviously we have our relationship with them on the engine and chassis side and technology that we share, but it’s hard to know the inner workings without being directly involved with it.

From my standpoint, been easier for me to emulate what Job Gibbs has done and what we saw over there. I think that’s the great thing about Stewart-Haas Racing is that we have had so many guys come from so many different organizations, Bobby Hutchins coming from RCR, and Dale Earnhardt, Inc., and Ryan Newman and Matt Borland coming from Penske, and myself coming from Job Gibbs Racing, Darian coming from Hendricks.

We are trying to take the best of what we have seen from each organization and trying to incorporate them into our own package and try to make our organization the best we think it can be trying to take the positives we saw in each of those organizations and take the lessons learned that we think are negative from those and try not to make those same mistakes. We try to learn from a lot of different teams and try to take the best from each.

Q. Are you at all surprised that there’s two Fords at the top of the standings right now?

TONY STEWART: I don’t think anybody is surprised at any order of the 12 guys that potentially could be there. I mean, it’s just circumstance that they are both there together.

But does it surprise me? No, not at all. There were, in my opinion, eight guys that started the Chase that could be in those first two spots right there, and Matt and Carl were obviously two of the guys that I had on that top eight list. So does it surprise me? No.

But as far as if you’re referring to the manufacturer side of it, that doesn’t surprise me either. They have made big gains in the horsepower this year and I feel like on the Chevy side we are starting to do the same thing. We are starting to hit our stride on the power and starting to make that ground up and hopefully get by.

Q. A follow-up to the Hendrick question, with those guys sort of down in the standings at some point, is it possible you could go to Rick or that organization and go, hey, could we get one more thing to finish up the season to try and win this championship for Chevrolet?

TONY STEWART: I don’t think that there’s anything that they are holding back from us that we could ask for to be honest. We work very closely with them every week with the setups. Our engines — I have the ability, and Ryan does, too, if we feel like we aren’t getting a good enough engine, we can sit there and look at all six dyno sheets for our engines and hand-pick the one we want if we so desire.

I have confidence that our relationship with Rick and his whole group is very solid and that we are getting everything that we need from them. It’s just our job to execute it and finish it out on the weekend.

Q. You’re the only driver that’s won the championship by accumulating season-long points and by winning the Chase. Is there — so you’re the only guy that can tell me, is there a huge difference between it, the way it was and the way it is now?

TONY STEWART: Absolutely. I don’t think there’s anybody that’s mathematically out of it with four races to go here right now.

So with the old format of the season-long-standings with four races to go, you only had a handful of guys that still mathematically had a shot to win the championship. And you were really racing two to three guys at the most at this point, where there’s nobody that’s really eliminated from the opportunities to win this championship with four races to go, all 12 guys are still in it.

So it’s definitely a lot more stressful trying to do it in a ten-race format versus a 36-week format.

Q. As competitive as this series is, with the move to fuel injection, do you feel a team could hit on something that gives it a distinct advantage?

TONY STEWART: It’s definitely possible. Any time that you introduce anything new to the sport, it’s a matter of how quick does each organization find out how to maximize that opportunity. There’s going to be some teams and organizations that are going to figure it out quicker than others.

But yeah, it’s definitely a possibility. I mean, the good thing is that NASCAR has been doing a lot unified testing. They ran at Talladega last week. I know we are testing Monday after Martinsville. We ran Charlotte and they had cars at Kentucky earlier this year, and at the Phoenix open test.

So there’s all of these manufacturers and organizations team-wise that have had the opportunity to put quite a bit of time on them. You never know. I mean, when we go down to Daytona and we get to the first four or five races, I think that’s definitely when we will see that if there is somebody that does have an advantage.

Q. Different topic, can you talk a little about your go-kart experience? We have a go-kart league down here for kids and I just wonder if you could address that when you were a kid.

TONY STEWART: It was an awesome experience for me. I started off local county fair ground racing every Saturday night and by the time I was 14 years old, I was traveling on a national circuit and got to go to more places and more different states and cities throughout the year than most of the kids that I knew got to go to before they even graduated high school.

So I thought it was very valuable. It was neat to meet different kids from different areas and learn their backgrounds and learn what they do and be able to travel and have something that I felt like I was really privileged to do as a kid, to get to go to all of these neat places and states that a lot of my friend had only heard about.

Q. New Jersey looks to be getting a Formula 1 race in 2000134 and your reaction to the possibility that we could have two Formula 1 races in America within the next two years?

TONY STEWART: Very exciting actually. To think that we are getting one back is huge. Obviously we were all sad that we lost it from IMS, but glad that Texas picked it up. And now to have possibly a second date on the schedule, I think it’s real complimentary of what everybody in the States are doing to get F1 races here. I’m looking forward to it.

I know if we get a chance to get a day where we can sneak over, we have had the offer from the McLaren team to come visit and definitely want to take them up on that if at all possible.

Q. With four races to go, what specifically is the team working on at the shop each week to get that championship, is there one thing that Darian and the crew are working extra hard on to make that possible for you?

TONY STEWART: I hope not, because if they are working extra hard to do something, it’s something they should have been doing all along.

This sport is so hard and technical to begin with that you can’t go into each week not giving 100%. And you’re not going to get more than that. You’re only going to get 100% out of each person, and if they are not doing that, then you know, there’s plenty of guys out there that will work that hard. But I feel like our guys have done a great job of keeping the morale up and the team, it’s been a trying couple of weeks for the 14 car and the 39 car.

But I feel like our guys and our attitude in our shop is very, very positive right now. We have got a really strong group of true racers that have been involved with the team, guys that have been involved with racing for a long time in different series. They are really keen and savvy when it comes to keeping their morale high and realizing that one bad week doesn’t take it out of it until they say we are mathematically out. I feel like they have been giving 100% all along.

Q. You mentioned your go-kart experience and certainly you probably have more experience in a variety of vehicles than just about anybody. Could you tell fans the biggest difference between IndyCars and stock cars and what changes in light of the tragedy that IndyCar just had, what changes would you make to an IndyCar that would improve safety?

TONY STEWART: You know, I don’t have an engineering degree, so I’m not sure that I’m smart enough to know what to do. It was a freak accident. It was something that nobody ever wants to see happen, but unfortunately it’s a part of all of auto racing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s NASCAR or IndyCar or drag racing or motorcycle racing. It’s just an aspect of our sport and everybody involved knows that and understands that and accepts it going into that.

You know, it’s definitely something that none of us wanted to see but I think it’s been very easy and unjust for people to sit back on Monday and point fingers and say, well, this needs to be done and that needs to be done. And most of the people that are making the suggestions are not even people that are involved with race teams or sanctioning bodies and really don’t know what they are talking about.

It really boils down to the basics of, it’s auto racing. Auto racing, football, hockey, they are all dangerous sports. But we all love to do it and the fans love to watch it.

I think safety has come a long way in all of our sanctioning bodies across the board. But you’re still not going to make it 100% safe all the time, and everybody is doing everything they can to keep incidents like that happening in the future. But it’s never going to be 100% safe. You’re always going to have that element of danger that’s involved in it.

Q. As far as that goes, trying to research this, and I was amazed at the amount of tragedies in the past, even among fans, and as far as looking at the past and looking at all of the safety changes that have happened, say in the last decade, it’s amazingly a lot better. But do you think that fans and some people, they just kind of knee-jerked and they missed that fact?

TONY STEWART: I think they definitely miss that fact. If you look back in the 50s and 60s, it wasn’t uncommon — and obviously I wasn’t around, but this it isn’t the first time this topic has been brought up. But it wasn’t uncommon at all to read in the paper that there was a fatality at auto racing automobile weekly back in those days.

But like we said, safety has come a long way and technology has come a long way. And obviously to each of the sanctioning bodies, whether it’s NASCAR, IndyCar or Formula 1, AMA, NHRA, they all have dedicated groups to looking to the safety aspect of it to make it as safe as possible.

If you look at the technology behind the safety equipment, I think it’s proved that aside from worrying about just putting a product out there for the fans to watch, that these sanctioning bodies do care about the participants involved and the spectators are doing everything that they can to make it as safe as possible: The head and neck restraints, the soft walls, the collars that the riders wear in AMA, the motor cross tracks, John Force’s group with the Medlen project with NHRA, there are a lot of talented and really smart people that have really dedicated a lot of money and time to making our sport and all forms of racing as safe as it can be right now.

THE MODERATOR: We thank you for your time today and patience and wish you the best of luck in Martinsville this weekend.

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today’s NASCAR video teleconference. Our guest today is Ryan Newman, driver of the No. 39 U.S. Army Haas Chevrolet in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Brian is coming off a strong effort yesterday at Chicagoland Speedway finishing eighth while team owner Tony Stewart captured the victory. Brian captured his only victory in New Hampshire in July where he won from the pole position. Ryan is currently seventh in the points standings for the Race for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
Ryan, as we head into the second race of the Chase where you’ve been successful with three victories, talk a little bit about New Hampshire and your strategy for this weekend.
RYAN NEWMAN: New Hampshire has always been a good place for me. I’m not a hundred percent sure why. It’s the place of my first win, when I hadn’t won in a long while, 70 some races. I won again there. This past July we were able to qualify and finish 1-2 at Stewart-Haas. It’s a fun race, it’s a very finesse racetrack. You can’t overdrive the car there very much because it’s so flat.
I’ve always said the birthplace of track position. It’s a relatively short race. Basically you only need to stop for fuel two, maybe three times depending on cautions. You don’t get a whole lot of opportunities to work on your racecar. You start up front, you have a good chance of staying up front. It’s a place we’ve done well at. Our short track program at Stewart-Haas Racing is strong. It’s a good place for us to go after the first stop at the Chicago race.
THE MODERATOR: We’ll go to the media for questions.

Q. Ryan, just wanted to ask you a little bit about the complexion of this Chase seemed to change a little bit last week with the fact that you’re starting at a mile-and-a-half versus New Hampshire. Can you speak to how that does change the complexion given that the mile-and-a-half’s are such a key component in the Chase.
RYAN NEWMAN: Well, I was really proud of our team. We ran in the top five, let’s say, all day long. There were times we were sixth or seventh, times where we led the race. I was really proud of our performance because we haven’t run well at racetracks like that as well as like Chicago, last year we really struggled. It was a good rebound for us. Gives us more confidence going into places like Charlotte, Kansas, and even Homestead to a degree.
It’s still a 10-race stretch. It’s still made up a lot of mile-and-a-half racetracks, intermediate style racetracks. I don’t think it changes the outcome of a champion as it does the initial momentum that you can have after the first race or two.
It always has been Loudon and Dover, two one-mile racetracks that are different in characteristics, much shorter than the intermediate-style racetracks.
Just really proud of our organization and our team this past weekend to get the Chase started off strong. We’re disappointed in the eighth-place finish because we hadn’t run there all race long, especially that last run, we ran out of fuel with three-quarters of a lap to go, that’s what we got. Could have been much worse, could have been a little bit better, and we’ll go on.

Q. Do you think it served as what to expect in this Chase in terms of the mile-and-a-half’s, not dictating the outcome but showing who is strong?
RYAN NEWMAN: I don’t think it necessarily shows who is strong. It shows who is strong at Chicago. Who would have thought after Jeff Gordon won at Atlanta, a mile-and-a-half racetrack, goes to another one, he gets lapped and has a poor finish. It doesn’t show you that it can happen each and every week or each and every mile-and-a-half racetrack.
You can’t just assume that because there are all those cookie cutter-style racetracks that it’s going to be like that. The strategy can change. Just as we saw the strategy change to a non-fuel mileage race to a fuel mileage race on that last run, everybody peel off for gas and try to stretch it out. We usually see guys wait for that caution, come in, put tires on, a couple guys try to stretch it on fuel as Brad Keselowski did the first Kansas race.
It’s different each an every week. Different based on tires, strategies, the number of cars on the lead laps, and nobody can predetermine what that is going to be.

Q. Given all those factors, does that make this Chase as wide open as any as there has ever been?
RYAN NEWMAN: It’s open as much this year as it has been every year. Nine races to go, it’s still wide open to everybody.

Q. Tony’s win certainly underscores that. After all, he came in there saying on Thursday, telling the media he didn’t believe he was a title contender, yet he wins the first race right out of the box.
RYAN NEWMAN: That’s kind of my point. You can win the first one or even the first and second one as Biffle did a couple years ago and not be in the top three in the Chase, or have a championship run going into Homestead.
Doesn’t mean he has lost confidence in his team or he has 200% confidence in his team. It means in general anything can change each and every week.

Q. I know you’ve made quite a few visits to the military this year and last year. Could you talk a little bit about what that’s like for you. Do you get a little emotional seeing wounded soldiers? Do you have people in your family who served in the military?
RYAN NEWMAN: I got to go to quite a few different camps and forts, not sure what the difference is in the two. Fort Bragg, got to do some training missions and things like that. I went to Camp Atterbury outside of Columbus, Indiana, where they were doing actual training missions and setting up mock towns just exactly how they would be in Iraq or Afghanistan. People that are getting ready to be deployed in Camp Atterbury versus people that are being trained in Fort Bragg. Going to see the wounded warriors in places like Walter Reed, where people are going through life-changing experiences, it’s sad. It shows the bravery of the men that want to go back and be with their troops, soldiers, and their friends at the same time, go back and battle and be part of their team they were forced to leave.
U.S. Army American soldiers are amazing people.

Q. I was wondering, was Tony’s win at Chicago beneficial to your team in any way? If so, how might that be?
RYAN NEWMAN: I mean, from our standpoint, yeah, it’s big for the shop. Our over-the-wall crew didn’t get to Victory Lane, it’s still big for the shop. Back at the headquarters, people that are working more days than we are at the racetrack, it’s huge for those guys that are assembling racecars, gives us confidence in the pieces they’re bolting together. Even though our setups might be a little bit different, they’re virtually the same when it comes to gears, rear-ends, things like that that make a difference. So that confidence is huge for everybody. That was big. We appreciate his victory because of that.

Q. Does having to stay an extra day to run a race, it’s not the only time you’ve done that, that extra day, how does that impact what you are trying to do as far as getting ready for next week’s race?
RYAN NEWMAN: It was unfortunate because Scott told us it was close to a sell-out crowd. It was going to be a great afternoon of racing on Sunday, then Mother Nature kind of changed the plan.
It really shortens up our next week. It doesn’t necessarily change anything. There are some guys that are overanxious and overexcited, which we didn’t see at Chicago like we saw at Richmond with the energy that went into the start of the race.
I don’t think it changes much, it just takes a day away, three-quarters of a day away from our schedule the following day we would have used. Fortunately for me I didn’t have anything scheduled or planned business-wise, it was more of a personal day. Didn’t change my schedule much.

Q. I wanted to get your analysis. The rule situation that affected Matt Kenseth yesterday. Certainly that could have affected you in getting assistance from another car on the last lap. Obviously it’s written in the rule book that it’s not allowed on the last lap in that situation and Kenseth was penalized. If that would have been you, you potentially could have been in that situation. Looking at the way that rule is, what happened yesterday, is there something that you would think of that could be looked at to tweak that rule, improve that rule, change that rule, or is it fine that you can assist a car any other lap except the last lap?
RYAN NEWMAN: The answer is, no, I think it’s fine the way it is. I personally forget about that rule. I was looking for somebody to push me that last lap running out of fuel coming off of turn two. It’s not something typically we as drivers have to worry about. At the same time, if it does happen, there’s never usually that arranging of the stars for somebody to come push you and assist you.
Obviously for him there was. I think that there is good merit and a good understanding as to why, because it can have such a huge influence on I guess maybe the extra team aspect of it. I think he was pushed by one of the Fords. I don’t remember if it was the 34 or 38.

Q. 38.
RYAN NEWMAN: He was pushed by a non-team car, if that makes any sense.

Q. That could have been one of the Hendrick cars that weren’t in the running. Through no fault of your own, you potentially could have won.
RYAN NEWMAN: I don’t think that is good to have our sport affected by that because it has so much of an adverse effect on the other guys that maybe timing-wise they didn’t have that opportunity because of where they were at or who was around them. I think it’s fine the way it is, is my answer.

Q. What’s it like being in the car when you’re trying to save gas? Your job is go, go, go, go, go. In some way this is part of racing, but it goes against what you were brought up and trained to do. What are the challenges? What do you go through? Is it just part of another day at the office?
RYAN NEWMAN: Well, it’s part of what we do. There is a true challenge, a true talent in doing it. Therefore, sometimes it’s fun, but when you have the fuel mileage and the racecar to capitalize on it. Tony Stewart did. We were a little bit worse than him on fuel mileage all day long. I knew I had to save even more than what he was saving.
As he’s checking out because he can push the car a little harder, it’s hard to have that discipline to say, Hey, we have to suck it up and take the position that we’re in or take the position we need to be in in order to get to the end. That’s difficult to manage because there is no fuel gauge, no warning light, there is nothing other than the fact you’re out.
Literally for me the red light came on going into one and I was out of fuel coming off of two. The warning is of no use. Fortunately we were able to make it back around. Matt Kenseth got penalized, got us back to eighth. It was disappointing to us because we weren’t able to finish what we had been running all day long, all race long. It was still a much better finish than if we had run out 200 yards before that. We would have been 12th to 14th, who knows.

Q. How do you save gas in a race like that?
RYAN NEWMAN: It’s funny because everybody has a varying opinion and there’s different ways of doing it and there’s different ways of capitalizing on doing it. In the end, number one, you have to have a good racecar. If you don’t have a good racecar there’s no point in saving because you’re going to be the last car on that lap anyway.
It’s just energy conservation. To me it’s self-explanatory, that’s why I chuckle. I don’t mean that in a bad way. You use the brakes as little as you can, you get on the gas as little as you can. The way a carburetor works it pulls fuel when it pulls air. The revolutions of the engine have an adverse effect when you are out under power because of a carburetor compared to a fuel injection which is going to be a whole different question, a whole different set of answers when you ask me that question next year. That’s basically it.
You have to have the car to go along with it and fuel mileage to go along with it. Your fuel mileage can be so poor that you may not have enough to make it to the end. You saw a couple guys in that situation yesterday.

Q. I saw Junior shut his car down during caution laps, I saw Keselowski put the clutch in when he’s entering a turn. Anything else out there that we don’t know about?
RYAN NEWMAN: Part of it is using the brakes. That’s why I said, conservation of energy. If you’re using the brakes, you’re dissipating that energy into the racecar. That energy is a by-product of the fuel that you burn. If you can put that to the racetrack instead of to the racecar, you’re helping yourself fuel mileage-wise.

Q. These kind of races that come down to fuel mileage, are they okay with you?
RYAN NEWMAN: It’s a part of what we do. If we were racing solar-powered cars, it would be who had the best battery and best charge at the end. It’s part of what we do. In order to do what we do at the speeds we do it, we need some kind of fuel. That’s gasoline.
It’s always been a product. NASCAR has refined it to the point that now you’re seeing cars running out within a lap, not within 10 laps as it was 30 years ago.
It’s fine with me. It’s a part of what we do. I like the challenge of being able to save more fuel than other people with a good racecar.

Q. Using your mathematical abilities here. The points system, when they reset the points, there’s only 12 points between the No. 1 and No. 12 guy. Here we go into the first race and, boom, a couple of guys just slide down and Tony jumps way up. In the past it seems like the first two or three races, there’s a couple guys that are going to almost get eliminated. Do you think the new points system is going to have an effect on that? Do you think about that when you look at those points?
RYAN NEWMAN: The new points system doesn’t have any effect on that difference or that delta. It’s a smaller number because the difference between one position to another is a smaller number. It’s not going to change anything with respect to that.
Yeah, I mean, going off your first comments, 1st to 12th, doesn’t seem there’s that much of a reward for winning in the pre-season I guess you could say. It is what it is and everybody has to deal with the same rules.
I think it’s fine the way it is and we’ll go on.

Q. Tony Gibson, your crew chief, he’s a kid that grew up in Daytona. You’re in the Chase now. You have to rely on him even more at this point, I imagine, in races like Chicagoland.
RYAN NEWMAN: What’s your question?

Q. Just leaning on Tony Gibson more for his pit strategy.
RYAN NEWMAN: I don’t lean on him any harder in the Chase than I did the 26 races before that. I expect certain things out of him. He expects certain things out of me. We expect things out of the pit crew, tire guy, spotter, everything else.
We’re doing the same job; we just have to do it a little bit better. I don’t think leaning on a person makes them do a job a little bit better. It’s a matter of communication, teamwork and performance. I don’t see it as leaning on Tony Gibson on a 10-race Chase is going to be beneficial to me.

Q. How about working with Tony these last few years? Seems like you really have a chemistry with each other.
RYAN NEWMAN: We have a lot of fun. We have a lot of things in common away from the racetrack, which gives us something to talk about when we’re not talking about springs, shocks and sway bars. At the same time we have a good relationship on the racetrack.
I think he’s a great team leader. That’s one of the things I look for when I was looking to make this transition to Stewart-Haas Racing. He’s a good team leader. What he does with the race engineer, all the guys, was really good. I saw that beforehand. He was fortunate enough to bring those guys over. That’s been a big piece of our success.
I also want to commend all our guys for being such good mechanics and having a racecar that’s there for me each and every lap, each and every race. It’s something a lot of teams lack.

Q. You mentioned earlier about getting your first win at New Hampshire. Is there anything in particular that you remember about that race?
RYAN NEWMAN: I remember that I was trying to lap Sterling Marlin who was the points leader at the time. Kurt Busch was giving me little love taps down the straightaways, corners. Never really shook me loose, just made me realize that he was there. We all know the track is one of the most difficult to pass at. I think it was a little more difficult back then even more so than today to pass.
I had Kurt breathing down my back. I forget what lap number it was that the rain finally came. I had virtually no brakes left in the racecar. We had air in the system. I was pumping the snot out of the pedal down the straightaway just trying to get the car to slow down. Between trying to lap the guy that’s leading the points and having Kurt breathing down my back, it was textbook. I couldn’t have asked for the rain any sooner because I needed it when it came and it worked out for us.

Q. Did that do anything for your confidence?
RYAN NEWMAN: It was big for our confidence. That was our second win as a team because we had won the All-Star Race before that. We felt that we had been knocking on the door several times. We were close at Richmond earlier in the year. Ran second to Stewart. We had had good racecars every week. I was inexperienced. You have a lot of drive to get that first victory, that first points win, not that I don’t now. Even though it wasn’t the end of the race, we weren’t three-wide backwards at the start/finish line, I was proud of the team effort going into that race, being able to hold off Kurt, not crash Sterling, not upset the sport in getting my first victory.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much for your participation today, Ryan. Best of luck this weekend in New Hampshire in the second race of the Chase.
RYAN NEWMAN: Thank you.

Ryan is currently tenth in points in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series points standings, and tied with teammate and team owner Tony Stewart. In 19 starts at Michigan, Ryan has collected one pole two, wins and four Top-5 finishes.

Ryan, as you head to a track that you traveled to many times as a kid, talk about what would it mean to collect another victory at Michigan, especially considering it being Army’s birthday this week and your first Father’s Day.

RYAN NEWMAN: Well, it’s special for a lot of reasons, and I’ve always considered it home. It’s one of the first places I ever came and saw a NASCAR Sprint Cup race and as a fan, and just kind of like coming back home for me.

So mix in having U.S. Army on the race car, their birth die, 236 years strong, the cool factor of having bud Moore on the race car and as you said the decorated veteran that
he was and is, just being Father’s Day, first time for me having my dad there and coming back home, I look forward to it. I hope the race car is as fast as all of the hype we have built up into it.

Q. Bud Moore being on your car and everything, and the Hall of Fame just announced Dale Inman is going to be inducted, wonder if you’ve met these guys and what’s your sense of history of what they have done in NASCAR many years ago?
RYAN NEWMAN: Well, I had never met Bud Moore until a couple of weeks ago and was honored to meet him, especially after watching his biography on TV talking about how he was involved with the war and how influential he was and the command that he was with. That’s one part of it.

The other part of it is the NASCAR side of things, and you know, what he’s done for our sport, the innovations he’s made, the things he’s accomplished, and mixing those two things together, that’s why it’s an honor for me to represent him.

And then talking about guys like Dale Inman that you said, that I’ve got a chance to meet, obviously in the Hall of Fame, these are great, genuine men who have meant a lot and done a lot and some have started out with very little. Just proud to represent and proud to — and it’s an honor for me as I said to represent the Army, and then you add in a soldier like Bud Moore and NASCAR pioneer, that’s even cooler.

Q. We saw this week Kyle Busch got a 6-point penalty for being too low on the left run. A little bit of an infraction, but not huge; how do drivers look that it? Do they say it’s not much of a big deal or he got away with something?
RYAN NEWMAN: It’s tough to answer that without knowing exactly what it was on the car, if it was something that was done intentionally and NASCAR can deem that intentional, then that’s one thing. But if it was some situation where a part failed, then that’s a different thing.

So it’s hard from the outside in to say whether it’s the penalty meets the crime, but in saying that, the toughest part in my eyes was figuring out how to match this points system with a penalty. To my knowledge that’s the first penalty we have had with the new points system.

Q. Is it natural for guys to have parts break and just to be too low — inaudible — if that happened 36 times a year, he would be too low once or twice?
RYAN NEWMAN: That’s why I say it’s tough to say, because if you look at suspension components, the right front seems a lot more low than the left front does, so if the left front failed a component, then the question is, was it made to intentionally fail.

So NASCAR has to do their homework and have a study on whether it’s element analysis of the parts and pieces and how it was assembled and whenever it happens, whether it was a spring or suspension part hood, I don’t know. But that’s all of the things that need to be considered, and you know, handing out a penalty when it comes to something like that.

Q. I see that you’ve been active in rescue dogs and that kind of program for a long time. Just wonder what your passion is about that, and how you became involved in it and why you think it’s important, and I think the last thing I saw was that you and your wife have I think five rescue dogs, and I guess how many is too many when you get the house full?
RYAN NEWMAN: We used to have a rule in the house that we had to stop at four, because between my wife and I, it was only a dog per hand is all you could do to scratch and satisfy their needs.

We actually broke that rule and ended up with six and now we are back down to five. We just have a love of animals and want to do everything we can to help their welfare. So raise awareness for spaying and neutering and people going out and adapting a pet versus spending $1,000 on animal that somebody bred just to be a money maker for them.

You know, we are trying to eliminate the over population. The over-population, and therefore, the euthanization of animals.

Q. What’s the response been from NASCAR fans as far as listening to the message and then getting involved in this?
RYAN NEWMAN: Well, NASCAR fans are like anybody else. I shouldn’t say we are all — there’s a majority of us that are pet lovers.

So it’s good to see — we have got our — inaudible — of pets that talks about drivers and TV personalities and car owners and crew chiefs and their love of animals and the bottom line is, we represent as — from the NASCAR side of things, the same type of feelings and emotions that people have that are common fans out there in the real world.

So a lot of things transfer over and I think that’s what they like to see in how our relationships are with our animals.

Q. Looking at Daytona, are you looking forward to tandem racing, and what are your thoughts on tandem racing in general?
RYAN NEWMAN: I look forward to coming back there, and getting a little more experience from Daytona and Talladega, I’m sure our teams are going to be more competitive than they ever have been at that type of racing.

It’s going to be hot. It will be interesting to see how much grip there is in the race car after this spring and if we still have to run wide open or if we have to lift at all. The racing itself, I wouldn’t say is my favorite kind of racing, but I do prefer it more over the old style of drafting, I guess you could say, that we have always done there.

It’s nice to have an impact as a driver on the abilities of tandem racing, but I would rather be racing side-by-side, three-wide or four-wide or running wide open and having my car do the work than something else pushing me.

Q. I went to the ride swap yesterday with Tony Stewart and Lewis Hamilton. I was just totally fascinated. A lot of effort on behalf of your team and to come out for two days and get ready. Did you see any of that, and if you haven’t answered this yet, what are your thoughts about how Tony did it and how Lewis did it and how fascinating that would be as an general ear to watch it?
RYAN NEWMAN: I watched three minutes of it last night and saw Lewis in Stewart’s car and he did a heck of a job I thought just controlling the race car which isn’t easy to do.

Outside of that, I think it was more about having fun and creating some awareness for mobile and how great of a partner they are for Stewart Haas Racing and how basically from a racer’s standpoint, a good racer can drive anything, and I’m sure probably both of them proved that at the end of the day. I didn’t see that but I’m just speculating.

Q. Would you like to do the swap of something like that just for fun?
RYAN NEWMAN: I don’t know if they make an F1 car that I can fit into.

Q. Tony fit into it.
RYAN NEWMAN: Yeah, I got him by a couple of inches on the suit coat size.

Q. You’ve been racing Daytona about ten years how. Can you give me your impression of how racing has changed at Daytona in those ten years, how dramatic it’s been?
RYAN NEWMAN: It’s been a big change I would say for two parts. No. 1, probably the biggest part is the car itself and the way that we race around there and going from no it — what do you call it, no taxicab signs to taxicab signs to no taxicab signs in the new car and then the difference between the wing and the spoiler and the way the cars are drafting now. That’s one part of it.

The other part of it is the racetrack itself; the fact that it’s so grippy now, it was such a handling racetrack. You had to be all about getting your car perfectly set up in order to not abuse the tires or blow a tire or going back to my Daytona 500 victory, the cars were on edge; everybody was on edge. It’s a fun place to race. And it will be even more fun once the track gauges up again.

And in just those ten years as you stated, it changed a lot. The racing changed a lot, more so from the change of the race car than to the change of the racetrack.

Q. With your engineering background, the changes on the horizon with the fuel injection and the new body template, it seems like NASCAR is quickly modernizing the series.
RYAN NEWMAN: Yeah, and I don’t like the whole modernizing thing. I don’t know how to answer the fuel injection question. It’s kind of a Catch 22 where we are talking about being green and good for the environment and those things, that’s one side of it. The other side of it is I like the preservation of the history of our sport, and the fact that it is kind of rustic in many areas.

You know, a friend of mine, I said one time, before you take the carburetor off and put a fuel injection system on it, why don’t you take the 1966 truck arm suspension out of the back of the car first and make it make the racing look better. I don’t think the difference between a fuel injection versus a carburetor is going to change the way the fans perceive our sport in the grandstands, and I think that’s what we need to focus on the most.

Q. You get to do many off-track activities; can you share your most favorite off-track moments?
RYAN NEWMAN: My most favorite off-track moments: I’ve had a lot of fun doing my Army appearances and actually I’m driving right now to another one, so if the lady on the GPS speaks, that’s not somebody else, that’s her; she’s got no personality.

I really enjoyed my Fort Bragg appearance where we got to do the vertical winds tunnel. They took me down in the training areas where they do live rounds bouncing off rubber walls. It felt like they were bouncing off. I swear, I don’t know how the rubber walls kept the bullets from not bouncing but just things like that are a lot of fun and getting to meet soldiers.

And visits to the Walter Reed are special; they are bittersweet, but they are special. Things like that have taught me much more about what the U.S. Army does and is and has been doing that I didn’t realize in my years past. But we have a lot of fun off the racetrack, sometimes even at the racetrack I go and finish and do things like that, too. But getting to meet those soldiers and those people are definitely special.

Q. And do you get to do anything like say you get special treatment to go to a Super Bowl or is there anything like that that you like, also?
RYAN NEWMAN: Yeah, I’ve gone to Super Bowls. In fact, I never had gone to a professional football game in my life and I went to a Super Bowl. I was lucky back in the day to be partnered up with Gatorade because they have big Super Bowl parties and things like that. I enjoy those things, but I don’t enjoy them any more than going on the racetrack and doing
what I do and enjoying the things around the racetrack.

Q. You had a 15th and 9th the last two weeks; you guys are on the bubble. Do you feel like you are at all on the upswing or do you feel like you’re swinging into this Chase spot or where do you think you’re at?
RYAN NEWMAN: Our 15th at Kansas was partially luck. We did the fuel strategy thing. I had a miserable race car and finished 15th, which was good. We salvaged a decent finish out of something that should have been 30th. But we got caught up in wreck there at Charlotte with the mediocre race car, and really struggled — my point is, Pocono was a good turnaround for us, for our team. We had a transmission problem towards the end of the race and still finished 9th. So that was nice to have a good rebound weekend there.

And I think to answer your question, going into Michigan here, that will be one of our defining factors of whether we make the Chase or not, or at least have the potential as far as how we do here and if we can keep that ball rolling, that we finally got moving again back in Pocono. And saying that, not basing everything off of Michigan, but a big part of our summer stretch is working on racetracks that have lower grip and typically fast mile-and-a-half, two-mile racetracks. We’ll see what we can do there.

Q. Does Michigan take on any additional importance because — inaudible — wild-cards, at Infineon and Daytona?
RYAN NEWMAN: Yes and no. They all weigh evenly and you can get just as much lucky as you do unlucky sometimes or vice versa. So when it comes to — just like at Charlotte, getting caught up in the 34 and the 5 wreck, we could have been a Top-10 car that day. We were not going to win the race, at least based on the performance of our race car.

Honestly you just never know. You can speculate, but Michigan is a place that I enjoy, and it’s really a wide-open racetrack. Once you get your car right, you can pretty much have a good day.

Q. You mentioned your visit to the Walter Reed; how do you handle that? Those are very emotional, seeing the soldiers with lost limbs. I guess you try to be upbeat or try to talk about racing with them, or how do you do that?
RYAN NEWMAN: Well, you have to have a strong stomach and sometimes you have to have an even stronger brain, because they are going through some serious life changes in their life and the amazing thing is all those soldiers, at Walter Reed especially, they want to get back in battle. They want to go back with their command and friends and be part of their team. That’s part of the reason they are such a parallel between racing and what we do and the U.S. Army and those soldiers, because they want to fight. They want to go back to battle and they want to win.

It’s tough at times. Sometimes you go in and you see somebody have a reaction to you, and it’s like magic and you can just talk about anything. You can talk about sports, the weather, their trip, what happened to them, the things they have been through. And some people, they don’t want to talk about it. You just have to read the character and make the best of the first impression that you can.

Q. I asked you a couple of years ago about social media and you said you didn’t really care for it that much. You do have a Twitter account now and you do have a Facebook page. Has your opinion of social media changed?
RYAN NEWMAN: It’s not changed from my personal standpoint, and I’ve told other people this and I’ll tell you the same thing. Those accounts, my Twitter and Facebook, they are the things I’m doing, but I’m not pushing the buttons to make that message come out. So the reason I say that is because if I was as involved with my Facebook and Twitter account, I wouldn’t be able to take the time to do those things that are getting ready.

It’s kind of a Catch 22 for me. I enjoy doing what I do, whether it’s feeding my baby deer, or playing around the farm, doing things with my baby and my wife, or going to get ice cream; if I was — I’ve got an old flip phone with no Internet — or I shouldn’t say no Internet, no e-mail, or anything like that. I try to keep it simple, and a phone is a phone to me. I just have people that help me out so that because of the importance of Facebook and Twitter and social media, it’s important to the fans and it’s important to our sponsors and that’s why it’s a Catch 22, because I know of its importance; at the same time, I know of the response of the things that I like to do outside of that so that I can have time to get everything done.

Q. Are you surprised at the number of your counterparts, drivers and whatnot, that do have an active account and participate on a regular basis.
RYAN NEWMAN: I wouldn’t say I’m surprised. I understand the reason and the importance of it. I guess I’m maybe a little more active when it comes to doing things throughout the day than they are, so that’s maybe the difference.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you everyone for pore anticipating and thank you for joining us today and best of luck this weekend and happy Father’s Day.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you, and good afternoon.  Welcome to today’s NASCAR CAM Video teleconference in advance of Sunday’s STP 400 at Kansas Speedway.  Our guest today is Tony Stewart.  At Kansas Tony will be sponsored by A&E’s, The Glades, which will start its second season this Sunday June 5th.

Tony shot a cameo for their originally scripted drama series in late March and that NASCAR themed episode is slated to air June 26th.

Tony is currently ninth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup points standings and has been successful at Kansas Speedway having won there twice and having seven Top 10s in ten starts at the one and a half mile speedway.

Tony will continue to be a busy man even after the Kansas weekend for the 7th Annual Prelude to the Dream is schedule for Wednesday June 8th at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio.  The All-Star dirt late model race benefiting four of the nation’s top children’s hospitals will be broadcast live on HBP pay-per-view at 8:00 Eastern.

Tony, as you look ahead to Kansas, what’s been your key to success there?

TONY STEWART:  You know, I don’t know.  It’s just been one of those places that from the first time we’ve run at Kansas on, it’s been a track that we’ve been very comfortable with.  We always seem to know at the end of happy hour where the balance is that we need to be really good during the race.

It’s just a big momentum track, and it’s really important just like it was at Charlotte this past weekend to get in the corner well and to be able to not necessarily have to get on the gas right away but just to be able to maintain that corner speed.  It seems like if you can make your car pass through the center of the corner that you’re going to have a really fast race car the whole day.

THE MODERATOR: Thanks, we’ll now go to questions.

Q.  I wondered, did you have any issue with the not throwing a caution on those on those final two laps there where Jeff Burton spun, and is it okay with you if NASCAR calls races differently late in the race versus maybe how they would in sort of the middle or early stages of the race?

TONY STEWART:  I think NASCAR just has to be consistent.  I don’t think anybody really has a problem with however they do it, as long as they do it the same every time all the time.  And that’s probably more from a driver’s side and crew side what you want.  That way it’s the same for everybody, it’s the same all the time, and you know what to expect.  I think just the consistency is the biggest thing.

Q.  What about in the situation on Sunday night?  Were you fine with no caution there?

TONY STEWART:  Well, we were kind of in a situation that it didn’t really pertain to us anyway.  I ran out of fuel at the start/finish line or it didn’t get to the pick-up, so we really weren’t a factor in how the outcome ended up.

Q.  Can you just kind of talk about your race on Sunday night?  It seemed early you struggled, but then it seemed like things came around later in the race?

TONY STEWART:  Yeah, I was a little disappointed in the beginning.  I thought we were actually going to be able to move up through the field a lot quicker than we did.  We really just maintained where we started for the most part.  It seemed like the groove was right around the bottom, and it didn’t seem like very many guys were able to actually move up to the high side like we were able to do at the All-Star Race.

I was really surprised.  I thought the middle and top of the racetrack would be a lot better than what it was, but we were really line committed.  I couldn’t really get off the bottom at all, and it made it really hard for us to pass.  But we did get better in the middle stage of the race, I thought, and were starting to make gains on it.

But we just struggled at the end of the race with speed.  And at the end, like we said, on the last restart there, I didn’t keep the box full of fuel where the pick-up is, and it stumbled on the start.  I just tried to get out of the way and not mess everybody else’s race up too.  But we still ended up with a 17th place run out on of it.

Q.  Going back to what Jay was asking, I wanted to make sure I had you right.  When you say that you wanted things as long as they’re consistent, that’s okay.  Do you mean consistent throughout the course of the race or if they officiate the last few laps differently, just be consistent from race to race to race.

TONY STEWART:  You want to do whatever you need to do to be consistent.  You want to know that no matter what the scenario is, they’re going to make the same decision every time consistently and not change it because it’s the end of the race or beginning of the race.  You want consistency all the way through.

If something happens you want to know how NASCAR’s going to react to it, and it should be the same all day.

Q.  I want to back up a little bit to the introduction.  I’m not up on my television.  What is this A&E show, and are you in it?  Can you tell me a little bit about the sponsorship here and what’s going on?

TONY STEWART:  It’s called “The Glades.”  It’s on A&E, and this is their second season that they’ve been having the series.  We’re actually on an episode, myself and Carl Edwards and Joey Logano are on an episode that airs June 26th which is the same weekend that we run Sonoma.

But it was a lot of fun doing the show.  It’s really going to be neat to be in Kansas City this weekend with The Glades sponsorship on the car.  So it’s going to be a neat paint scheme for us.  But it will be a lot of fun come June 26th to see whether we’ll ever get asked again to act in a TV series again

Q.  Tell me what is the acting?  Did you play yourselves?  Give me the synopsis.

TONY STEWART:  Yeah, we played ourselves, all three of us were just ourselves as NASCAR drivers.  It’s a NASCAR themed show that week, so you’ll have to tune in to watch

Q.  How would you grade it?  Have you seen the show, have you seen the finished product, or just give me your review?

TONY STEWART:  Well, we haven’t seen it yet.  I don’t want to see it till it comes on.  I think it’s going to be a lot more fun for us to see it when it’s happening.  But we have seen the shows from last year.

It’s a really funny show.  It’s obviously The Glades down in Florida, so it’s a Florida based TV series.  But it’s got a lot of dry humor in it, and it’s something that I enjoyed watching.

Q.  What was the hardest part about acting?

TONY STEWART:  Acting, that is the hardest part (laughing).  You’re having to remember lines and it’s not just stuff that would roll off your tongue.  So you have to memorize lines and try to remember what you’re supposed to say.  That is the hard part.

Q.  Can you talk a little bit about your swap with Lewis Hamilton at Watkins Glen, how that came about, and is it something that you always wanted to do?

TONY STEWART:  I think the further my career went along the more that you wanted to have opportunities to drive everything.  We’ve driven monster trucks at Talladega, I mean, you name it.  We’ve driven 22 different types of race cars over my career.  And obviously having the opportunity to race in the IRL and IndyCar Series there and knowing that the final step of that would be Formula 1, it was always a goal once we got to there to just say that at some point we could get an opportunity to drive one.

Once I stopped racing in the IRL full-time and started NASCAR full-time, it was basically I thought that opportunity would never come about.  But thankfully our partners at Mobil 1 had found out about that.  It was actually in a conversation, and we were just talking about when Jeff Gordon and Juan Montoya did it at Indianapolis.  They took that ball and ran with it.

Next thing we knew they had talked to McLaren and had basically set all this up for us to be able to go to Watkins Glen and Lewis was going to have a chance to drive our Cup car, and I’ll have a chance to drive his Formula 1 car, so I’m really excited about it.

Q.  Did you speak to Jeff after he did his, and what kind of feedback did he give you, if you did?

TONY STEWART:  Yeah, he was really high on it.  I knew some of the stuff that he was going to say because my IRL experience.  But I had never ran the road courses, but Jeff was really impressed with how quick they accelerated, how quick they decelerated and just the downforce levels those cars have.

So I’m somewhat familiar with what kind of down force they’ll have.  But I’ve never run one at a road course, so it’s going to be one of these things you can talk about it all day long, but you’re not going to really fully understand it until you get a chance to sit in the car and drive it.

Q.  As a track promoter yourself, I was wondering what you would do if you were in charge of New Hampshire Motor Speedway.  I was wondering what you would do to keep interests a buzz around their chase race in light of the fact that it is no longer the Chase opener this year?

TONY STEWART:  I’m not sure I’m smart enough to know what to do in that situation.  Aside from the fact that the promoters hat that I wear is a lot smaller scale than what they have at Loudon.  But Loudon’s always a fun place.  You don’t have to generate extra excitement about it because the fans in that area are die hard racers anyway.  They come to watch the modifieds, the northeast race, they go to Stafford, they go to Thompson.  They’re dirt fans.  They go to New Egypt.  They go to Lebanon Valley.

There are just a lot of great racing in the northeast there anyway.  So I don’t think the fans care, necessarily, as much whether it’s the first chase race or not, it’s still going to be just as important.

But that whole weekend has an extra dynamic about it because you have all the northeast racers there, and any time you get a chance to race with the modifieds up there, that’s what to me makes New Hampshire so special.  It’s the only time of the year we get to race the modified series.

That’s the weekend you watch that race and watch how many drivers are standing on top of the haulers or standing in the corners and watching those cars, that’s something that you don’t normally see the Cup drivers doing.  So it shows there is an extra level of excitement for the weekend because those guys are there too.

Q.  I was just wondering if you got a chance to see the end of the Indy 500.  Maybe if you didn’t see it live, you saw the highlights.  Does your heart go out to J.R. Hildebrand and what did you think he did that caused the crash?

TONY STEWART:  Well, you feel for him for sure.  The guy was less than a mile away from winning his first Indy 500 in the biggest race of his life.  But you know what, it was definitely a mistake.  He’ll look at that a million times and realize what he could do different.

But I thought he kept his composure even when he hit the wall.  When he figured out he got going straight again, even though he was dragging on the wall, he was back on the gas trying to win the race.

But I thought his interview after the race, and I thought John Barnes his car owner, I thought those guys were a class act.  I don’t know how you can even handle that kind of situation being in the position those guys were both in.  I just thought they handled it well and with a lot of class.

They’re both guys that will be around this sport a long time.  They’re going to get their Indy 500.  There is no doubt about it.

Q.  Some of the younger drivers are having a hard time getting Cup rides because often because of economic factors.  Has that situation and the challenges changed a lot since you moved up to Cup?

TONY STEWART:  I think it’s still the same challenges.  It hasn’t changed for the last two or three years, obviously.  All these car owners are trying to – we’re all competing.  It’s just as competitive off the track as it is on the track.  The car owners are all fighting for the same funds trying to get them to come to your team.

So the hard thing and immediate thing that happens is teams start undercutting each other on prices just like in any other business, trying to make it as economical for the sponsors as possible.  So when you do that, next thing you know your budgets are getting cut and things that you’re trying to do to make your team go faster, there are areas that start getting cut in those areas.

It makes it more difficult.  I’m not sure that we’re far from out of this hole with the economy from the racing side for sure.  I don’t see it changing in the next year or two.

The encouraging thing is we’ve seen a couple new sponsors come in the sport, and that does show that we’re probably starting that upward trend again, I hope.  But I think it’s going to be a while before everybody gets comfortable again and really can put the full court press on their programs like they want.

Q.  Do you have kind of a special feeling now that you’re an owner and you face those challenges a little differently than you did as a driver?

TONY STEWART:  It’s just more difficult on days like today.  I’m going to my shop after we’re done here, and I’ve got to sit there and we have a competition meeting.  And the hard part is trying to figure out what can you do to make your program better, but you have to work within the parameters and the box that you have.  You have so many funds to work with and trying to figure out what is the most important parts to put money where to make your program the best.

Q.  Tony, can you tell me a little bit about the plot of this particular show?  Is the crime at the track or how does NASCAR get involved in this particular episode?  You don’t have to tell me who done it?

TONY STEWART:  I can’t tell you anything about it.  You’ve just got to watch it.

Q.  A lot of the NASCAR boys don’t like to say they have had some bad luck, but for you this season it has been one thing after another, like waiting for a yellow to come out for your pit stop, but instead it comes out just after you take your pit stop.  So instead of saying you’ve had some bad luck, I’ll steal a line from Rodney Dangerfield and say this year you’ve had no respect.  Can you explain to the race fans how you’re able to put up with all this no respect?

TONY STEWART:  Well, I don’t know that it’s no respect as much as it’s just been bad luck.  I’ve said it for years that there are only so many variables during the race week that you can control.  There are a lot more variables that you can’t control than the ones that you can.

It’s weird.  You’ve hit the nail on the head.  There have been so many things that happened that have never happened, but let alone week after week things like that keep happening.  We’re definitely in a slump right now, but just like anything else, it won’t last forever.

This is probably the part that I think will define what our organization is truly about.  Our guys still have good attitudes about it.  They’re not happy about where we’re at, obviously, but they have good attitudes about it that we’re going to get out of this and get going again.  But that’s something that I’m probably more proud of my guys and how they’re handling this time than when times are good.

Q.  Get a couple of wins at Kansas and Michigan following that and you’ll be all set again, thank you.

TONY STEWART:  Thank you

Q.  With all of the experience and years in the sport that you have, if you could pick one thing that’s changed our sport the most, what would that one thing be?  And did it change it for the good or did it change it for the bad?

TONY STEWART:  I would say in the big picture, not only for NASCAR but just racing in general, the biggest thing in the last 20 years has been technology.  You look back in the ’60s and ’70s, and even part of the way through the ’80s, and guys were on – I remember watching Harry Gant.  The late truck race I got to run with Harry, I remember Andy Graves tell me he walked in the trailer and was watching Harry pushing shocks down.

We had shock finders then, but Harry pushed it down, and he’s like that’s the one I want on the left rear corner.  I mean, he knew just by feel.  It wasn’t a computer telling him what to do.  Honestly, I think that’s an example of how technology has changed all of auto racing.

It used to be guys would think of something in their head, write it down on paper, and that’s how they did it.  But now it’s computers and simulation programs, and having to come up with bump stops and all of these things that technology helped develop.  That’s probably hurt racing more than anything – wind tunnels.

There are a lot of variables that have gotten into things that make everything better.  It’s made things better outside of our sport too.  It’s made passenger cars better, but the technology as much as it’s a great thing for society and for life is that sometimes it’s gotten in the way of racing and what racing was all about too.

Q.  I was kind of curious how you balance all the pressure and stress that you go through as a business owner as well as a driver?  A business owner for a Sprint Cup driver like Ryan Newman, and when he crashed on Sunday night, do you spend more time worrying about him or yourself, or do you feel that you haven’t really had added pressure since he’s come on your team?

TONY STEWART:  Well, the circumstance with his crash the other night is nothing I could control and it was out of his control too, I believe.  I really haven’t seen the replay of what exactly happened.  But whether I was his owner or his teammate as a driver, the first thing I did was check to see if he’s all right.  Then once you find out he’s all right, you have to put your focus back on what you’re doing.

Today we’ll be in our competition meeting and I’ll find out exactly what happened.  We’ll both be there talking about our weekends and how our races went.

It’s a lot easier than I’m going to be able to make it sound, probably.  But Monday through Thursday I have to put that owners hat on and pay attention to exactly what we have to do not only for myself but for Ryan also.  That part of the pressure really isn’t that hard.

I have a great relationship with Ryan both away from the track.  We’re great friends and great teammates at the track.  But I think Ryan has the confidence in knowing that I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that I give both of us the resources we need to be successful on the weekends and Monday through Thursday is when he we do that.

When we go to the track on Friday morning, I have to set that side of the program away and I have to focus strictly on the 14 car, and Ryan focuses on the 39.  We still work together during weekends, but I’m not worried about the stuff that I worry about during the week.  That stuff has to be put aside at that point, and you have to focus at the task at hand for the race weekend.

THE MODERATOR: Tony, thank you for your time today and best of luck this weekend in Kansas.

Ryan, thanks for joining us. Off to a little bit of a slow start in terms of the points. You’re coming in 32nd in the standings. Last year at this time you were 33rd. As people well remember, you went on to make the Chase and have a great season. Do you feel pretty confident about a similar sort of comeback this season?

Ryan Newman I’d like to think so. I mean, I think it’s real early to be talking about a comeback. Based on the numbers I guess you could call it that.

Honestly, I think you’re right, we’ve got ourselves in a hole. I wouldn’t call it a comeback, but we’ve got some work to do to get ourselves in position. We’ve got a long time before that issue becomes pressing.

So I feel confident that we’ve made some big gains with our racecars this year. Vegas, we actually were off a little bit. But California we had a really fast racecar and lost an engine. Daytona we were working our way up through the pack and got crashed. I feel like we’ve been more competitive in general. In saying that, we’ve still got more work to do. We’re not sitting here having won two of the last three races like Jimmie Johnson has.

Herb Branham: We’ve been trying to get a question from our Twitter account from our race fans out there. We have one from Christina. She wants to know: You’re a Daytona 500 winner, so what is the next huge goal for your career?

Ryan Championship is the ultimate. If you’re looking at a race win, the Brickyard would be really special to me. I’d say one step even more special would be the Southern 500. That to me has a lot of history and a lot of meaning behind it. That race itself would be the biggest race along with maybe the Coca-Cola 600 that I would like to win. But the championship is the ultimate goal.

Herb Branham: Thank you. We’ll go to the media for questions for our guest Ryan Newman.

Q: It seems like any more in Sprint Cup Series what rivalries we do see seem to be between teammates than between somebody with another team. Is there something about racing under the same roof as some other driver that makes you want to beat them worse than somebody else?

Ryan I think it has the biggest potential for conflict of all things we do in NASCAR, any teammate is a competitor. That sense of pressure I guess, especially with the extra hype now with the Chase and everything else, it makes it a higher level of potential for that conflict on the racetrack.

You know, I understand what you’re saying. But I think that’s the biggest reason why. You got the same equipment. You got the same a lot of things. The biggest difference is your results. That creates a little internal rivalry at times.

Q: In what ways has the success of the 48 team challenged you and your team to be better in the last couple years with your experience in Cup? How has their success impacted you in a way that forces you to get better?

Ryan Well, the real key time of their success has been in the Chase. They’ve been a successful team and obviously a successful organization the last several years. But what they do in the Chase is what makes everybody scratch their head, it seems.

I can’t say there’s one thing that we try to do to be better than them. But I will say that we try to do everything to be better than everybody else. I wouldn’t say it’s pit stops or what we try to do at a certain racetrack to be different or strategy or anything else. I think it’s collectively as a group and organization that we try to be better than everybody else. Therefore, that would hopefully make us better than the 48. At Stewart-Haas, we’re still in the process of building that.

Q: That said, is it difficult not to want to go reinvent the wheel? You say you’re trying to be better than everybody, so that takes care of the 48. When you look at what the 48 has done, how challenging is it to say this used to work but it’s not getting us to the level we want, we need to go in the opposite direction? How much of a danger is that or is that the approach that sometimes you have to be daring enough to take?

Ryan I think you kind of asked the question in two different formats because you asked if I wanted to reinvent the wheel, then you also said if I wanted to go the opposite direction. That’s two different things. Reinventing the wheel means you’re reworking what’s already there. If you’re working that, you’re going to take it to the next level. I wouldn’t say you’re going in the opposite direction.

I think ultimately you’re trying to do what they are doing, and that is beating everybody else. What your weakness is as a team or organization is what you need to focus on and not take focus away from another thing. That sounds somewhat contradicting, but that’s the way it is.

Every department has a department head and those department heads are responsible for their own focus. That, therefore, defines the organization’s focus.

For me personally it’s to go out there and just do my best job that I possibly can. We’ve obviously seen Jimmie do that, especially in the Chase. There’s no reinventing the wheel, going in opposite directions. It’s a matter of what I just always have said, is getting the job done. That to me is just doing it better than everybody else, that being the job.

Q: Is Atlanta the kind of place you look forward to as you dig your way out of the early hole you’re in?

Ryan Well, I mean, I look forward to every race. I wouldn’t say Atlanta is any different. I’ve always enjoyed Atlanta on Fridays just ’cause of my record in the cars that I’ve been given at those types of racetracks, especially there.

But, yeah, I wouldn’t say that I think of Atlanta as a place that we are going to rebound or we can rebound. I think every racetrack or every day is a new opportunity. It’s up to our team to go out there and make that happen.

Q: You had been quoted as saying Atlanta is bumpy enough that those bumps can spit you right out. Getting into turn one in the middle of three and four, you have to catch it right, it’s like surfing or wakeboarding. Since you’re so fast at qualifying in Atlanta, can you describe to the fans what it feels like to do that inside the car?

Ryan It’s really difficult from a fan’s perspective to see the bumps we feel. Even when you’re playing on a video game, Atlanta is a smooth surface, there’s not any bumps there. You can’t get that sensation or feeling. When you’re running 200 plus miles an hour going into a corner and you hit a bump that makes the car jump three or four inches, that’s a big bump. That’s big feedback, I guess is what we call it.

You know, just to have those inconsistencies at that speed is not necessarily typical. Charlotte is super smooth. Texas is smoother than it ever has been. Places like Vegas, even though they have little bumps, they’re not near as big as some of the bumps at Atlanta.

I equate it to water. When the water gets choppy, things get that much more difficult, whether you’re a wakeboarder or a skier or what. So it’s just a way to relate to the fans what we as drivers go through to get that ultimate quick lap or each and every lap to make it as fast as we can.

Q: Have you ever been surfing or wakeboarding? How good are you at that?

Ryan I’m not at all. I went skiing when I was a kid. That didn’t last too long. I didn’t think the water was going to hurt that bad when I hit it. That was enough for me. I do a little jet-skiing once in a while, but that’s it for me. If I’m on the water, I got a fishing rod in my hand.

Q: There’s a theory that once the spoiler gets put on the car that when a car spins, it decelerates more with a spoiler than with a wing, and that would keep the cars on the ground. Does that make sense to you? Have you looked at any numbers on that?

Ryan I don’t know. I mean, I think there could be. There may be some true reasoning for the speculation of that just from a drag perspective. I have not seen any numbers aero-wise in reference to that, when the car is backwards. So I couldn’t say.

I think from an aerodynamic standpoint, this is purely my opinion, that a spoiler would probably create less lift than a wing that is made to create downforce going in the opposite direction.

So if that wing is to create downforce going forward, it’s going to create a percentage of lift going the other way. I think that percentage of lift is greater than the percentage of lift than the spoiler creates going backwards.

Q: As far as your testing of the spoiler, have you done any on-track testing or relied all on simulation?

Ryan We haven’t done with the 39 team any testing in reference to the spoiler. We have had cars in the wind tunnel, knowing what the rules are potentially going to be, trying to do our homework in respect to that. The 14 has tested it at Texas. We’re just waiting our time. Charlotte will be — I think actually Talladega will be our first test, even though it’s supposed to be a different spoiler.

Q: Career start number 300 will be coming up this weekend. As milestones go, where does that stack up in your book?

Ryan I don’t know. I mean, what’s a milestone look like? Is it granite or quartz?

Q: Maybe it pays some money.

Ryan Honestly to me it’s just another number. It’s cool if you think about it to have 300 straight. From my standpoint to do something that I’ve always loved to do, that’s driving NASCAR Sprint Cup cars. It’s a number from my mental standpoint. But physically it’s nice to be able to do what I want to do for such a long time, and obviously have plans to do it even longer.

Just another number. That’s my short answer (laughter).

Q: I also know in past years when you’ve come to Atlanta, you’ve gone fishing with buddies in Georgia. Is that on the agenda? Is that something you try to do, go fishing or hunting?

Ryan The hunting, as we call it, the place I like to go, no longer exists. I do have some other places I like to go. Usually it’s dependent on the weather, what’s going on that day, what my schedule looks like. We’ll see.

But it really is a prime time, with the exception of the deep freeze we’ve been in the Southeast this year, it is a prime time to go fishing.

Q: You enter Atlanta in a similar position to last year. When you look at the way you were able to rebound last year, is there anything that you harken back to that you find yourself missing in this position going forward?

Ryan From our standpoint, we rebounded pretty quick last year. I don’t know when we were first inside the top 12 after being 33rd three races in. I know there’s plenty of potential and there’s a lot of season left. The law of averages works out for everybody except for Jimmie Johnson.

You know, I think we’ll have our opportunities. But I think if you look at 2009, when we rebounded, we didn’t keep that performance going. We had I think four or five top fives in a row, then we fell off. We maintained an 8th- to 10th-place position for the next 10 races or so, which was not ideal.

We left ourselves a lot of room to get better, which is a good thing, even though we made the Chase. I think if we can improve upon last year, then talking about 33rd at this time won’t be an issue, you know, for the rest of the season.

Q: What are your projections for Purdue with Robbie Hummel out?

Ryan I don’t know. I haven’t paid attention to any of it. I couldn’t tell you what’s going on in the world of basketball.

Q: Atlanta, this weekend you’re going to possibly set a pole record with the Buddy Baker situation and tiebreak that. Where does that fit in your career? How much do you actually place emphasis on your career on poles or is this something you naturally do well?

Ryan I think Buddy Baker is one of the 50 greatest NASCAR drivers in the history of our sport. If there was ever a record I could beat him or tie him in, that would be a big reward mentally for me.

You know, having the opportunity this week with a car that we ran in California actually, which I feel is a very good car, to go there and have the opportunity to break that record, or to stand alone in that record is pretty cool.

If I live out the rest of my career tied with Buddy Baker, I’m still fine with that. But obviously I’d like to beat it, too.

Q: I think fans’ expectations of the spoiler coming are pretty darn high. Do you think it’s actually going to change the racing all that much?

Ryan I believe it will. I think the biggest thing that we’re going to see with this spoiler, this is speculation from my standpoint, is the way the spoiler is designed, there’s going to be a lot more surface area of that spoiler on the quarter panels. I think the side drafting on the straightaway is going to be even bigger than it was with the old style car. I don’t think we have but 50% of that side drafting down the straightaway on the current car with the wing on it.

I think the fans will see more racing, even on the straightaways, if that makes sense. You’ll see more side-by-side, back and forth, nose-to-head, with the competitor down the straightaways, which I think will make places like Michigan and California, some of the tracks that are bigger, notorious for being a little boring through the middle of the race more exciting throughout the entire race.

Q: How big of a curve ball is this, getting a change like this mid-season or partial season?

Ryan I mean, it’s not that huge, I don’t think. I think that NASCAR has been working on the aero balance part of it so the cars will drive similar. We don’t want to put Goodyear in a position where the cars are driving different where we’re having a tire situation after working so hard to get back to a good, safe, consistent tire. I think that it’s not gonna be night and day. There might be a couple clouds in the sky, but we’ll be fine.

Q: Looking ahead a little bit to Darlington, what are the characteristics of that track that give drivers such headaches?

Ryan It’s the only racetrack that we go to in the entire – including road courses – where you accelerate into the turn. You let off on the straightaway going into turn one, then you accelerate up the hill. It’s unique all to its own at Darlington to have that characteristic.

You know, that stands out. You know, it used to be very unique. It was in a small group with Rockingham, when we had Rockingham, because the asphalt was similar, the tire was exact. You had to race the racetrack. I think it’s changed a little bit. You have to race the racetrack at Darlington still only because it’s so narrow, not necessarily because the grip changes so much.

Used to be easy when you came out behind somebody that came out on fresh tires to try to chase or run them down or at least keep up with them and crash your car. I don’t think you have that anymore because of the tire and the asphalt combination we have there.

Q: The words and phrases that perhaps invoke fear in drivers, particularly young drivers, where do you think the term ‘Darlington stripe’ falls as far as that category goes?

Ryan Nowhere for me personally. It’s a tough one to answer. I think some people and drivers are entirely intimidated going to that racetrack. Some drivers absolutely hate it. But it’s one of my favorites if not my favorite. I always said it was my favorite when it was the old asphalt. I don’t even consider it, to answer your question.

Q: As an engineer, we’d expect you to be somewhat of an analytical driver. Jimmie Johnson writes down notes after every race. Do you think analytical drivers like Jimmie is the kind of driver who can end up surpassing the 48 team and a jump-in-the-car type of driver?

Ryan That’s a good question. I don’t know how exactly to answer that. I think a driver has to be very well-rounded. It doesn’t have to be an engineer. Doesn’t have to be, you know, a perfect driver. He has to be well-rounded with respect to all visibilities from the physical, mental and emotional standpoint to drive that racecar to the highest capabilities possible.

The other part of that is it’s way beyond the driver. It’s part of the team. If you look at what Kevin Harvick has done this year with the same organization, but obviously with faster racecars, if he was taking notes, just started taking notes this year, you could call him — you could blame his excellence this year in taking notes.

But I think everybody is different. Some people have to take notes. Some people don’t. Some people can remember phone numbers, some people can’t. Some people can’t put a name with a face. Everybody’s different is my point. You know, I guess we’re still trying to find collectively as a group that equation to beat Jimmie Johnson, Chad Knaus and the 48 team.

Q: Do you think the naturally articulate people like yourself have the ability to give better details to a crew chief and maybe that’s a helpful trait to have?

Ryan I think, absolutely. The more information you can give to a crew chief, the better, from a feedback standpoint to make the racecar better or make the improvements or the correct adjustments.

I do my best. I know everybody tries to do their best. It’s how successful you are, who you’re working with, the team that you have behind you that makes you successful. You know, they are the benchmark.

Q: You mentioned earlier about the side drafting with the spoiler. What kind of a skill is that for a driver to learn that side drafting? Is this something like a racing 101 type of thing or is this kind of using a postgraduate course? What are the challenges in understanding that or is that an easy thing to pick up?

Ryan It’s a pretty easy thing to pick up. It’s a pretty easy thing to do physically. The hardest part of it is, you know, it’s not the in-line difference in speed as much as it is the lateral difference in speed. If you get a car you’re trying to get as close as you can with your right front fender to his left rear quarter panel, he moves left or right a little bit, you’re putting both of yourselves in jeopardy. That’s the toughest part of side drafting, in my opinion. You know, just getting that run or having somebody help push you a little bit. That’s not so big a deal as it is physically putting your right front fender, which is the most demanding fender I would say in respect to aerodynamics, right vulnerable to somebody else’s left rear quarter panel.

We don’t see it as much as we used to because that side drafting isn’t as important. We used to see guys running into each other in the straightaways trying to slow somebody else down so they didn’t get past them as quick.

Q: So it’s as much about understanding who the driver is that you’re coming up on and understanding their tendencies as much as really the whole aspect of side drafting?

Ryan Correct, yeah. It’s more important to know who you’re dealing with and who you’re working with or who’s working against you than it is to actually know the maneuver itself.

Q: You have the seven Atlanta poles, which ties the record. You have a Truck win at Atlanta. The Cup win hasn’t happened. What might be the one critical factor that has eluded you at Atlanta?

Ryan I’ve had winning racecars halfway through the race before and had tires go out of balance and power steering go out, things like that. I’ve been in position; just haven’t been able to follow through.

You know, it’s all about the entire package, just like it is for everybody else on any given weekend. I’ve always says it’s much easier to go out there and be the quickest car on one lap than it is to be the best car on average over 500 miles. The longer you’re doing something, the harder it is to maintain that level of excellence.

I’ve been very successful there in qualifying, fortunately. I’ve had some unsuccessful moments in racing. So, you know, you just take it with what you can. It’s all about hard work and effort.

Q: You’re racing for the Wildlife Project has been really building up. You helped the Michigan Waterloo Recreation Area with some work. I know you love fishing. When I bring up the idea how much you helped Michigan, I’m thinking, have you ever gone ice fishing?

Ryan Yeah, actually just this past year out — we were snowmobiling with some friends out in Utah. They had a pond up there. We went ice fishing for a little bit and caught a few trout. That was a lot of fun.

But actually that was the second time in my life I went ice fishing. First time was with my grandfather when I was five or six years old. I remember we didn’t catch anything all morning. Bored our own holes. Decided to get some lunch at 11:30 or 12:00 when it was cold as could be. Came back. We left the lines in the water. I think one of us or both the us caught one without even being there. We caught fish the rest of the afternoon. That was a lot of fun. That was my first experience. I guess about 25 years later I got my second experience.

Q: I asked that question to Elliott Sadler. He said, You’d never catch me driving my truck out on a lake.

Ryan That would be driving a truck on a lake, not ice fishing.

Q: Ryan, we were talking about a follow-up on the qualifying. How much do you feel the speed if you’re so used to it? You’re so good there. How much do you feel that speed or are you conditioned to it?

Ryan I don’t think you necessarily feel the speed as much as you actually know the input you’ve given the racecar to make it go faster. I’ve always said, you know, from 140 miles an hour on up, I don’t think that you actually feel speed until something happens to you or you hit something. Case in point, flying an airplane. Nobody knows when they’re on a commercial flight they’re doing over 500 miles an hour until you hit turbulence, then that turbulence is pretty noticeable.

When you’re running 200 miles an hour at Atlanta, I don’t think you necessarily feel that actual extra one or two or sometimes three miles an hour. What you feel is the input you give in the car to make it go faster, getting back to the throttle a little sooner, getting into the corner a little bit harder, carrying a little more mid-corner speed. Those are the things that you feel that actually make you feel what you’ve done to pick up speed over a given mile-and-a-half.

Q: As speeds get faster and faster, are you cognizant of the fact that you actually have to do so much more to get to that point on the qualifying?

Ryan Well, that’s the thing. It’s really not that much more. It’s just a little bit here and there. It’s not like you’re closing your eyes and holding on for an extra three seconds. I mean, it’s a matter of 10, 15 feet max that makes the biggest differences. That 10, 15 feet at 200 miles an hour is literally a millisecond. It’s just a matter of picking your game up a little bit everywhere to be able to get the grip out of it and match that grip to your racecar to get everything you can for a given lap.

Q: Thanks a million.

Ryan You’re welcome, times a billion (laughter).

Herb Branham: Ryan, thanks very much for joining us today. Best of luck at Atlanta and the rest of the way.

Ryan Newman Thanks, everybody.

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Part 2

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The Moderator: Welcome to today’s NASCAR Cam Video Teleconference. We’re leading up to Sunday’s Amp Energy 500 at Talladega Super Speedway, Talladega, Alabama. That will be his seventh race in the 2009 chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

Our guest today, he’s at the NASCAR Research and Development Center in Concord, North Carolina, Ryan Newman, driver of the No. 39, U.S. Army Chevrolet.

Ryan’s seventh in the series points going into Talladega. He’s had a lot of good runs there in the past. Four top 5s, seven Top 10s in 15 starts.

Ryan, we’re going to start off today, we’ve been each week on our teleconference we’ve been gathering some questions from our fans via NASCAR’s Twitter account. And we have a fan in Fort Worth Texas, Micah, she wants to know that after all the great success of Stewart-Haas Racing
this year, would Ryan Newman perhaps one day want to jump into the driver/owner ranks and give it a try?

[amazon-product]B002OEU2ZI[/amazon-product]Ryan Newman: That’s a good question. But, honestly, that’s not one of my goals. I think Tony’s done a great job and Gene Haas as well as far as laying ground work and everything else in the shop. Done a great job. I don’t know that you could ever try to repeat that or duplicate that. Other people have tried even before Tony.

So I don’t think that that is something that I’m interested in. I know that there are — it’s kind of like when things are on a grand scale, when they’re good they’re great. But when they’re bad, they’re really bad. And I don’t have any will to have those potential bad headaches.

The Moderator: Questions.

Q: Ryan, I’m wondering, what can NASCAR do to fix the problem at Talladega? The drivers obviously don’t like driving in packs, but that’s due to restrictor plates. But at the same time NASCAR doesn’t want the cars flying into the stands anymore. So is there anything in your view that they can do to fix that issue?

Ryan Newman: I know they’ve made one big step and that’s to reduce the restrictor plate size to slow the cars down so we’re less likely to get airborne.

I know the Speedway has made improvements with respect to catch fans and things like that. But ultimately we don’t want to get to that situation.

Realistically, the drivers, as NASCAR has evolved to restrictor plate tracks, have changed the way we drive. There will be times when we single-file out and there will be times when we’re four-wide/four-deep for the whole pack at times.

So it’s just a matter of excitement and strategy and the timing of those things in conjunction with what lap we’re on and what there is to expect before the end of the race, because I didn’t expect the last race there to be two cars, two groups of two cars pushing each other and may the best two-team win. I never thought that would be a Talladega race. Realistically, you never know what to expect. But I know the restrictor plate change is a big thing.

And as I said, as NASCAR has evolved, you never know what you’re going to get with the drivers and how their styles change.

Q: If I could jump ahead a week to Texas and ask you about the double-file restarts. Seems like it’s been a wonderful thing, and it seems like in most of the races we’ve seen restarts within about 25 to 30 laps or so. So how has that kind of ramped up the intensity for you guys on the racetrack when that happens and looking ahead to next week, does that just give things a greater potential for a more exciting finish?

Ryan Newman: The double-file starts are more advantageous at bigger racetracks, especially the wider ones. I saw for the first time at Martinsville this last weekend that the double-file restarts really didn’t make much difference. You could put cars that were more of equal competition levels side by side. We ran side by side, at least what seemed to be side by side for longer.

When you have that on a one-lane racetrack, it’s hard to get three-wide. But you get to Texas and you can get three and sometimes four-wide in the corners.

So I look forward to it. I think it’s been a great addition to the excitement of racing that NASCAR’s involved with the double-file restarts. And Texas will be a great place for it.

Q: Along the same lines, I was looking ahead to actually Phoenix. It seems to be actually a favorite of a lot of drivers: Flat mile track. Just your thoughts on the second trip out to Phoenix and maybe how it’s different from the first trip.

Ryan Newman: Well, again, just like Martinsville will have the first for double-file restarts at that racetrack. So it will be interesting to see how that plays out. And Phoenix is a little different from Martinsville in the fact that you have a little bit more room to get three-wide at times.

I look forward to it. It’s a driver’s racetrack. We’ve always said that because it’s unique. It’s different from one end to the other. And, therefore, the crew chief can only get one end perfect, it seems, and the other one the driver has to adapt to.

I look forward to going there. It’s one of my favorite racetracks. I know Tony does the same. Those restarts will be interesting there as well.

Q: Ryan, Mark Martin recently described preparation, compared Earnhardt, Sr. and Jimmie Johnson. He said Jimmie is technical and he writes things down. Earnhardt didn’t take notes, just piled into the thing and drove it like an animal, that’s his quote. You’re probably the most analytical of drivers, with your degree and everything, how would you describe your approach and how do you think you fit in between a studious Jimmie and jump in there, pile in their car, Dale Earnhardt, Sr.?

Ryan Newman: It’s like any other sport. Every driver has their little way of doing things, whether it’s Senior’s style or Jimmie Johnson style or Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart style or Labonte style, everybody’s different. And you have to do what fits you to be the best you can be, to be the most successful in your own mind, to put it down on paper the way it’s going to be or how you are trying to project what it is you want to do. And some guys are off the cuff and some guys have to lay it out. And everybody’s different, is my point.

So to me I wouldn’t compare myself to either. I kind of do my own thing. I have an engineering degree as a background, but I wouldn’t say that distinctively drives what I do inside the race car or out of it.

Q: Ryan, I see at Charlotte you were asked about your expectations for this season. And I think you said you weren’t really sure how it was going to turn out. It’s turned out obviously pretty well. I’m curious what your expectations are for next season.

Ryan Newman: Well, the one thing that I would say for sure is I feel like we should be able to expand upon this season, 2009, and take the relationships that we’ve built and start building better and faster race cars and things like that, because of the things that we’ve learned together as a team and what Tony Gibson and I have learned, what he’s learned about the way I like to drive a car and the way I learned from things from him and how he likes to adjust on the race car.

So just being able to sharpen our pencil, per se, and shine things up a little bit, put a little polish on them and just be better than we are in all respects, from the pit crew side, from the team side, mechanically and performance-wise, what we can do to be better, we should be able to capitalize on that, what we experienced in 2009 to 2010.

Q: Ryan, I have a question about the Car of Tomorrow. I’m not suggesting like a total overhaul, but are there some changes you think that could be made possibly over the offseason that would make it a better race car at some of the tracks where it hasn’t been so great?

[amazon-product]B002BIPW8E[/amazon-product]Ryan Newman: Well, I think that there’s different ways of looking at that. From a mechanical standpoint, there are things we could do to make the car ride different or be able to adjust to it differently.

I haven’t been a big fan of the bump stops, but they are a way we tune the race car and they are a way we can create advantages. So they are one thing that’s as it’s a disadvantage, it’s an advantage to be able to have over other teams in what you’re doing to make the car ride better. Ideally, we’d not like to have bump starts, we’d have four shocks, go off and make it more simple. When you make it more complex, makes the more understanding teams be more successful.

So the second part of it are the aerodynamics of the car: I don’t know if they’re ideal. I’m not a huge fan of the wing. I think that we’d get more side drafting, have a little bit better side-by-side racing if we had a spoiler on the back of it. I think you’ll see a lot of the things we’d ideally have liked to have seen in the Car of Tomorrow for the Cup Series and the Car of Tomorrow for the Nationwide Series in the future based on things that both NASCAR and the teams have learned.

Q: Ryan, if NASCAR asked you if you had any changes inside your mind for the chase, is there something on your mind that you would say: Yeah, let’s change this about the chase?

Ryan Newman: I don’t know. I mean, I want it to be as realistic racing and not a fabricated point system or fabricated championship trail in other people’s eyes. There’s a lot of historical significance in the way we race and the way that we award points. And that’s been a successful pattern for the last 50 plus years.

So ideally, to answer your question, there’s nothing that stands out in my mind. I’ve always said I’d like to have points awarded for qualifying but that’s separate from the chase. And I still feel that we spend an entire day getting our starting positions. And if you have the opportunity to go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 for the top 5 qualifiers, I think that would be good. And I think that would, secondly, change the points before you ever start the race, which is a big hype as well, especially in the chase format.

Q: Also, Ryan, this Thursday at Michigan International Speedway, they have asked people to bring their dogs to the track dressed in Halloween costumes and the winner’s going to receive a book signed by you; did I hear about that correctly?

Ryan Newman: Yes. Actually, I’m involved in voting for the winner. It’s cool what Robert Curtis and everybody has done up at Michigan International Speedway. They’re very much into the outdoors and going green and things along those lines. And incorporating animals with the fans and with NASCAR racing is something that we’re a definitely big fan of, with our foundation, and obviously involved in NASCAR.

So I think that that’s pretty cool, and I’m proud to be a part of it. And the second part of that is we’ve got a new book that is coming out in February. Hopefully we can do it again next year, with a brand new book to offer to the fans.

Q: Last month in Atlanta you did pretty good with a Top 10 finish. And it was the first night race at Atlanta. I wanted your overall impression how you thought about the night racing in Atlanta?

Ryan Newman: I liked it. I’ve always liked night racing, whether it was in open wheel racing or NASCAR Sprint Cup racing. I think it’s more exciting for the drivers. It’s more exciting for the fans. And it’s cooler, which makes it more tolerable for us, for sure.

But just the way the light reflects off the cars, I think all the racetracks have done a great job with the lighting to make it realistic and safe for driving and it’s a lot of fun. I think night races are typically better.

I’m not saying I want them all to be night races but there’s a reason why a lot of races have switched into night races.

Q: Following up on that, do you think that we should have more night racing in NASCAR than is currently in the schedule?

Ryan Newman: I think there’s a good balance. Places like Indianapolis, I think, are always going to be day races. I don’t think that they’ll realistically put lights up around Indianapolis Motor Speedway; that’s just my opinion. But I think there’s a fine balance to have. And I’d say 60/40 night races/day races would be just about right if I had to do the math.

Q: Ryan, Goodyear recently tested a wider tire. I wanted to see if you heard anything about it good, bad, indifferent, and how do you think it will possibly change the racing?

Ryan Newman: I’m not sure. I know that they have plans of that. I know a lot of other series have wider tires as well as taller tires, not just in overall circumference but in wheel diameter.

So there’s some things they’re looking into. But I don’t think that that’s something that’s necessary for the sport. I don’t think we should, per se, reinvent the wheel when we have things that we could shine up right now in respect to certain racetracks and put on great shows for the fans. Ultimately, it’s the show for the fans that we’re working on. And I don’t think a different wheel/tire combination is the ideal way to solve that situation.

The Moderator: Thank you, Ryan.