Here is what drivers were saying after Sunday’s playoff race at Las Vegas:
NASCAR disqualified Ryan Blaney after the No. 12 failed post-race inspection. This moved everyone from William Byron and back up one spot.
Kyle Larson — Winner: “Thankfully, Christopher always races extremely clean. Could have got crazier than it did coming to the start-finish line. Thank you to him for racing with respect there. What a job done by my team, too. Just a great race car. I almost gave it away there in (Turns 1 and 2), getting sideways, hitting into the wall. Had to fight back there with our balance. They got it much closer there in the lead.”
Christopher Bell — Finished 2nd: “I feel like that was my moment. That was my moment to make the Final Four. Didn’t quite capture it. I don’t know. Coming to the checkered there, I knew that he was going to be blocking, so I’m like, I’m going to try to go high. He went high. I don’t even know if I had a run to get by him there coming to the line. Just wasn’t enough.”
Kyle Busch — Finished 3rd: “Really appreciate Randall (Burnett) and all the guys giving me a great piece when we unloaded here. We qualified up front and ran top 10 all day. Our weak spots are just restarts. I just get into bad spots and lose spots at times and can’t get my way forward, like a couple of other guys can do a better job at doing that.”
Brad Keselowski — Finished 4th: “We just executed really well on pit road, with strategy and on restarts. We executed really well, but I feel like we needed a touch more speed and a few breaks to go our way to be able to win. Kyle was just a little faster. If we were in front of him, I think we might have been able to hold him off, but he was just really fast.”
Ross Chastain — Finished 5th: “It feels good to be competitive — just be able to drive by cars. We were just a couple of adjustments away and we got it there late in Stage Two. We drove from 12th to second, and from there, just both sides of the balance — too loose for our No. 1 Worldwide Express Chevy, and then too tight there at the end. If we nailed it, balance-wise, I think we had a shot.”
William Byron — Finished 6th: “We definitely need to just work on our build and how we build loose, but our No. 24 Relay Payments Chevrolet was solid. The points are a lot tighter than we would want them to be, so we just have to have two good weeks, and hopefully go to Homestead and have a little bit better long run speed. But overall, happy with our execution.”
Tyler Reddick — Finished 7th: “Yeah, we missed it a little bit on the handling, unfortunately. We were really loose and it kind of boxed us in unfortunately. To get an eighth out of it, that was probably a better finish than we had on pace, so to get that finish is good for us. You look at it — yeah, we lost ground on the cutline, but how our car drove today, it should have been a lot worse than it was. We got something out of it and kind of minimized the bleeding.”
Martin Truex Jr. — Finished 8th: “I don’t know what we had going on. Restarting up front, we were pretty good, and then on the long runs, really good — I thought — probably a third-place car, but once we got back there — 16th, 18th whatever it was — it was just really bad on the restart. I would lose three, four, five spots every time and then once we got strung out and got going, I would pick them off and work our way forward, but then we would get another caution and I would lose a couple more.”
Denny Hamlin — Finished 9th: “Yeah, I didn’t have a very good restart the second to the last and got split three wide and lost two spots. We pitted, and the adjustment just didn’t work with the car and add the track position to it. I was just way too tight at the end and couldn’t do much. I tried to do the best we could with it, but 10th was all we had in the end and wasn’t what we had all day for sure.”
Chris Buescher — Finished 10th: “We got shuffled back a little bit in some dirty air and it was a struggle back there for a little bit. We got back going and needed some longer runs and green flag cycles to sort it out and we didn’t get it that way. We were able to make some decent work out of it and get a pretty decent finish out of the day.”
Aric Almirola — Finished 13th: “It was a solid day for us. I’m happy with the effort. We ran top 15 all day. We honestly ran eighth to 15th all day. I know that’s not great, but, honestly, for where we’re at in our program, that’s a solid day for us.”
Austin Dillon — Finished 17th: “We were fast in qualifying but narrowly missed advancing to the final round. We started the race today way too loose, but crew chief Keith Rodden and all of the guys on the No. 3 team did a good job of making adjustments to tighten us up. I put us behind with a speeding penalty, but we recovered. We were decent on the last run. The important thing is we are on the right path, and ready for Homestead-Miami Speedway.”
Erik Jones — Finished 27th: “We just blew a tire early and didn’t really have much after that for the No. 43 Allegiant Chevy. Not really sure what we had, but we just did some damage there with the blown tire and we were just off the pace after that. We tried to get it better, but just never really found anything. We’ll go to Homestead-Miami Speedway and hopefully put it together.”
Alex Bowman — Finished 34th: “We were really tight before (the spin), so I want to say it was a slow leak on the tire or something two laps prior to that. And then all of a sudden, it swung a little loose, and when I entered the corner, I didn’t even have a chance to save it.”
Carson Hocevar — Finished 35th: “It was a tough day. For as fast as we were, we got up to 14th at the end of the stage. I probably should have known something was going on. It was vibrating a little bit, but just thought I picked up some rubber. It’s part of it.”
Ryan Blaney — Finished 36th after disqualification: “I thought we could have maybe run third. That was probably the best we were gonna get to, but lost some ground there on the last stop and ran out of laps to get it back. Overall, it wasn’t a bad effort. You’re trying to get every point that you can because all of them matter.”
