"You can say I had a gorilla on my back because it was definitely bigger than a monkey.”
— Cruz Pedregon after beating Ron Capps and returning to the winner’s circle for the first time since summer 2000—126 events ago
“I don't know if we'll end up number three or not, but anyone who can run better than 4.75 during the day tomorrow will absolutely earn the spot. I think we will see some improvement over the daylight session today, just because we've all had time on the track now and it's not a blind shot. But dipping into the mid-4.70s during the day won't be easy."
— Del Worsham on changing track conditions after securing the provisional number-three position on Friday night
"John Force said he almost ran into me in Houston when I beat him. He couldn't see where I was. I said, ‘Hey, that's 'the champ' talking, how could he not see where I was?’ Sure enough, when I hit the bottles, the fire went out but the windows went black and I could not see. I was hoping that I wasn't going to run anybody over.”— Capps on the engine fire he experienced in Friday’s nighttime qualifying session
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"The way the clutch discs acted, we had to go down a different road. We had to either get different discs or treat them differently. I tried everyone and we couldn't buy different ones, so I decided to put our six-disc back in it, since it acts like it wants that anyway. A six-disc allows you a bigger window of screw-up because it has more discs to dissipate heat, more floaters to dissipate heat, you can wear more off of it and it still has aggression in the middle, where with a five disc, you ruin it. The hotter it gets, the meaner it gets, and it smokes the tires. That's what we ran into in Gainesville and Houston. The thing sees heat and when it sees heat, it gets aggressive. It's trucking along real nice, it sees heat, and it's like throwing a handful of clutch at the thing. So, it sucks the drive shaft right up and it doesn't matter what you do. So, I decided to keep it from seeing heat by putting it in a bigger pack. I can't tell you that I'm doing anything right, but I was so ticked off after the last two races. I could keep telling the car what to do and it keeps telling me no, so I decided to start listening to it.”— Tim Wilkerson on the private negotiations he’s conducted with his car after two consecutive DNQs at the previous events
"Of course, when it does that you can only hope it goes straight because you can't really steer the thing. Sometimes it will dance the front tires enough to allow you to make some corrections, but this time it hauled them up and kept them up, way up. As it got close to the center line, I had to lift or it would have been picking off orange timing blocks, breaking the front A-arms, maybe shedding the body off the car and all sorts of fun stuff.”— Phil Burkart on the big wheelie he experienced in his final qualifying attempt