“Tomorrow is going to be war. But I like the armor we're taking in there with us and I like the gun we're shooting with.” – Gary Scelzi after qualifying 3rd
"This car likes to go fast on this track.” – Mike Ashley after qualifying 9th
“You'd think that would be a good thing, to run a guy who is at his first race as a Funny Car driver, but I think you'd be very wrong to think that way. He's kept that car right in the middle for two days, and every one of his reaction times have been fantastic.” – Jeff Arend, the number-10 qualifier, on facing off against Mike Neff in his professional driving debut
"Going up there for the final session, we were pretty sure we were safe, because it would've had to have been like a world-record session to knock us out from the 8th spot. So, why not go for it? We loaded it up pretty hard, and were up there to either go to the top or smoke the tires trying. It didn't launch very clean, kind of rattling as it left, but it got out there far enough I thought it was going to make it. It didn't though, and it drove into tire smoke before half-track.” – Del Worsham, who wound up 12th, on his final qualifying attempt
"It was a problem plagued day.” – Tim Wilkerson on the mechanical woes that led him to DNQ at Vegas
"It seized the bearings in the blower drive, which happens like once every 15 years. The irony is we had the same problem that Robert Hight had in the same lane in the same race in the same round last year.” – Jack Beckman on his round-one loss to Worsham
"I was just racing, man, I had no idea he wasn't right next to me. I knew the track was hot, so I was ready for tire spin. I pedaled it out of the first tire smoke, and it hooked up for a while. After that, I was just in survival mode, doing anything I could do to get it to the finish line. You're just working at it as hard as you can, and you're hoping that other car isn't going to come flying around you.” – Worsham with his view of the first round against Beckman
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"We do not want to finish 3rd or 4th. I don't want to change my number. If I can't win the championship I want to get to No. 2. We are going to throw everything at them." – Robert Hight on dropping to third place with his first-round loss to Jim Head
“We went up there and it started to shake the tire pretty hard. And I almost pedaled it, but I didn't. And when I didn't the shake moved me to the right, out of the groove, so I had the right tire out of the groove. Eventually it went out far enough to make it hard for me to get it back and it smoked the tires.” – Scelzi on his first-round loss to Cruz Pedregon
"It looks like I let it get to the inside and it started spinning just a little and then it went boom.” – Neff on the spectacular engine explosion he suffered in round one against Arend
“We gave it our best shot, but this was a race we knew we had to do pretty good at, if not great, to go into Pomona and not have our backs against the wall. We didn't get by that first round and it cost us.” – Ron Capps on knowing his championship hopes have slipped away—again—after a first-round loss to Phil Burkart Jr., who was subbing for the injured John Force
"Totally my fault and I still have no idea why it happened. I was not pushing the tree, and I've never guessed at the line in my life. I went up there knowing we had a car that just loved going down this hot race track, while almost everyone else was losing traction, and I knew we had the car that could win this race. I even told myself I didn't have to have a great light, just a good one. We staged, I went through my normal rituals, and I got ready to go. All of a sudden, my right foot just went down, as if it had a mind of its own. It was bizarre, and I really can't explain it. I blew it.” – Arend on his career-first redlight start in round two that gave away an almost certain win against T. Pedregon, who struck the tires and posted a 7-second effort
"I could tell it just didn't want to go at the hit of the throttle, like it had an anchor out and couldn't get going, but then it started pulling pretty hard and it ran pretty well for the rest of the lap.” – Worsham on dropping a cylinder off the hit against Ashley Force in a losing effort for round two