What drivers said at Michigan after Cup race won by Denny Hamlin
Denny Hamlin — winner: “It’s fantastic. Chris Gayle, this whole team has just done a great job. We’ve been so fast throughout the entire year, just haven’t finished it for one reason or another. Feels good to come here at Michigan where we’ve been so close over the years. This is such a gratifying day to restart 11th or something like that and drive through the field. I knew I was going to have to go 100 percent to get around everybody. Just worked them one by one”
Ty Gibbs — third: “We had a very fast Camry. I wish we could have gone out and won. That was not the option from the fuel spot we are in, just very unfortunate.”
Todd Gilliland — 33rd: “There was zero warning at all. Obviously, everyone is kind of pushing it. We’ve seen some left-rears down in practice, but that was a very unfortunate place for mine to go out that’s for sure. It’s just wild that you have a long time to think about hitting the wall, but it’s all good. It honestly wasn’t even a bad hit at all, so I’m proud of my guys for making my car better throughout the day. It’s unfortunate.” To be honest, I don’t know what we were, but we can both imagine that I’m sure we were pushing it. Everyone pushes it. We pushed ours a little bit too far.”
Alex Bowman — 36th: “That hurt a lot. That was probably top of the board on hits I’ve taken, and unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of hits. So I hate that for the 48 team. Couldn’[t really do anything except think about, ‘Oh (expletive) this is about to hurt really bad.Hate that. Hate that for our team. It’s been a rough two months. I mean, honesty, we were pretty decent (in practice), I was pretty optimistic to start today. We got super loose and just had a long pit stop trying to make an adjustment to make it better. And never really got a chance to race again after that. Confident that my guys would have gotten the car better, and we could have gotten back up through there, but unfortunately, when you get in the back like that, (expletive) gets pretty crazy, and stuff like that happens.
“We’ve had a lot of speed and a lot of good race cars. Obviously today, we were off from where we needed to be. But just the support that we have from Rick (Hendrick), Jeff (Gordon) and everybody at Hendrick Motorsports, they’ll give us the tools we need to get turned back around. We just needed to get pointed back in the right direction. We’re a much better race team than this.”
WILL BE UPDATED