"Actually, I get really nervous right before that as soon as I get into the car and get calmed down, because it's such a spectacle before the race. I get nervous with all the people around, wandering up and down pit row. It gets really nervous. I'll be in the car fiddling around with the gear shift, switches, just getting ready to fire it up. You get antsy about it and once you crank it up, you can't wait. You're impatient and can't wait for the pace car to move. You want to back up and pull forward, get your steering wheel on straight…make sure you got all that going on. You're just ready to get off pit row as fast as you can. I hate sitting still when the motors running. I'm ready to go and get off pit row."

"We learn all kinds of things. It seems the mechanics get the car handling different, the tire changes, the tracks go through a seasoning. I've learned to modify my approach each week, your outlook in the race and how you approach each race…change it a little to see if a different equation works to have more patience or save the tires early on or whatever."

"We learn a lot during pit stops. We change the spring rates for each tire. You never get the exact spring rate for each tire. We change things around to try to see what's better for us as the track gets tighter throughout the race. What we've tried to improve on is being strong at the end of the race. We've gone into a lot of races running well at the beginning, but we can't seem to keep up with the track or the car goes away.

"As for myself, we've had decent runs and been strong, which gives us good hope that we can be a championship team one day. We have to have all the breaks and everything go our way.

"I don't think I would have been involved in racing if my dad hadn't been a racecar driver. I probably would have been working in a cotton mill or something. I've always thought about that. A lot of things happened when I was younger that changed my past. When my mother turned custody of me and my sister Kelly over to my father in 1981, that's when my life changed. I didn't know much about racing nor was I even interested in it, but I don't believe I'd have been a racecar driver if that had not happened. I was really young and that put me and that put me in my father's NASCAR environment. It's hard to say, but I've probably been living in Kannapolis, N.C. working in a cotton mill."