THE MODERATOR: We are now joined by members of our race-winning team. We have crew chief Cliff Daniels and executive vice president and general manager of Hendrick Motorsports, Jeff Andrews. Congratulations, guys. We'll open it up for questions.
Q. Cliff, it seemed like before the race you were saying, hey, look, we can play this conservatively, like we don't have to go out and hit a home run today, and then your car is so fast you don't even have to worry about it. Can you talk about how that changes things for you guys now?
CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, it does for sure, and obviously coming into the day, it's nice to have the point gap, but I think the last round taught us that nobody is ever safe, and certainly with the point gap we knew we weren't safe. So it's tough to certainly just tell yourself you want to call a race conservative, and then when we knew we had a fast car -- I wanted to make sure to keep tires on it. We never did lefts or rights, we were either four tires or I think we did fuel only the one time.
So wanted to make sure we weren't really exposed, had a big tire deficit or were going to be short on fuel at any point, trying to be smart about how we called that.
And then, yeah, I think you asked about moving forward, too. Moving forward we still want to be aggressive to get wins if our car is capable of it. I think as a company now we've got to put our focus on making sure we get the 9 to Phoenix, as well, but our job is still going to go win races every week if we can, and that's our goal.
Q. Cliff, a lot of times we hear people say, hey, the goal is to get to the Final Four because you just can't bank on what happens in one race. I'd think seven wins would be a successful season, but now that you are there to the Final Four, do you feel like whatever happens over the next three weeks doesn't define this year?
CLIFF DANIELS: Yes and no. The yes part is absolutely we've had a great year, and I think it's really shown a lot of strength of our team, of our organization, but to really see that through, right, to prove what we've hopefully earned, you want to walk away with a big prize at the end of the year.
We're certainly going to be focused on that as everybody is who's in contention. You know, I think changing anything from our perspective now would be a mistake. We've had a very common mindset every race throughout the year. It's what's got us to this point, so even though we're locked in, I'm sure my team is going to get a little grumpy at me on Tuesday because I'm going to walk in and tell them we have to win Kansas. That's just the mentality that we've had all year, so we'll keep it going.
Q. Cliff, now what? You say you go in on Tuesday, but do you focus on the next few weeks, or do you specifically focus on Phoenix?
CLIFF DANIELS: Well, we're going to -- first, I think part of what helps the Phoenix focus is just the timing of the schedule. Since it's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday show, the truck is going to leave like Tuesday of that week, and the way these race formats go, our hauler didn't leave until Friday morning this week, so you're just going to have two less days that week.
So now we are very fortunate that we have a little bit more time just to really plan out the way the next three weeks can go with emphasis on Phoenix where if you're not locked in right away, you're kind of giving everything you can for that week, and to not be talking out of both sides of my mouth, we have really good cars in the system already coming for Kansas, already coming for Martinsville. I looked at them with a lot of our guys last week. Both cars look great, so we're going to finish those out like they are already in process to be, and then when our Phoenix cars get in the system, make sure that they're top-notch and ready to go.
Q. Kyle said something, someone mentioned to him that the last time a driver had eight points wins at Hendrick was Jimmie in 2007. He said some of these guys were on that team. Are there a lot of guys who were with Jimmie back then who are with you now? And how does this run compare to that run 14 years ago?
CLIFF DANIELS: From what I know of that run, because I wasn't at Hendrick then, I would say anything like that is probably hard to compare. Obviously the record that Chad and Jimmie have completely speaks for itself, and to even be mentioned in a conversation with them, first off, is a big blessing and pretty cool just to even have that.
I know that I think that there may be one guy on our team that was with Jimmie in exactly the year '07, and then three of our pit crew guys I believe have been on this team since 2009. If it's not 2009, it's 2010, that at least three of those guys have been together.
Then there's another handful of us that have been there, two guys since '13, another two guys since '14, and I'm on the group that was the end of '14, beginning of the '15 season.
So certainly couldn't be more fortunate to have learned from the champs of Jimmie and Chad for the years that all of us were with those guys, and we have some younger guys on our team that -- I think the way we operate, the way we tried to go race every week has kind of resonated within our team. We have such a strong group, it's just really special to be a part of.
Q. I don't know the exact number, but I believe that you guys are going to have a shot at the single season laps led record since it went to 36 races at least. Do you care about that, Mark?
CLIFF DANIELS: I know it's a really big deal to Larson. I didn't even realize we were going to be that close in contention to it. That's pretty cool. I think the way races are nowadays, we've seen especially with some of the races that we've had this year where we've led a lot of laps and we haven't won, I would love to be leading a category of wins per year, but I'm sure that -- what does the King have? The King has 20 something in a year, I think?
The King has got a lot, so that would be probably a pretty lofty goal to ever get to, but we'll take laps led if we can get there at the end of the day. Taking our group of guys, taking our team and all the resources we have at Hendrick Motorsports and putting fast cars on track is so cool and so fun to be a part of that hopefully we keep it going, and whatever the numbers end up, we'll be happy about.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports