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What drivers said at Nashville Superspeedway

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Chase Elliott discussed the adjustments that led to victory at Nashville after a lengthy rain delay.

Here is what drivers had to say after Sunday’s Cup Series race at Nashville Superspeedway in Lebanon, Tenn.:

Chase Elliott -- Winner: “Just so proud of our team because we kind of had a setback (with a pit stop) there about halfway, and we were able to get our NAPA Chevy dialed back in and get back in the mix. It was a long day, a fun day. Just so proud of our team. We have had a pretty rough month-and-a-half, so just nice to get going back in the right direction. Getting a win is always huge, but to do it in a really cool city like Nashville is even better. Looking forward to that guitar.”

Kurt Busch -- Finished 2nd: “I got soft on him. I should have been throwing some fenders and moving some momentum around. I didn’t stick with our strength. We didn’t have many strengths tonight. We just executed really well. The restarts were so-so and long run speed was good. I just needed to stick with our strength and I messed up. I want to thank all my guys at 23XI. We have a great group of guys and girls. The way that we’re running, a second is cool, but we’re here for wins with the playoff situation. This Camry and all the TRD Camrys were awesome. I just hate it when we don’t get into victory lane and I was right there. I wanted to throw some fenders, but I didn’t get the job done. Everybody will be smiling, but I let them down. I should have come up with a better plan.”

Ryan Blaney -- Finished 3rd: “I’m not sure as the race kind of kept progressing later into the night I thought we lost some ground between some of the other cars. I thought hot and slick during the day we were pretty competitive and then something went down and I didn’t think we were as good. I had to go to the back and then spun out trying too hard. Jonathan made a good call to stay out the last stop. Why not, running ninth and was able to run third, so that was a good call by him. Overall, I wish it was in the hot and slick of the day because I thought we were a little bit more competitive, but not a bad finish.”

Kyle Larson -- Finished 4th: “It was definitely better once the sun went down. I don’t know whatever changes they made to it, so proud of my guys for working hard and persevering. Didn’t have a lot of things work out for us there as we got caught a lap down and we had to take the wave around and drove from twenty-something to 10th there before the last caution. We stayed out and netted out a top-five. So proud of my No. 5 HendrickCars.com team and proud of Chase Elliott, too. That’s great for Hendrick Motorsports and everybody there. Everybody has been working hard and trying to figure out how to go faster and they were definitely the best of the four of us all weekend. Cool to see that he closed it out.”

Ross Chastain -- Finished 5th: “An incredible night for the No. 1 Jockey Chevrolet Camaro. Trackhouse Racing brought two incredibly fast cars, and that was the right call to pit, but we just didn’t know that 10 people were going to stay out. If a few less stay out, we have got a shot. We got through traffic the best of all of us that pitted, so proud of that and proud of the effort. Incredible job on pit road tonight by our pit crew in picking up spots each and every stop all night. We just needed a little more to run with those top four, but we were definitely a top-five car. In the Cup Series, that is all I can ask for.”

Austin Cindric -- Finished 7th: “I’ll take it, I guess. That was a long way to get there for sure. Obviously, getting the lucky dog halfway through the third stage and getting our Ford Mustang into the top five. I got passed by a few guys on tires there at the end, but obviously had speed in the car. We just needed the track position. Jeremy made a great call to run long and we got probably 10 spots out of that and probably got about six or eight more on the restart there and was able to have a representative day.”

Joey Logano -- Finished 9th: “It’s an ugly top 10, but it was a top 10 nonetheless. It was a battle. I had some false hope by qualifying second, thinking we might be better than what we were, but as soon as the race started we realized we weren’t. We just kind of fought everything.”

Erik Jones -- Finished 11th: “We definitely had our ups and downs today, but nice to rebound and get an 11th-place finish. We fought the handling of our Chevy early in the race and I felt like we were making the right adjustments to have a good day before the rain delay. Once we restarted, after 10-15 laps, the handling would go away and it was just hard to drive. We’ll keep learning and working to get better. Overall, a good finish that we’ll take with us in to next week at Road America.”

Austin Dillon -- Finished 14th: We got in a deficit early today at Nashville Superspeedway but this team climbed our way out of it. We were too loose to start the race, and that got us behind early. We went a lap down but earned our lap back. From there, crew chief Justin Alexander made some great strategy moves to gain track position. Unfortunately, by the time we got track position our Chevy was too tight in the same places on the track that we were too loose earlier in the race. On a restart with four laps remaining, we knew that there would be a high likelihood of crashing. I just hugged the bottom of the track and dug. We raced from 18th to 14th. We were still just too tight at the end to make anything else happen. It’s not what we wanted, but we dug hard.”

Alex Bowman -- Finished 36th: “It’s frustrating to not be able to finish the Ally 400. (Crew chief) Greg (Ives) and everyone on the No. 48 team works so hard on these race cars and it’s unfortunate I wasn’t able to go compete for a win. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time today. Greg threw the kitchen sink at the car and then we made two laps before getting wrecked, so it was tough to not be able to see if we would have found something on that stop.”