When everyone had written us out of the chase, that spurred these guys on, and we weren't going to go down without a fight.

We're looking forward to this weekend racing here at home. It's always an exciting race for the fans and we're bringing one of our best cars. Some of our teammates tested at Lowe's a few weeks ago with mixed results. Matt's Busch team tested there also and had a good run. So we'll see what we're dealing with once practice gets going.

The month of May was really tough on this team. We got way behind with some of the car setup and some of the things we had going on, but we were able to turn it around. The last two months have been real strong for this team.

We've been fortunate enough to have really good racecars whenever we unload at Vegas over the years and I really don't expect this weekend to be any different. The guys do a great job setting these cars up. Obviously, at this point it's too early to tell how the weekend will go, but we've got some momentum and we're coming to a track where we've enjoyed some success in recent years. We're coming in with high expectations.

We had been getting some bad results, now it is up to us to make up the ground and catch Manchester United.

He's been a big part of this team, just like all of us. With a big injury like that, it does hurt the morale.