Comments From Those Eliminated From Chase At Talladega

Randy Sartin-USA TODAY Sports

This past weekend at Talladega Superspeedway the dream of winning the 2014 NASCAR Championship came to an end for Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kyle Busch. Kasey Kahne was also eliminated from the chase but the news of Ryan Newman failing post-race inspection has given Kahne and his team the smallest of hopes that they could still find themselves back into the chase as a result of penalties that NASCAR could had down to Newman on Tuesday.

Following the race Sunday (during their post-race TV interviews), the above drivers reflected on Sunday, the season and being knocked out of the chase sooner than they thought they would be.

Jimmie Johnson

"It feels relieving to go down swinging. The last two weeks were really poor. At least we went down swinging. I’ll take some pride in that.I showed up this weekend thinking I’ve been playing with house money and I’ve had a very unique opportunity to advance. In any Chase, after two bad races like we had the last two weeks, you wouldn’t have a shot at the championship. So, the frustration was kind of peaking over the last two weeks. This week’s been chill. We qualified second and ran up front all day. And it’s so hard to win one of these races. You can’t come in here and say you’re doing to dominate Talladega and win the race. We dominated it. We just didn’t lead the lap that counted."

Dale Earnhardt Jr.

"The race is over, it’s time to go home.We worked real hard all day long trying to run up front. I knew we needed to be up front all day long. We got shuffled to the back. I made a move trying to get up front and it didn’t work out. So, we lost a lot of track position and never got it back. We will just go try to win some more races before the year is out. That is all we have left."

Kasey Kahne

"You just try and get the best finish you can. Basically the restart before, they all checked up in front of me so I went high to get momentum and that didn’t work. I don’t know why that didn’t work, but it didn’t. Anyways, I’m in 20th and got back to 11th. It was tough if you weren’t in the top few spots. Once we were up there early on we could race. We had a great Farmer’s Insurance Chevy – led laps and ran in the top-three and back to the lead. Once I was 10th or eighth, it was just really difficult to get back to that point. I think we got back to fifth or sixth, but that was about it."

Kyle Busch (crew chief Dave Rodgers spoke on behalf of Busch about the effort to get his car back out onto the track and how well Busch has handled adversity in the chase this season)

"My hats off to all these guys — everyone at Joe Gibbs Racing and everyone at TRD (Toyota Racing Development). It’s a shame, everyone has been working really hard. I felt like we got off to a slow start early in the season and we were advancing through the playoffs pretty well with hard work and good decisions and good teamwork. The team was performing really well and working extremely hard. I thought we were in a decent spot coming into the race and rode around in the back. Kyle (Busch) got checked up for the wreck and had everything saved up, but he got run over from behind. There is no safe place in here. Everyone, every time we come to a speedway everyone will strategize — we’re going to ride in the back, we’re going to ride in the front, we’re going to do this. The truth is that if you’re out there on the race track at Talladega or Daytona, you have a pretty good chance that you’re going to get in a wreck and today was our day.I can’t praise him (Kyle Busch) enough. He’s really stepped up to be a great leader of this race team in the Chase. We’ve had a couple things go against us — getting the nose knocked off at Loudon, today and Kyle’s done a really good job of biting his lip and just backing the race team to let us do our job. Kyle, I can’t say enough good about him. I’m really proud of him. It’s been a lot of fun working with him and we’re not done yet. We can’t win the championship, but we can still advance in points and work our way up to fifth. We’re going to go to Martinsville working hard and we’re going to try to win all these races."

NASCAR is expected to announce any potential penalty in regards to Ryan Newman on Tuesday between 4:30 and 6:00. Following Talladega  Newman had a 27-point lead on Kahne. If Newman is docked more than 27 points it would seem likely that he would fall out of the chase and NASCAR would then put Kahne into it.

Christopher Olmstead is the Editor of BeyondTheFlag.com on the FanSided Network. Follow us on Twitter @Beyond_The_Flag and “Like” us on Facebook.

[Unless otherwise noted all quotes in this article were obtained from press releases via the driver or the team].