RICKY RUDD - No. 21 Motorcraft Taurus - "Most of the year we would have taken that finish and been tickled to death and I still am, but in practice the day before I thought we had something that maybe could have challenged for a win and definitely didn't have that today. But the guys were really smart on pit strategy there at the end. We ended up ninth. I don't think we had a ninth-place car, but they were really smart on the strategy. I can't really say that. We had a set of tires at the end of the race that really ran good. There seemed to be some big inconsistencies for us all day. We got one set of tires and just stayed on them and that was the best our car had run all day." WHAT ABOUT THE FUEL STRATEGY? "That's a heads-up call in the pits. Our car just wouldn't work back there in that dirty air. In practice we didn't really practice in all that dirty air and, evidently, when you get back there the car just doesn't handle anywhere near the same, so we gambled on the strategy and the fuel. We knew we could make the fuel. We knew it would be tight, but the gamble was could you run that long on tires. We didn't really know that, but we found out we could."