RICKY RUDD – No. 88 Snickers Ford Fusion (Finished 7th) –

DO YOU FEEL OLD? “I do when I had to run without a cool helmet about the last 100 miles. That was pretty tough. We’ve been having a lot of alternator trouble this year for some reason and I just had to turn all the systems off and just try to ride it out.”

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO GET THIS RESULT? “We knew we had a good car. We obviously didn’t have a winning car, but we knew we had a top 12, top 15 car. Even when we got here we qualified seventh with it. It’s been quick all along, but I’m really proud of our guys on this Snickers Dark Chocolate team. They kept chasing the race track. We started off and were about right. We needed to free up more and we were just almost a stop behind every time on getting the car freed up enough, but our guys did a great job calling the shots on getting the car freed up. We were OK. We were about a 12th-place car and we ended up seventh or eighth, so we’ll take it.”

DID YOU THINK THE RACE MIGHT COME TO YOU AND YOU WOULD WIN? “I was having to save gas so much the last couple of laps. We were lucky to finish. We’ve got two batteries and the second battery had 10 volts in it. As a matter of fact, I stalled it in the garage area and it wouldn’t start back up. We were just glad we were able to finish, really.”

BUT YOUR CAR WAS COMPETITIVE ALL NIGHT. “It was a racy car. It was a 10th-place car probably. If we could have got it freed up, it would have been better than that. We just never could seem to get the right handle on it.”