5 hours ago 1

What drivers said at Pocono after Cup race won by Chase Briscoe

Chase Briscoe — winner: “It was a lot of (pressure). I wasn’t driving hard. It wasn’t like I was on the ragged edge. It was just so hard having the greatest driver of all-time here just behind me. I’ve been telling my wife the last two weeks I have to win. It’s just a great day.”

Michael McDowell — 35th: “I had warning half of the race that the brakes weren’t going to make it. It’s unfortunate. It wasn’t what we needed for this No. 71 Chevrolet team. We came off a good weekend (in Mexico City), and this is the exact opposite of what we needed. But we have Atlanta, Chicago and Sonoma coming up, so we have a lot of good tracks on the horizon for our team. The season is grueling sometimes. I was just trying to nurse it there at the end on that last restart, knowing I was starting to lose my pedal a little bit. In the car, there’s not a lot you can do other than dial bias to the rear and hope and pray for the best. What put us behind this weekend was yesterday in qualifying. I just made a mistake there, and that kind of sets you up for the whole race starting 28th. We did some strategy there and we were going to give ourselves a fighting chance. But like I said, I knew we had an issue with the brakes and I was trying to get to a place where hopefully they would last, but they didn’t. ... I’ve been telling you guys all year that I’m not planning on pointing my way in. I’m planning on winning a race because that’s the way I see us getting into the playoffs. You’re going to have weekends like this where you have issues, you get taken out or you have something happen. You can’t plan on pointing your way in, especially this early on because there’s still a lot of opportunities for guys below the cutline to win, as we saw last weekend. When you have places like Atlanta, Chicago, Sonoma, Daytona, you’ve got a lot of tracks that it could open it up for a new winner, like we saw with Harrison Burton last year. That last few years, there’s been a few surprise winners.”

Bubba Wallace — 36th: “I was going to battle the 17 (Chris Buescher) and the 2 (Austin Cindric) and by the time I was ready to touch the pedal it just went to the floor and the brakes exploded. I hate it, we’ve had two or three good races in-a-row and there goes the bad luck again. But hey, (Michael Jordan) told me there’s no such thing as bad luck. We create our own luck. I apologize to the racing gods. This weekend sucked aside from practice, but that pays nothing. I hate it for my guys. We knew it was going to be a grind and I was mentally prepared for that all day. Especially as frustrating as it gets not being able to pass here in Pocono, we were going to just take our lumps and march our way through and set ourselves up for the end of the race, but the brakes just didn’t want to hang on that long.”

Riley Herbst — 37th: “I’ve grown up watching these races at Pocono and seeing what happened to me happen to lot of other guys. It was a scary feeling for sure. I was just starting to get tight, just a bad adjustment on my part. Getting into (turn) one, the brakes just went to the floor. A brake rotor exploded and I was along for the ride with our Monster Energy Camry XSE.”