Crew chief Paul Smith keeps stepping up perennial low-buck favorite Jack Wyatt. Iowan’s RaceGirl Trans Am missed the quickest field ever but still clocked a 4.93/312.13 effort.

""I'm disappointed right now." — Whit Bazemore on his 14th-place starting position

“This car sticks the tires so much harder than the old one did and we're still trying to make it a top qualifier when the track is good. But you can win or lose from any spot, so all that's really important is that you get a chance to play." — Tim Wilkerson after slotting in at 15th

"We got whipped. (There's) not much else you can say. Scelzi and Capps knew what they had to do and they did it. Give 'em the credit. And give credit to Worsham, too. That's a good team, another good team.” — John Force after losing a close race in round one to Worsham and eventually dropping from first to third in points after Scelzi and Capps both advanced to the final

“Suddenly, the rear end broke and the car went wild, almost hit the wall, but luckily, I saved it. We don't know what came first, but the left tire stopped spinning and broke away from the housing. The left tire was inches behind the right tire. It blew off the brakes and literally bounced to a stop. Wow, it's really a monster when the rear end falls out of the car. I'm pretty bruised up. My elbows are beat-up from bouncing on the frame rails, and the car is ruined. We are swapping cars to get ready for Pomona, as we speak. We can't tell if anything happened to the chassis, but I don't want to take a chance, so I decided not to run it. We'll take it to Murf McKinney's shop as soon as we get home." — Wilkerson on the wild ride he took about 500 feet out in the first round against Capps

Whit Bazemore’s colorful Matco Stratus tribute to the city centennial of Las Vegas made four clean runs in qualifying but things got worse from there; first round loss was followed by massive fire in Monday testing which trashed the one-off body.

"Last week, when we smoked the tires in Dallas, we had a problem when the throttle stuck shut. It wouldn't open again when we pedaled it. After the second time we pedaled it today the same thing happened. The throttle wouldn't open again and, 10 out of 10 times, we would have beaten Cruz in that situation. It's just very, very frustrating. Even though we smoked the tires it was a round we normally would win and nothing happened for a good second and a half to two seconds. The throttle wouldn't open again. We have something wrong in the barrel valve or somewhere in the linkage mechanism that something's happening where it's not allowing the throttle to open again after we smoked the tires. I hit it three times and on the third time it opened. I don't know what happened. They had a problem with the track last night. They changed it and we saw a lot of people smoke the tires (in the first round), but that wasn't the issue here. The issue here is that that round was ours to win no matter what happened. Before we pedaled it the second time we almost caught Cruz. We definitely had the momentum, even though we smoked the tires. The Matco Tools Dodge was going to go down the race track and run about a second quicker than it went." — Bazemore after losing a pedaling contest against C. Pedregon in the opening round

"We were one win light short of what we planned to do. We planned to qualify No. 1. We did that. We made it to the final round, but we just missed it a little bit.” — Scelzi after his narrow loss to teammate Capps in the final round

"When it's your day, it's your day. When it's not, it's not. Today was our day.” — Ed McCulloch, crew chief for Capps, on setting low E.T. of each round on the way to the event win