FUNNY CAR

"Coil said something that really stuck in my head. He said, 'That kid's been going down that racetrack for the last eight years -- in his head. He's driven every run with you as your clutch man.'" -- John Force on crew chief Austin Coil's take on their rookie driver teammate Eric Medlen

"You're getting to play with somebody else's toys and if you break 'em, they just give you some more. That's cool but there's a responsibility that comes with that." -- Medlen on what it's like to be a driver for Team Force

"Houston has a new surface, so it's our hope that the track has been smoothed some. It was really bumpy, especially in the left lane; so much so that it was really a one-lane race track. We hope they've gotten that fixed." -- Whit Bazemore on the resurfaced Houston strip, before qualifying 11th

"I'm a little reluctant to beat my chest too hard, but it was a really nice pass for the time of day." -- Tim Wilkerson after qualifying number two with a 4.874 at 305.08 mph

"We thought lane choice would be a big deal, but it wasn't at all since the weather cooled down on Sunday." -- Ron Capps after losing by a narrow margin in the first round to Tony Pedregon

"We went down the race track and made a good run. The problem is that we drew the wrong guy." -- Tommy Johnson Jr. on having to face off against Force in round one

"It seems that more people smoked their tires in the left lane, but some people ran awfully well over there too, so you can't blame the track in this case. You can't blame anything. Our

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car was just too aggressive right there and we smoked the tires." -- Bazemore on his loss in the opening round to Del Worsham

"It was like a final round in first round, with all sorts of ramifications." -- Worsham, the current points leader, on what it meant to keep Bazemore at bay

"I over-staged on the pre-stage lights and that got my timing off a bit. There's a certain amount of 'real estate' that NHRA allows us at the starting line and I usually deep stage but with my timing off I was staged shallow. Medlen was deep staged which caused him to have the better reaction time. The numbers indicate that he beat me on a holeshot, but we did the math and in reality I left on him but with him being staged deeper than me the numbers showed otherwise." -- Cruz Pedregon explaining what went wrong in his first-round match against Medlen

"We had a problem in the warm-up before the second round and we just couldn't get it fixed in time. I just took the car up to the line hoping that he would make a mistake."
-- Force after going up against Jerry Toliver in round two and not even making it all the way down the track

"We don't have enough runs with this new combination on this clutch. It never really locked up until the finish line. If it had done what we anticipated it doing, it would have been a little better race than it was." -- Gary Scelzi after losing to Worsham in the second round of eliminations

"We just had too much clutch in it." -- Tony Pedregon after losing a pedal-fest against former teammate Gary Densham in round two

"I guess the good news is that we finally had a little good luck but then it went away in the semifinals where a part in the clutch controller malfunctioned. But we moved up in points. And in this field, that's big." -- Densham on the positive outcome of his semi-final loss to Toliver

"You can't be too down when you run that well and the other guy beats you by an eyelash." -- Worsham on his semi-final loss by just .0023 seconds to Wilkerson