Kyle Larson — winner: Yeah, it was great. Obviously, starting on the front row helped a lot, as well as just controlling the race, having good restarts and great power by our No. 5 Chevy. It wasn’t easy. I know it looked easy at times. There were definitely runs that were easier, but when the sun came out, it got difficult just to maintain my grip. I would stretch out, and then I’d catch traffic and I would just not be very good. I guess that the way that run just played out there, maybe coming out in traffic and the pace being down a little bit helped me live a little bit longer. I think it’s just sometimes easier to be the hunter rather than being hunted. I could see he (Chase Briscoe) was starting to struggle in front of me and still pushing really hard. I was just trying to take it easy, let him make a mistake and build some runs on exit. We were able to do that. Just proud of the team.”
Austin Cindric — second: “I definitely wish I would have had a shot there. You know, I thought we were really strong all day. We made some decent adjustments and got ourselves good for those long runs for the final run. We just lost a bit too much time in the pit cycle. I think there’s definitely some things I could have done better. I stayed long in the stall and threw off the stop a bit. When you lose by only half a second, it comes down to all the little stuff. Those guys had a hell of a battle for the lead to give me a shot. Super proud of the effort from everyone at Team Penske and Ford.I feel like I had a car that could have won today but didn’t. I can be happy and pissed about that at the same time. Hopefully we can transfer that over to next week and the week following because I don’t see the reason why we can’t. I think these are the tracks you have to be critically good on. We saw pieces of this from Chicago and I felt like we took some bits and pieces and applied them to Kansas, and obviously, you can see what it did. I’m super proud of everybody on the team, keeping us in it all day and unloading super close.”
Denny Hamlin — third: “Winning. That’s the only difference. Just didn’t quite have it today. Just was hanging around. We could be really good in the long run, but the short run, you know, the 5 (Kyle Larson) was really good, 2 (Austin Cindric) was good. We just couldn’t quite hold those guys off or keep them close enough in the short run. Obviously at the end we ran a lot down, but just not enough time and track position. Obviously gained a few spots there at the end. Overall, just that’s kind of what we had. Third-place car, driver, and everything today.”
Chase Briscoe — fourth: “Just went really, really loose. I kind of had that the run before when we did the green flag pit stop. I got it in the wall so many times that I had a little bit of a leak. Just went really, really free ultimately. It was better for me to be in second. Just being behind him, especially with how much the aero blocking, it would just tighten me up and allow me to actually be a little bit better. And then as soon as I would get the lead, I would just go really, really free again. So, yeah, frustrating for sure. Yeah, just felt like I had a win there to stay in contention for a championship, and obviously now losing, I don’t know, 123 points back, that’s probably not going to happen We’ll keep trying for Toyota. It’s nice to have a good finish in this Chase. It’s been a rough go to start. I have six more weeks to go try to win as many races as we can, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Ryan Blaney — fifth: “We were moving at the end. And, gosh, seven or eight more laps and I might have actually had a shot to win the thing. We were mowing them down rapidly the last 10, 12 laps. Just a good job by them sticking with it. Starting where we did, you know, and just working on it. Getting a little bit better through the day, I thought. Our last run or two of the day was our best run of the day. So really proud of that effort. This is a place where we’ve worked really hard to try to figure out how we can be better here. I thought we had a great day. The 2 [Austin Cindric] had a really good day. It was fast all day. Solid effort. We definitely got better at the start of stage three. I thought that’s where we really got it better. I think a lot of it was just getting some track position, right? You’re buried in traffic and you’re trying to figure out what does your car need to do well there. And then as you get cleaner air, it’s like, all right, now you’re adjusting again and trying to play catch up there. It just kind of took some time to do that. But, they stuck with it and made good changes.”
William Byron — seventh: “I thought the speed of our No. 24 Chevrolet was hard to judge. We were just tight all day, and we couldn’t really get it to rotate on the restarts. I felt like our pit crew was doing a really good job of getting track position on pit road. On every restart, we just couldn’t fire off and couldn’t go with speed. We just fought that throughout the day. I thought our long runs were reasonable, but we still fought some balance issues. We just didn’t have the balance we wanted, but I thought our Chevy was pretty good.”
Chase Elliott — eighth: “It was an improvement from last week, for sure. Our No. 9 Chevrolet was pretty good. We had a couple runs there in the middle stages where it got a little tight. I just made a couple bad decisions on restarts, and everything we had gained, I felt like I lost it all right there. We finally started to get our balance back and going the right direction. I think I had given up a bit too much at that point of time. Overall, it was definitely an improved day from where we’ve been. We just have to try and build on that. Hopefully we can just put some of these solid days together and try to continue to build on the good stuff from the day. There were some high spots for us, more than there has been lately, so we’ll see where it goes.”
Ryan Preece — 10th: “We just kind of fluttered and floated around that eighth to 15th all day. I felt like Derek had a good move strategy wise to get us a top 10. So that was about what we had.”
Joey Logano — 20th: “We had a solid Shell-Pennzoil Ford all day. We stayed in the top 10 and picked up some stage points, but we were chasing the balance a little bit all afternoon. We worked hard to keep ourselves in the mix, so it was frustrating to have the tire issue at the end. We’ll put this one behind us and see if we can keep the momentum heading to Vegas.”
Austin Dillon — 21st: “Proud of everyone on the No. 3 Chevrolet team today at Kansas Speedway for fighting until the last lap. We didn’t have practice and qualifying yesterday, so we knew we were going to learn a bit about the car’s balance in the initial laps. We started off a touch loose, but overall good, and then made an adjustment that made me way too tight. The team went back to the drawing board and were able to reverse that and get it to where the car’s balance was pretty good, we were making top-10 lap times and I was driving forward. We’ll make some notes for 2027 and turn our focus to Las Vegas next week.”
Chris Buescher — 23rd: “It’s a tough race. We were just on the tight side at the start. We were able to fight around the top 10 there. We were trying to work forward, to make some adjustments, and then we got caught up in the wreck on the restart and got some damage. It seemed to really put us behind from there. We struggled to get it back. From there, we just weren’t really able to find anything to get us heading in the right direction. Unfortunate. I thought it was gonna be a really good night.”
Austin Hill — 26th: “Our Chevrolet had speed on the long run, but we struggled on fire off. For the first 15-20 laps, our car was really tight and it would take too long to come in. At the same time, we were at the limit of the rears at the end of a run. If we could have found a way to not lose so much ground at the beginning, I think we could have had a solid finish because most runs, we would drive back forward at the end. We’ll learn from today and try to come back better next season.”
Michael McDowell — 27th: “A messy day here in Kansas, we had a few things not go our way and we fell behind pretty quick. From there, the balance wasn’t where we needed to be to make up the ground we had lost. It’s tough, our Chevrolet showed signs of solid speed early in the day. Once we got pushed back to the back half of the field, it felt like we couldn’t recover from there. I have faith in our group, we have a few more 1.5-mile tracks coming up, so it’s going to be important to maximize those going forward and build into next season.”
