Corey Heim — winner: “I’m speechless. We started 13th. We fell straight back to like 20th, then put on our scuffs from qualifying and struggled just as bad. I don’t know if we made any adjustments, but Woody kept telling me that these were our worst two sets of tires. We’re gonna be just fine, and he was right. I couldn’t believe that we strapped another set of tires on. We were just fine, hit the wall a couple times, maybe it knocked some good into the car. I have no idea. After Stage 2, I just kind of took a deep breath and was like I had really high expectations coming into this race. It’s an even playing field for me. I don’t see that every day for a young driver like myself, and I just kind of took a deep breath and reset and went after it. Caught a couple breaks with some of the good guys wrecking out, but they don’t ask how, just how many. For a while there, I thought (Reddick) was kind of playing with me, but he’s able to set the pace being the lead car, but I was kind of able to stick with it. I’m not really burning my stuff up. So five to go came, and it’s just kind of time to put some pressure on him, see if I could get him to make a mistake. And sure enough, he did. I guess he ended up
breaking or something. I don’t know what happened to him. But a lot of respect for him, though. He doored me down there in 5 and gave it back to me. That’s something I’ll say every day. Great teammates. Just crazy. It feels like a dream. I hope I don’t wake up from this dream, but I don’t know. This is insane. I didn’t expect to come into my part-time season and win, but here we are. I mean, it’s crazy. It hasn’t even sunk in yet. I’m sure I’ll get emotional in a little bit, but it really hasn’t even sunk in yet.”
Tyler Reddick — second: “To even have a shot at it at the end was really nice. Yeah, man, I don’t know. I thought I was going to be able to hold him off there. Yeah, we kind of just struggled with rear tire life all weekend long. Yeah, I got beat by our own stuff, so. Yeah, we’ll try to figure this out. It definitely stings. First and foremost, congratulations to Corey. I tried to battle back and overdid it. I really did it. I ran him straight in the wall. That wasn’t right. I wasn’t going to pass him for the win that way, especially a teammate. It’s a real shame. I don’t know if I cut the tire during, before or after. I’m not really sure. Really needed a good points day. Had another really bad one, so. we’ll try and scrape together and have a decent finish in Sonoma.”
Kyle Larson — third: “I’m surprised how scuffed up it is because we had a super-clean day, as clean of a race you can have on a street course. All-in-all, it was a great day for this No. 5 Chevrolet team. We had a shot at the win there, if the strategy would have played out. I think it was between us and the No. 67 (Corey Heim). You never know how it might go on that run there, but the caution kind of broke it up. They were just super-strong. We were surrounded by 23XI cars. They had a great package for the street course here. Overall, it was just a lot of fun this weekend. It was an unreal atmosphere, probably one of the coolest atmospheres I’ve been a part of in a long time. Kudos to NASCAR, the Naval Base Coronado and all the men and women who serve. I was hoping we could get this Chevy to victory lane, but we’ll take a third-place finish.”
Zane Smith — fourth: “It feels great. It’s just an amazing racetrack, a crazy racetrack. It’s fun to be back home and have a good run, but none of the cautions really feel for us, it seemed like. Ryan Bergenty did a phenomenal job to put me in the best position possible, to stay on offense and not just put me in a bad spot where things get a little chaotic. Road courses have been horrible for myself and this 38 team, and we learned some in practice and made a good run out of it, so that makes me so excited. Whether we had a bad finish or a good finish, we showed a lot of speed today, and I felt like that was the final area our team had to check that box of being really good. I’m just proud of this team. I love working with them week in and week out, and it’s an awesome run for Hard Rock, too. The Tejon tribe, it’s cool to go support them next week. We’ll be out in Bakersfield doing an appearance out there on Wednesday. Knowing we’ll have this paint scheme next week, hopefully, we get another good run like this. We’ve had a strong year, to be honest, just a lot of misfortune. The speed we’ve had this year is so exciting, so it certainly brings a level of confidence next week. Honestly, just an amazing weekend. This will go down as arguably the coolest weekend of the year. Obviously, the Daytona 500 and Indy, the Coke 600, places like that stack up towards the top, but this is right there with it. It was just an amazing weekend honoring our Navy and our military. It’s a wild road course, and it was cool to have a good run at the end of the day.”
AJ Allmendinger — fifth: “We were able to run some good laps in this No. 16 Chevrolet. Trent Owens (crew chief) and this entire team did a great job with strategy and pit stops. We know we lack rear grip late in a run, and that’s what we were fighting there at the end. Getting points in both stages and finishing in the top-five, these are the days we have to have at racetracks that we can be pretty good at.”
Chris Buescher — sixth: “That last caution certainly did not fall when we needed it. That was kind of the deal breaker for us, but it was so much fun. The weekend was a blast. Practice and qualifying, I just didn’t come up to speed quick enough and wasn’t where we wanted to be. We got in the race, and we just started driving through the field. It was so much fun. I’d take this Ford Mustang and do that every time we had cycles, and it was just a really strong day. It’s just that last caution wasn’t what we needed. We needed it about eight laps later, and we would have been in a heck of a spot. That’s how it falls. Everybody did a nice job, and it was a solid day from start to finish. I didn’t want to, but I knew we had to. It’s one of those you’re riding up there and, at first, we cycle to the lead, and you’re like, ‘Alright.’ And then we didn’t make it through Turn 2, and it dawned on me, I was like, ‘That was the field pulling off pit road. They’re on fresh tires – zero lap tires.’ That was gonna put us on the front row with no buffer, which is really what saved us the other few times, having that three or four laps to get away and then let the tires come, but it was the only answer. As much as it hurt to do, it was the right play. We ended up passing 10-12 cars at the end, vs. having to bleed a certain amount. I’ve got a pretty good feeling you would have bled more than five.”
Ross Chastain — seventh: “It was an uneventful day for this No. 1 Chevrolet team. Really, we stayed out of most of the chaos. We worked on gaining more rear grip all day; be able to get the rear tires to live longer and have more grip from the start to the end of each run. Brandon McSwain (crew chief) was able to make adjustments to do that. We only half-spun one time, but other than that, it was a clean day.”
Riley Herbst — eighth: “ I don’t know. It’s so tricky. This corner is so difficult. This asphalt is just so slick. I think that was the restart where everybody had some confidence, and we just wanted to pick it up a little bit. The front two, I think they kept bluffing each other into Turn 1. The marbles caught it. I was lucky enough to miss it there on the bottom. All in all a good day for this 35 car. I thought we had a fourth-place finish. Got moved there on the last lap by (AJ Allmendinger). Finished eighth. We’ll take it and go try again at Sonoma. It’s good. I’m happy for them and everybody at Airspeed. Yeah, so hopefully we can keep running better for the 35.”
Ryan Blaney — ninth: “There were a bunch of different strategies going on and it’s kind of hard to pick which one is gonna be the right one, but, overall, we did a really good job today of staying clean and getting really good stage points. We stayed in the race and ended up with a decent finish. It was a fun day for sure. I thought our Ford Mustang was fairly quick and it was fun to work through it all day. You just never know who is gonna be good or not, and wrecks happen all the time. I didn’t really think of that. I just thought I got a few spots. I didn’t even notice who it was at first until I asked, but that’s part of racing. It was a fantastic event. I had a blast all weekend. The Navy was great to us. The base was great to us and personally I would love to come back. It’s a cool event.”
Michael McDowell — 10th: “When that wreck happened up front with Shane (Van Gisbergen), Connor (Zilisch) and Austin (Hill), we got into that and got a lot of damage on our No. 71 Chevrolet. We lost a lot of track position from that, but we were able to rebound there at the end. Just proud of the effort from this No. 71 team. I’m bummed out. A top-10 is not what we came here for, we were hoping for more. But it could have been disastrous, so I’m glad we got back into the top-10 to carry the momentum to Sonoma (Raceway) next weekend.”
Ryan Preece — 11th: “We had a great points day, then climbing from 28th late in the race to 11th to close it out. It was a good day. We want to be strong on road courses and capitalize on those days, and we did that today. This whole trip to San Diego exceeded all expectations.”
Denny Hamlin — 14th: “Really happy for Corey and that whole team. Dave Rogers (23XI Competition Director) doing such a good job, they are putting that fourth entry together and piecing together guys from around the shop and some development guys. We gave Corey an agenda this week that in each start his is our expectations, here’s what we want you to work on. I don’t think this was in the agenda for San Diego. He’s been good at road course racing anyway, as (Ryan) Blaney mentioned, he’s going to be a problem. ... I felt really good about where our car was all day. We were at the line on pit road, and he says I don’t think you’re going to make and I steered hard left and the caution came out. That stunk, had to start 19th or 20th on the last restart and only could get back to 14th. Inside the top-15, that was the agenda for this week and will try to go to Sonoma and do the same thing.”
Joey Logano — 18th: “Proud of the effort from the 22 crew to stay with it all day, and [crew chief] Paul [Wolfe] made some good calls to put us in a spot to get stage points early on. The strategies were all over the place, but we were able to stay on top of it. This was a really cool weekend to be a part of and appreciate everything that went on behind the scenes to make it come together the way it did.”
Austin Cindric — 22nd: “A challenging day for our No. 2 Ford Mustang Dark Horse team. We fought handling issues most of the race and never really found the balance we needed to be as competitive as we wanted. The team kept making adjustments, and we were able to improve it some as the day went on. We’ll take what we learned and turn our focus to Sonoma next weekend.”
Cody Ware — 23rd: “I think the No. 51 Chevrolet was fast all day long. I think there at the end, we could have been a top-20 car, for sure. I should have had a little less patience with some guys that had damage. But all-in-all, I think we performed well today and just really happy with the work the team put in all weekend. It was a really awesome weekend, overall. I think we have a lot of momentum going into Sonoma (Raceway) next weekend now, so I’m excited to have back-to-back road course races.”
Austin Dillon — 24th: “We’re going to go back to the drawing board for this track. I felt good about our Chevy in the initial laps, but as the race went on we lacked forward drive and I didn’t have the grip I needed. We made some air pressure changes to try and combat that, but despite the best efforts of everyone on the No. 3 Chevrolet team, the car never felt like it was in the track. This wasn’t the finish we wanted here, but we also fought back from a spin. I want to thank all the incredible men and women of the U.S. Navy for having us this weekend. It was an incredible experience. Now, I’m going to go enjoy the rest of Father’s Day with my wife and kids here in California and focus our attention on Sonoma Raceway.”
Tyler Reddick — 25th: “We were involved in so much today. To even have a shot at it at the end was really nice. I thought I was going to be able to hold him off there. Yeah, we kind of just struggled with rear tire life all weekend long. I got beat by our own stuff. We’ll try to figure this out. It definitely stings. First and foremost, congratulations to Corey. I tried to battle back and overdid it. I really did it. I ran him straight in the wall. That wasn’t right. I wasn’t going to pass him for the win that way, especially a teammate. It’s a real shame. I don’t know if I cut the tire during, before or after. I’m not really sure. Really needed good points day. Had another really bad one. We’ll try and scrape together and have a decent finish in Sonoma.”
Kevin Magnussen — 27th: “I’ve watched NASCAR before, so I know that’s how you guys play it. It is what it is. He was playing it a bit stupid out there. He could have had a good race. He chose not to. I felt like I was in a fistfight the whole race through. Everyone was driving so well. It’s tough racing, but people have respect. You can’t mess around. You find out. I like that kind of racing. Big respect to everyone except that one guy, but I’ll deal with that. It would have been so much better if we could start the race again. Because I learned so much about the car in the race. I felt so much more confident with everything toward the end of the race. I understood the car. I did the fastest lap by quite a margin. The pace was there, the car was really good. Just super happy to get the opportunity to race in NASCAR. If I get a chance, I’ll be here. I loved every second of it. It was dumb. What pissed him off was that I bumped him. I dived in and after I dived, he closed the door. OK, fine. That ruined his whole race. Messing around under caution, slamming my door. I thought he’d get it out of his system, but he didn’t. By far the most extreme track. Those restarts, man. Everything is on the limit. The whole race. It’s great fun.”
Brad Keselowski — 34th: " “It was a really long day. The team worked really hard. We got some damage when I made a little mistake in Turn 5, and we recovered from it, and we were going to kind of reset our day. We had a great start to the race, passed a lot of cars. That was fun. A bunch of cars spun out in 12A, and we kind of got collected in the melee behind it, and that was unfortunate and put us behind the wall and really ended our day.”
Austin Hill — 36th: “We had a really good car with our Chevrolet. With the strategy that we were on, we were going to have at least an extra set of tires laying towards the end. I got into Turn 1 a little deep and started sliding. I was sliding the rears and I slid the fronts a little bit. On corner exit, I was fully locked to the right just trying to stay off the No. 88. It’s one of those racing deals. If I had that extra car width and the No. 88 wasn’t there, I would have cleared fine but knowing that he was out there, I carried a little too much entry pace compared to what I had been doing all day. Right when I touched him and he got in the wall, it sucked me into him and I couldn’t stay off of him. I hate it for Connor and the No. 88 team, and I apologize to those guys. We could have had a really strong day for everybody at RCR and ECR. We’ll go again next week in Sonoma. It was a lot of fun running up front and showing speed, though. I’m starting to figure out these Cup cars a little bit more, especially on the road courses, so that’s a good sign.”
Connor Zilisch — 37th: “It’s just unfortunate to end the day like that for both Chevrolets with Shane (Van Gisbergen) and I. We had a really fast car today. We got out front, and it felt really good, but that’s how it goes sometimes. I had a lot of fun leading my first career Cup Series laps. Just super proud of this entire No. 88 team, but hate to see the day end this short. When you have a chance to go win a race and you’re in a prime spot to do so, but get put in a position like that, it’s extremely tough. It’s been a big weekend for all of us at Trackhouse Racing, and I just hate that both cars get taken out like that. We’ll put our heads down, put this weekend behind us and move onto the next (at Sonoma Raceway). I felt like we were just pacing ourselves and trying to get to the end of the race. These races always get crazy towards the end. I felt like we were really good, so it’s just unfortunate to have our day end like that.”
Shane van Gisbergen — 38th: “I got a pretty good start, backed out of it to let them go. Obviously, didn’t want to be three wide. And then, yeah, not good from there.”
Brent Crews — 39th: “I was kind of going through the gears, and it just broke, I’m not really sure. I’m going to have to have Adam (Stevens, crew chief) to look over it and myself to figure out if it was something I did or if it was just a freak accident. Once I look at it I’ll have more answers. It’s really unfortunate for this whole team. We came here to get points and coming out with not much. Unfortunate for the whole group, it was a great opportunity to come and learn and try and help these guys out. I had three laps I think in the Cup car and five in the O’Reilly car, so it was just trying to learn to the best of my ability. They are a lot different, the grip level is a lot less in the Cup car, but it’s got a lot of brakes, but right after that it falls off, and you don’t see that as much in the O’Reilly car.”
