Jarrett Dominates in Winning Big Kmart 400 NASCAR Winston Cup Race

The victory was Ford's seventh of the 1999 season. That's two more than Chevrolet and five more than Pontiac. Ford extended its lead in the manufacturer standings to 14 points. Ford has 101 points compared to 87 for Chevrolet and 78 for Pontiac.

DALE JARRETT PRESS CONFERENCE
"Sitting as a fan I hate to see a race like that, but from where I was sitting there couldn't be anything better than to have a day where you had an almost perfect race car with no cautions or anything to interrupt that. That's what I spent a majority of my time doing, asking those guys to drive carefully and for nobody to blow up. I just didn't want anything to happen because Gordon got his car better at the end and they were actually a little bit better than we were. My car was pushing, so I didn't want a 10 or 15-lap shootout there at the end. It worked out for us. The car was just incredible. That's the only word I know to describe it. It was a little loose to start with and I could never get myself in a good position at the start of the race and kept getting shuffled back, but we anticipated the car being loose and the track being loose to start with. Todd and I spent three or three-and-a-half hours last night discussing track conditions, our race car and what we saw yesterday with the race track. That really paid off. We looked at what we had and what we felt was gonna happen, so being a little loose at the start was really what we wanted to see. Once we got single file I could start going again and that's what we needed the car to be. That was really the key -- the beginning of the race. It just allowed us to work slowly with the car. We didn't make any adjustments the first top, the second stop we made a slight adjustment and on the third stop we made a little more but needed more than that. We had a big enough lead by then so we were OK."

IS THAT THE BEST CAR YOU'VE EVER DRIVEN? "I still believe that's the best car I've been in. For 90 percent of the race I couldn't have asked it to do any more. I could run high, low, I could pass people wherever I caught 'em. As long as I had somewhere on the race track to go I could go there. I probably created the tightness more at the end than I needed to. Once we got the new tires on it after the last stop I tried to stretch the lead a little bit more with the new tires. I probably ran it a little bit harder and a little longer on the bottom of the track than what I needed to and that heated up the right-front a little bit more, so I probably created that. It would take someone smarter than me to make that car better."

DID YOU BACK OFF AT THE END? "No. I knew that I had heated the tire up when it got to pushing, so I was trying to run a little different line and do something a little different. I was just making sure I wasn't gonna do anything like blow a right-front tire out or anything like that. I wasn't easing up, but I knew what kind of lead we had too."