NASCAR: no plans to fines drivers for comments about qualifying
STEVE O'DONNELL: I wanted to make a few comments on the qualifying session today. I think as everybody knows, this format was put together by NASCAR with feedback from the industry, but ultimately to be as exciting as possible. We used it last year in Daytona for the summer race. We made some adjustments from there. Going into Talladega, obviously learned throughout that. Then came into Daytona with some minor adjustments for the Daytona 500, as well. So if you look at group qualifying as a whole, we felt it worked really well, but certainly there's some challenges on superspeedways. One of the reasons we moved away from single-car qualifying, I think you've heard from the drivers as well, a lot of things go into it as well, aero packages, different setups, not based on a race setup. You also heard Jeff Gordon talk about putting it back in the drivers' hands more. That's something we like. We don't want to see wrecks of any kind. Not lost on us how much work goes into these cars by the teams, the efforts for our biggest race of the year. I close by saying I believe we've got a really good track record of making adjustments where we need to, so we'll certainly evaluate what took place today, we'll continue to get feedback from the industry, from the drivers as we did to get to where we were today. With that, I'm happy to take any questions anybody may have.
Q. You mentioned you made some minor adjustments after Talladega last October. There were a lot of complaints there. What adjustments did you make? Were there things that happened today that you wish you would have addressed?
STEVE O'DONNELL: That's a good question. When we looked at it, some of the things you saw that took place on pit road today we were hoping to avoid. Then some of the drivers, how they enter a track on a superspeedway, we put in rules in place for today's session to avoid incidents candidly. Blocking, we were going to monitor. We said we could look at things to disallow times, but that was more on how you entered the track coming up to speed. Some of those were put in place, but I think those are areas we need to continue to look at.
Q. Steve, Brian [France] has talked about in the past that he's fine with drivers making comments, but don't disparage the product. Certainly some of the comments that came out today, what is NASCAR's stance on the comments of Clint Bowyer or Tony Stewart? Are they clear or are they facing any type of penalty for comments made today?
STEVE O'DONNELL: I think what Brian said is you can take us on. We're NASCAR, that's part of our job. When I look at the comments that Clint made or Tony made, those are based on wanting to see the best racing out there. So certainly tough to hear. But those are things we have to have conversations with them on and work with those guys to figure out if there's a better way to do it. We will do it. But it's not something we're going to fine the drivers for today.
Q. When determining whether to make changes to this format, how much of it is driver input and how much of it is fan input?
STEVE O'DONNELL: I would say we look at input from the entire industry. You're going to take fan feedback. We're going to talk to the drivers, the owners, crew members. That's a little bit of how we got to where we are today, going away from single-car qualifying, taking input from all of those folks we talked about. It's a balance for us. Ultimately it's our job to make a decision. Not always does everybody agree with that decision, but we've got to make that decision at the end of the day.
Q. I understand you still want to get feedback from the industry and evaluate things. As it stands now, was NASCAR happy with how today's session unfolded?
STEVE O'DONNELL: I think it's a balance. Jeff Gordon on the pole, certainly his last Daytona 500, is great. Seeing the incident that took place is not. So it's a balance. We've got to take everything kind of in stride. We see new things every day, have to make decisions on that. Overall I think we're happy about the excitement of the qualifying session, but we've got to look at if there's adjustments we can make to continue to improve that, we're going to do that. NASCAR