"We got off to a much better start than Friday. We won our scratch heat fairly easily, and we were sitting on the front row for the heat race. We elected to ride a bike that we thought would be better at night time and we got going in the heat race and pretty much were a distant third. We were never really a threat to transfer directly to the main event. (Joe) Kopp was out front and (Kevin) Varnes was second and those guys were going real good, and I had nothing for 'em in the heat race.

"Lined up for the semi, and had Hacker in my semi. He kept me honest the whole way and made me nervous for the most part of it. We were able to eke out the win and put her in the feature.

"The bike didn't feel very good. I feel like something might have been going south on the motor. The thing coughed and sputtered and died right there when I came to talk to Larry Maiers for an interview after winning the semi, and that got me a little bit concerned. We went back and discussed things, and Kenny ran the bike and he said it seemed okay, but we were trying to err on the side of caution and we knew we had to go back a row, but we were on the third row anyway so we didn't think it be that much of a difference. With these new 500s, we've been twisting them pretty hard and a lot of guys have been breaking them down here, so instead of breaking the motorcycle, we went to our spare that we went good on in practice and started on the fourth row.

"We came through the pack and put a charge on. I was a little bummed at the red flag on the first start because we had passed seven guys in the first lap and we were sitting in ninth and still in touch with the leaders - within a half of a straightaway - running ninth. Then a couple guys went down and we had to start all over, and I didn't get quite as good a run the next time around. We picked the guys off one-by-one and moved up to fifth, and once I got into fifth, I didn't really gain much on the leaders. Winsett, Poovey, Varnes, and Murphree were all running about the same speed as I was by the time I got to fifth, and I never really gained any ground on them.

"It was a good run for us. We're happy with the result. Although we wish we had been on the other motorcycle earlier in the night - we might not have had to come from where we had to come from. It was another good case of damage control for us and we got a good finish out of it.