NASCAR CUP SERIES: FIREKEEPERS CASINO 400

June 7, 2026

Chris Gayle

Press Conference

An Interview with:

THE MODERATOR: We're going to roll in tonight's post-race media availabilities. We are now joined by the winning crew chief of tonight's race, Chris Gayle.

Q. Passing points, that's what we talked about before the race.

CHRIS GAYLE: We did talk about that. Can we retroactively make that happen?

Q. I will get a column together and advocate for it. How important is it given this championship format, the current status of these cars to where momentum can come and go just as people figure stuff out, to capitalize when you have a car like this like you've had for the spring and early summer?

CHRIS GAYLE: Yeah, I think it's important with this format. I think it's important -- I don't know if it's any more important than the other one, though, because of the bonus points and all that would happen. It's just different, right?

I think it's more important just Denny closing in on his career, the number of races he's got left, I think it's important to all of us to capitalize on the potential wins with him, you know what I mean, and make those happen when they're close.

Like last week was one we shouldn't have necessarily had without that late restart. We left one on the table at Kansas, potentially Texas too. Those are ones you want back.

Overall, it's just nice to have fast cars, and you want to try to capitalize on those at any point in time. I don't know that it's any more important with this format, other than Reddick could have a bad day today. We should have closed the gap to that, to the lead there quite a bit, I assume.

Q. When you guys scrape the underwing, the diffuser, and go out there and set fast time anyway, some people will say, and they'll be as uneducated as I am for that matter, Why do they need to do that? They were fast anyway. What was the damage, and what is the calculus in making those changes to the car?

CHRIS GAYLE: Well, qualifying, right, specifically at Michigan, is a place where we were qualifying at closer to the end of the day this time, right? Track temp was falling, and you're almost -- you're not quite above the limit of the tire, but you're close to where they're running flat, specifically the last six to eight guys out, right?

For one lap, you can get away with running off the tire a little bit and having the car trimmed out a bit more if you can actually do that in qualifying. So a little bit of the downforce we lost. We knew it wasn't going to be great for us, but you could potentially overcome that in qualifying an event here. Now, roll that into Sunday with track temps much higher, and you have to run longer stints where, if you're in a deficient race car from a downforce standpoint, you're going to degrade your tires more and more and more every lap.

So you have to live with that consequence and that deficit the whole day, and I just didn't see any way that that made sense. We do a lot of math to know what we killed there and how much we lost on it and what it was worth and do we think that that's the right thing when you're going to go 40 to 50 laps on tires today? And no. But we could have gotten away with it for one lap for qualifying.

Even if we didn't get the pole, it's worth trying to get a good pit stall, even if we qualified sixth, whatever the case may be. We would have fixed the car to try to make it race better. They're long races. We didn't have a clean day today. We had a pit stop issue early. We almost got involved in that one wreck around lap 80-something and had to come down pit road and pit when we didn't want to. I think we went to the back three times counting the start.

Whatever performance we can get in the car, that's the way we want to do it for the race.

Q. I was curious what your thoughts are on going for three in a row next week at Pocono?

CHRIS GAYLE: I haven't thought about it. It's a good problem, I guess. Obviously Denny is great at Pocono. What's he have, seven wins there already or something like that? I think it's great. It's a great target. We try to win every week. We talked about how good our cars are right now. Any time we can go into a race weekend, we feel like we have a shot to win if we can just execute and do everything right all weekend. It would be great to get the win at Pocono for sure.

Q. Is Pocono a place where going late in qualifying is important and crucial as it is at Michigan International Speedway?

CHRIS GAYLE: I would be lying to you. I don't know what time we qualify at Pocono. I haven't looked at the schedule. Going late is always great in case there's weather at Pocono, it rains out, and I'm sure we'd be on the pole at this point. So that part would be beneficial for sure.