For First Win Of 2005
· Matt Kenseth posted the 10th of his NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series career with today’s triumph and first at Bristol Motor Speedway.
· Kenseth’s last points win came a year ago at Las Vegas (56 races ago). He also won the Nextel All-Star Challenge non-points event at Charlotte in ‘04.
· Kenseth is the fourth different Roush Racing driver to win a Cup race this season, joining Kurt Busch, Greg Biffle and Carl Edwards.
· The win is the 10th of the season for Ford, which equals last season’s total.
· Ford has 564 all-time NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series wins.
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Taurus – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW –
“It means a lot. This base group has been together for a long time and they do an awesome job every week. Our performance has been better and you knew we had a fast car when we’re on the pole and for me to qualify as fast. Our DeWalt Ford was awesome all day. I’m just so thankful to have the opportunity to drive these race cars. It’s a lot of fun.”
YOU NEVER SEEMED CONCERNED. “No, we were pretty fast. We were a little free, which made us real fast on a short run. I was a little scared if we had like a 150-lap run that we were gonna be too loose, but it was a 70-lap run and they couldn’t run with us. We were pretty stout, so it feels great. I’ve got thank all of my sponsors. I’m gonna forget most of them because it’s been so long, but mainly DeWalt, they’ve been with us forever, and Ford. Carhartt, Waste Management, Trex, USG, Kraft singles and Gillette Young Guns.”
JUST 11 POINTS OUT OF 10TH PLACE. “I thought we were out of it and we had a great run last week. I felt like performancewise we won the race last week, we just came up short on fuel, but I had a great car. That really put us back in it and tonight leading all the laps and winning, of course, I knew that was gonna get us closer, but there are still a couple of races to go. We’ll see what we can do. We’re a lot closer. I see some of those guys had trouble and if we can run like we did at Michigan at California next week I think we’ll be right there.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard/Subway Taurus (Finished 3rd) – “We had an awesome car all night there. I believe after we worked on it we had the fastest race car, but we were just too loose there at one point in the race. Coming from the back at Bristol is the toughest thing to do and all the fenders are straight on this race car, so that’s pretty awesome. I ran into the back of the 88 on that last wreck. I couldn’t get slowed down, but it was an awesome day for the National Guard car. These guys worked really hard in the pits. I had more pit stops than I’ve ever seen at Bristol. We stopped a lot tonight. The tires acted a lot different. You had to have four tires or you couldn’t go. It was just a great job by everybody. I’m just so excited to come back to a third-place finish like this. It’s unbelievable.”
YOU’RE COMING AROUND AFTER A LITTLE LULL. “I don’t know if we’ve had a lull or not, but this race team has a never-give-up attitude. All the sponsors we have on the car every week – Travelodge and Charter and Subway with the National Guard is pretty awesome. To come from dead-last to third, and I didn’t get any freebies – not in the pits – I had to earn every single one of them. It was an awesome day for us.”
MARK MARTIN – No. 6 Viagra Taurus (Finished 16th) – “We had a real good car and we did what we needed to do. Even with the pit stop, we’re all a team and we’re all in this together. That’s all we needed to do. Sure, it would have been nice to finish up in the top 10 where we belonged and really where we ran all night, but we just had one little slip-up and it didn’t cost us that much. We got done what we needed to get done.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Taurus (Finished 24th) – “The Office Depot car doesn’t look like much, but at least we made it to the end. Congratulations to Matt Kenseth. That was wild. What happened was we had a broken right-front shock from lap 50 or something and it was all I could do to get it in the corner. It was real bad into the corner. I was following the 43 car, Jeff Green. We were doing great. Everything was going really well and we went into the corner and he just stopped and I punted him and spun it out. It was my fault and he was real upset about it. That was one event. Then I got back out there and we were running and I went to pass Kyle Petty on the outside and he just drilled me into the wall. It just destroyed our car. I thought he did it on purpose because I was far enough up next to him. Then we were running together later and he was running around me and sticking his nose in and I thought he was gonna try to wreck me, so I ended up bumping him. After the race he came down to tell me that, ‘Hey, it was just an accident. I didn’t mean to do it.’ That’s how crazy it is. You can think somebody is so angry at you. Sometimes maybe you need a radio frequency where the drivers can talk, but I feel bad about Jeff Green. That was terrible, but it was still a good night for us.”
A GOOD POINTS NIGHT. “Yeah, but we need to be a lot better than that here. It’s exciting. I had a good time. I have so much respect for Kyle Petty and Jeff Green. They’re awesome. I’m glad we worked that out and they’re not mad. That was really worrying me. Number one my broke car, but number two having Kyle Petty mad at you means you’re a pretty bad guy, so that’s cool. We’re alright.”
TODD PARROTT, Crew Chief – No. 38 M&M’s Taurus (Sadler finished 13th) – WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END? “The right-front fender got knocked in on that last caution. We got into the 92 car and I guess the car got tight or something. We got stuck on the outside and a few cars got by, but it’s not that bad. I’m sitting here looking at points and we’re only 34 points out of 10th and we’ve got two races left. It ain’t over yet. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet.”
GREG BIFFLE PRESS CONFERENCE – “I tell you what, it was an unbelievable night. It was nothing short of exciting out there tonight. We had a great car all night. Unfortunately, we got that flat tire going back to green. Unbelievable you can pit here under green and put on tires and then finish third in the same night. It’s unbelievable. Matt had a great car. I just wish I would have gotten another crack at him. I raised the track bar and my car was really fast, but it was just a zgood night for us. We can’t complain.”
RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus (Finished 4th) – “The guys did a great job in the pits. Fatback McSwain, the Wood Brothers and the Motorcraft Taurus was good all night. We just sort of tried to stay out of trouble. We’ve wrecked out of this race like the last three times. It’s usually been a good race track for us and we were lucky we got a good qualifying spot and just tried to keep our nose clean all night. It worked out pretty good. The last set of tires, when I needed them, we got tight. We needed to hit pit road, but we couldn’t afford to hit pit road because you give up track position. Fatback had a looser set of tires at the end, but we just didn’t get a chance to put them on. It was just great solid run for everybody tonight.”
YOU WERE IN THE TOP 10 ALL NIGHT. “I think that’s one reason you look at the car and it’s clean. The only mark I got, I don’t know what DJ was doing, he got passed and tried to drive to the bottom when there wasn’t a hole there and he just ran right into the side of my door.”
A SOLID NIGHT. “The stops were great all night. You’ve got to have track position and the car was really good on long runs. We came up here a couple of weeks ago and tested and Fatback finally found a setup that I really liked. We were here three-quarters of the day and didn’t like it and he hit on it right at the end of practice a couple of weeks ago. We knew we had something pretty good, but we just needed to be a little bit freer. We had another set of tires on the last pit stop we were gonna put on, but the way the circumstances all broke down we couldn’t afford to hit pit road because we would have given up all that track position. But it was just a great run for the Wood Brothers tonight.”
THIS TRACK SEEMS TO SUIT YOU. “It’s just a tough old race track. We’ve run second here three or four times over the years and must have about 25 top fives just no wins. It’s just been a good, solid track for us, but lately the last three or four races we’ve wrecked out of this thing playing a smart race. But they wreck in front of you and they run over you from behind. It’s just a lot of luck involved. You’ve got to be up front where you’re out of the mess all night.”
MATT KENSETH PRESS CONFERENCE
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – “Robbie brought a great car here. Normally with Matt, when he finishes a practice session and says he really doesn’t know what he needs to do, he asks them if they want to use the remaining time for something that Robbie or Chip wants to try – the engineer – they get it going pretty good. But, anyway, to start from the pole. This is only Matt’s second pole since we’ve been Cup racing together was pretty amazing. I had a feeling that if he could stay up front, if he didn’t get snookered by staying out when he shouldn’t or coming in when he shouldn’t – that if he could maintain track position he was gonna be really good tonight and that was all Robbie Reiser determining when they came in. The holding and folding and the gambling part or the raising gambling part, that was Robbie. Robbie and I don’t see eye to eye every once in a while on pit road, but tonight he was at his best and I stayed out of it so it worked out OK.”
ROBBIE REISER, Crew Chief – WERE YOU CONFIDENT TONIGHT? “I’m never confident. I mean, this has just been a struggle. A lot of times we start races I think we’ve got a good car and we don’t, so most of the time the first 20 laps I sit back and watch what’s going on and, hopefully, we’ve got a decent car and tonight we seemed to have one.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – IS THE 17 TEAM PEAKING AT THE RIGHT TIME? “As far as peaking at the right time, that’s exactly what I’ve been telling the guys that fortunately we hadn’t peaked and we had our peak in front of us. If it was high enough and it came soon enough we might have a chance. I’d all but written off our chances to get in three races ago, but Robbie and the guys didn’t lose the faith and they’ve kept it going. I was building toward next year all the way, but they’ve got it turned around now. It’s gonna be a horse race when they go to Richmond.”
ROBBIE REISER CONTINUED – HAS THIS TEAM BEEN BETTER ALL ALONG? “I think in the first part of the year Jack was ready to fire me. It was probably the best team I’ve ever had and that’s a lot to say considering we won a championship in 2003, but this group of people that we’ve got right now they don’t get down, they keep working. Obviously, this was a good testament of it tonight. This team hasn’t run that well this year, but the last couple of weeks it’s been really coming around and these guys have stuck into it and I don’t have one guy that has spent the season complaining. They’ve pretty much just gone to work. The month of May was really tough on this team. We got way behind with some of the car setup and some of the things we had going on, but we were able to turn it around. The last two months have been real strong for this team and these guys are behind it 100 percent. I think when everybody had us written out of the chase that was more of a challenge than anything else and they wanted to step up to the challenge and turn this thing around. There are a lot of guys on the 17 that have been there a long time and those guys have a lot of pride and they aren’t gonna go down without a fight.”
MATT SAID HE HAD WRITTEN THINGS OFF TOO. “That’s fine. I’m fine with everybody writing us off, but that’s what makes us tick. The guys that work on the team that’s what makes you tick. When people tell you you can’t do something, then you want to do it.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – “I’d like to comment on what happened to us at Michigan. We really didn’t get beat. I don’t consider we got beat on fuel mileage at Michigan. The thing that we needed to do to prove what mileage we had and be able to do what we might have done was to give up all of our track position late in the race – give up the track position and assume there would be no further cautions on the next-to-the-last caution, and we decided not to do that. That’s not the way we race. Three times out of four you’ll get bit doing that. We didn’t want to win that race the way it had to be won. All five of our cars led the race and we didn’t break a part. I stepped away from Michigan as satisfied as I could be. Normally when we win a race, even like tonight, we’ve got Carl Edwards that didn’t do what he might have based on the fact that he had two collisions up front and lost the water out of his radiator late in the race. I’ve got to sleep with that tonight or not sleep with it, but after Michigan I had absolutely nothing to be sad about. We were very happy about that race. We ran well and we’ll win a lot of races with the kind of strategy we had there and with the fuel mileage we had.”
IS MATT THAT CALM BEHIND THE SCENES? “He’s as cold-blooded as any driver I’ve ever worked with. A lot of times when you try to sit down, I’m constantly mulling things over and trying to figure out where is there a weakness, what do we need to do to change things. Many times when things aren’t going well as they were this year we didn’t make any major changes, but I had my finger on the trigger all the time. I’m ready to make a change if I can understand that there’s a consensus that says we’ve got a weakness in an area, but Matt stuck with all of his guys and he stuck with the strategy that we had. He’s got the maturity to know that this is a cyclical business with ups and downs and he was not gonna give up on the good thing he thought he had going when it was down and he was gonna wait for it to turn and it has. He’s been right.”
DO YOU SEE MATT AND JEFF GORDON BUILDING MOMENTUM TO MAKE THE CHASE? “I haven’t paid near as much attention to Jeff Gordon as I have at Matt and I think probably what their prospects are in either case is the stuff of editorials and more your business than mine. But it is important that we peak right. It is important to carry momentum into the chase. If we manage to get in there with the 17 car, I’d be happy to be in 10th place if we can do that. We’ll only be 50 points behind and having done that, I would certainly think that we’d have a very good possibility of being successful with Robbie’s confidence in his guys and with the maturity that Matt has. In 2003 when he won that championship, it was not our best year for our engines in terms of we didn’t have our new D3 cylinder head and I hadn’t made my arrangement with Robert Yates yet to get our engines where they are today. We had a Taurus that hadn’t been changed since ’97. Except for every year from ’97 to 2003, NASCAR gave us a new set of templates that made it less car than it was before, so our engine wasn’t great and our car wasn’t great and the guys overcame that with great pit strategy and great judgments on Matt’s part for the things he’d do in the car. This year we’ve got a great Taurus and a great engine and if we can just get a shot at this thing, it would be awesome.”
ROBBIE REISER CONTINUED – HAVE THE CREW GUYS BEEN POSITIVE ALL YEAR? “I think that’s the beauty of this team right now, yeah. I think those guys were behind it 100 percent. Sure, it wasn’t going right, but they’re all racers that are on the 17 and those guys realize that there are peaks and valleys and they all realize that we were gonna have to work at this thing to get it turned around. Last year when the different setups came in and we were pretty conventional in our aero package and there were some guys running in our company that were running better we had to look at what they were doing and it kind of sent us down a different path and one that was kind of the wrong direction for what we were doing with the 17 car, so it took a little bit to turn that back around and get it straightened out. Matt has been really patient with us during that time. I don’t know if Jack has been pretty patient, but Matt has been pretty patient and believing what we’re doing and the things we’ve got to do. Matt has always believed that we as a race team is as good as we’re gonna be together and not apart. It’s a strength of his that he understands that.”
ROBBIE REISER CONTINUED – WAS THERE ANY FINGER POINTING? “I don’t think there’s ever been any finger pointing. A finger gets pointed at me, but rightfully so, I’m responsible for the way the team runs and the way the team performs. If it doesn’t perform well, it’s my responsibility. Thank God we started to turn it around here because I’d probably be on the outside looking in, but it’s all about the race team.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – YOU’RE 11 POINTS AWAY FROM HAVING HALF THE CHASE FIELD. “Once they realized what they were doing, I called Mike Helton when they came out with this strategy for this chase last year and I said, ‘Mike, right now there has been a lot of criticism on multi-team programs and it’s growing and getting stronger and it’s gonna continue to do that.’ I predicted last year that we’d put all five. We should have put all five of them in the top 10 and people are gonna say I’m predatory, but we missed a great opportunity to get them all in last year with the brand new Taurus that we didn’t capitalize on. Robbie hit on it. We did not have the latest strategies for springs and aero utilization of the angle of attack of the car. We weren’t doing that the way some teams were doing that last year. We were a little confused with what the new Taurus had to offer, but over the winter when we looked at the data of things gone right and things gone wrong, it became real clear what we needed to build and we built a lot of cars. Robbie and Matt sat down and got busy with their springs and shocks and got on the same page as the competition and the best of the Roush cars and we’ve got a really nice group of cars that can go do pretty much on any given day what anybody can do in the business. If we don’t put them in the top 10, it’s gonna be because I’ve done something to screw them up and I sure don’t want to face that.”
MATT KENSETH – AFTER POCONO WHAT HAPPENED TO TURN IT AROUND? “First of all, we haven’t made it yet. I thought before Daytona, when we got out of Sears Point and went to Daytona, I said all along I thought we could make it, we just couldn’t have any big problems. But there are a couple of hurdles there why I was saying the last few weeks I thought we were out of it. We messed up both Poconos real bad and did so terrible. We were in the late thirties and we were 200-and-some points out and not just 200-and-some points out, but we had six cars in between us and 10th. That’s hard to do. To gain points and have a great day, that can happen with the equipment that we have and all the stuff that we have, but to have five or six people have trouble and have a great day for several weeks in a row is a difficult task. We’ve been a lot more competitive, I think, since around June. There have certainly been some races that we haven’t been competitive and we messed things up, but on average we’ve been much more competitive. I felt like, in a way, we won Michigan on performance last week. A couple of guys made it on gas, but we beat all the cars that were out there on performance and I felt great about that. At Chicago it was the same thing and this weekend we just had an awesome car. They looked at what we did in the spring here and figured out what they did wrong with the car and put it all back and got everything pointed in the right direction and working right and it showed. You could make changes and it would change the car. We just have awesome engines and we have great cars and if we can do the right things to them and not mess them up, they can run like that.”
I DON’T THINK YOU GOT PASSED ON THE TRACK TONIGHT. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU HAD A CAR LIKE THAT? “We had a car like that at Pikes Peak. That first Busch race we ran at Pikes Peak we had an awfully good car. We had a car this good, and I can’t say it was better, but at least as good at Chicago and ended up getting behind on track position and didn’t win it, but we had car that was that dominant. It was just awesome. This car was pretty much the same thing. If we would have had 150-lap run, I think we would have been not as dominant as we looked. I think we would have been a little slower at the end of the run, but this car was really, really fast for a 70 or 80-lap run. We were all over them for 20 or 30 or 40 laps. It was a lot of fun to drive it like that.”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED – DID YOU GET PASSED? “Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of. I think the farthest back we were all day was sixth place when some guys stayed out and we worked our way back to the lead. We had a great car, especially on fresh tires. Robbie did a great job calling the race and all of the cautions kind of fell in the right place for that. There were some 10-lap cautions. We’d run 10 laps and have a caution, so we knew we were gonna stay out and then we’d run 30 or 40 laps and with us being the leader – a few guys that did stay out just got killed. They didn’t get tires – so everybody knew they needed tires if you ran 30 or 40 laps and everybody came down with us and that made all of our jobs down there a little bit easier. Usually at this place you’ll have 15 cars stay out and you’ll have 15 cars pit and you get yourself way behind, but everybody knew that they needed tires tonight and that made it a little bit easier.” HOW BIG WAS YOUR SPOTTER TONIGHT AND WHAT ABOUT YOUR CHANCES THE NEXT TWO RACES. “The spotters are probably most important at Daytona and Talladega and then at Bristol they’re important too to watch for accidents. Things happen in a big hurry here. There’s only so much they can do, but they’re definitely important. When you’re in the front, that’s the easiest job they’ll ever have. When you’re out front and you’re catching people from behind and passing them that’s an easier job for them. I never like to get overly confident about anything, but I think unless something goes wrong, which it certainly could easy enough, I think that we’ll be very competitive at California. We have a car that we ran at Chicago and Michigan and it performed good enough to win both of those races and I think it will perform the same at California. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have a flat tire or a bad pit stop or a broken part or eye bracket or something like that, but I do think that we’ll go there and be competitive enough to run up front and, hopefully, challenge for a win. I just believe that car is a really, really, really good car. It’s been really great at both of those tracks and if we put the right stuff into that, I think it will run up front.” DO YOU BELIEVE IN PEAKING? “I don’t know how I can answer about sports teams for sure, but I know in our business that momentum is very important. It’s a weird thing. If we do make the chase and we do get to the top 10, I’ll feel really good about it – not just because we made the top 10 because, to me, it’s not just about making the top 10. I mean, if I’m gonna finish seventh in points or 12th in points, honestly, I don’t really care. If we make the top 10, I want to make the top 10 with a chance at winning a championship. Last year we made the top 10, I felt like in my heart that we weren’t gonna run for a championship anyway. I didn’t think we were running good enough. I just didn’t feel like we had our ducks in a row to do that and we ended up finishing eighth with some mistakes I made and so on. This year, the way we’ve run the last couple months if we were more consistent, but our performance is so good that I feel like if we could slide our way in there right now, we’re on a high note and I do think momentum does carry for a while. You could see it with Greg at the beginning of the year and, yeah, he’s still running really great, but in the beginning of the year he couldn’t do nothing wrong. If we’re lucky enough to get in a stretch like that and carry that on for a few races in the chase, I feel like we’re running good enough to be a threat. It’s only five points a position and if we can get in that, I think we could be a threat to challenge everybody with the way everybody is running right now. That’s what I feel the best about.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – NICE TO TALK ABOUT A WIN OPPOSED TO THE OTHER STUFF? “I don’t know if anybody has read or kept track of my interviews, but I basically haven’t commented on anything outside of our press release as it relates to Kurt and the dilemma that we’ve got in dealing with that situation. The structure that surrounds our business, we need rules for the technical aspects of it and we need rules and guidelines and make commitments that work for our business and I guess we’re gonna have some trials with those things right now to see if the structure we’ve got with our business works so we can make guarantees. But I’m looking to Kurt being in my 97 car for Newell Rubbermaid, Sharpie and Biaggio to the extent that they negotiate with one another and get happy with it in 2006 and then we’ll make new plans for 2007.”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED – ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RICHMOND? “Yes, I’m thinking about Richmond, but I’m not thinking about it because of the chase. I’m thinking about Richmond because we’re going there Monday and Tuesday to test our Cup
