· Mark Martin registered the 35th NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series win of his career and his first at Kansas Speedway. Martin is the active all-time leading Ford winner and third overall behind Ned Jarrett (43) and Bill Elliott (40). All of Martin’s 35 NNC wins have come in a Ford. · Martin is the fifth different Roush Racing driver to win a Cup points race this season, joining Kurt Busch, Greg Biffle, Matt Kenseth and Carl Edwards.
· Martin has won a Nextel Cup race at every active series track except six (Pocono, Chicagoland, Daytona, Homestead-Miami, Indianapolis and New Hampshire).
· The win is the 13th of the season for Ford, which is three more than last year.
· Ford has 567 all-time NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series wins.
· This marks the second time in 2005 that Roush has posted a 1-2-3 finish. The last time came on Sept. 10 at Richmond when Kurt Busch won with Matt Kenseth, second, and Greg Biffle, third.
· It also marks the second time Roush has placed four drivers in the top five. The last time came on June 19, 2005 at Michigan when Greg Biffle won with Mark Martin, third; Kenseth, fourth; and Carl Edwards, fifth.
MARK MARTIN – No. 6 Viagra Taurus
VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW
“I just want to say to Matt and Arlene that I wish you guys were here. It’s a really special day for me. I want to thank all the fans for all the great support I’ve had this year and Pat Tryson and the Viagra team. This Ford was incredible today. It reminded me of the old days in a Busch car. It was just awesome. These guys want to win so bad and they believe in me and they made a winner out of an old man today.”
BIFFLE GAINED AND THEN FELL BACK. DID YOU PULL OUT SOME RESERVE? “I don’t want to lose. I always tell these guys to give me the lead with four fresh tires with the end in sight and you’ll never get a fight like you’re gonna get from me. I had the race car to do it. I ran as hard as I could run there in the beginning. I maybe saved it a little bit and then when Greg started coming I stepped it up. I could have drove maybe a little bit harder, but I might have wrecked. That’s as fast as I could go and keep him behind me.” A THOUGHT ON THE CHAMPIONSHIP. “My thoughts on the championship are they probably slipped out of my hands last week, but winning is great. Leading the most laps and winning probably puts us back close, but it’s gonna be a lot harder now than it was gonna be if we could have finished in the top 10 at Talladega.”
SEVENTH PLACE, 113 BACK. “That’s too far back, but we can go win us some more and you never know. The thing is these guys are my heroes. They’re the ones that put me in this chase and they kept it together and kept working hard and they’re a championship team and they deserve to be in the chase. We made the chase and unfortunately we had some trouble – big trouble – at Talladega and it may be impossible to dig out of, but I’ll love them forever for what they’ve done for me.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard/Subway Taurus (Finished 2nd) – “I tell you what, it was a great run for our National Guard car. The thing ran flawless all day. I’ll finish second to Mark Martin any day of the week. He drove his butt off out there and made two tires work. My car, I was probably a little faster, but I was just aero-tight behind him and couldn’t get any closer. I was just waiting for Mark to make a mistake, but that’s highly unlikely for Mark Martin to make a mistake, but that’s all I was waiting for.” HOW CONFIDENT ARE YOU ABOUT THE REST OF THE WAY? “We were pretty confident coming I here and we’re still confident that we’ll be able to make our way towards the front. It just depends on what the 20 does. If he passes all his stuff and nothing happens, it’s tough when you only two spots in front of him to gain any points.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Taurus (Finished 5th) – “We didn’t really run as good as I expected today, we just got real tight. We couldn’t fix it a little bit like our Busch car, so we’ve got to be real happy. We had the pole and finished fifth and that was cool that Mark and those guys won. I would have liked to have run a little bit better than we did, but overall it was a good day.” WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF THE CHASE? “I think you’ve just got to look at every race and do the best you can every race. I think everyone in front of us was in the chase, so they’re all gaining points on us, but you can’t really look at it like that. You’ve got to do the best you can. We’ve raced three out of the four chase races and finished in the top five, and we were running great at Dover before we blew a tire. We were running in the top five there, too. That’s all you can ask for. If you run that good every week, you’re gonna have a shot at the end.”
SURPRISED YOU FINISHED IN THE TOP 5 WITH THE PROBLEMS YOU HAD? “Yes and no. We just sort of missed it. I was kind of surprised. We had a really good car in practice on Friday, but the track changes quite a bit. After that first run when we fell back, I just really fought the car and couldn’t get it to turn very good. We had great pit stops. Without our pit stops we probably would have run 15th or so, so you’ve got to give it to those guys. They get me up front every week and did a good job recovering.”
FOUR ROUSH CARS IN THE TOP FIVE. “Yeah, our stuff is awesome right now. I just wish I wouldn’t get beat by my teammates all the time, but if you’re gonna get beat by somebody, it’s good to get beat by those guys. It was awesome to see Mark win. He hasn’t had a win in a while. He won the all-star race but hasn’t had a win in a while before that, so that’s awesome to see him there in victory lane. Overall, it was a great day for us.”
YOU CAN’T GIVE AWAY POINTS LIKE LETTING TEAMMATES LEAD LAPS. IS IT EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF? “Yes and no. I think the 97 is mad, but we help each other a lot. I’ve helped the 97 a lot through the years and he’s helped me a lot through the years – Kurt has helped me a lot and Greg and everybody – but when you get in the chase you’ve got to get all the points you can. There’s the 97 and there are a whole bunch of them lined up behind him that haven’t led yet that were in the chase too. It would be pretty stupid to give somebody a free five points and lose the championship by four at the end of the year. Right now, it looks like we’re a ways out of it, but Jimmie Johnson went out there last year and made up a ton of points. You’ve got to race. There comes a time where you’ve got to race and that’s all there is to it.”
THERE ARE MORE OF THESE TRACKS COMING UP. “The encouraging part for me is that we’ve been running a lot better. We’ve had three top fives in the chase. We were running in the top five at Dover at the end when we blew our second tire. We’ve had some problems and still been able to finish good, so even though we’re a ways behind those other guys, they haven’t had any problems yet. We’re going to some tracks like Charlotte and stuff that is kind of an unknown and I feel good about our performance. I just feel like if you can run in the top five and even the top 10 every week, you’re gonna be there at the end.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Taurus (Finished 3rd) – “The Office Depot Ford was really that good. Man, it’s kind of strange to be disappointed about a third-place finish. I really wanted to win here in front of what I consider a hometown crowd. It’s cool to see this many folks here and how much support we’ve got. But third place is awesome. Mark Martin won and Greg Biffle was second, so congratulations to those guys. It was a great day. That last restart got me. I tried some stuff on the top and if I would have stuck to the bottom we might have had something for them.” SOME GOOD MOMENTUM GOING TO LOWE’S. “Yeah, we’d like to go to Lowe’s Motor Speedway and run really well. But I had a good time today, that’s what matters. Everybody was safe. We had a good race and Mark Martin won, so it’s a good day.”
RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus (Finished 9th) – “We were a real good race car on a long run. We couldn’t go on a short run and it just killed us at the end. We had a restart – 10th in line – and that’s really 20th with all of those lapped cars. We could run fast, but we just couldn’t go on the restart.” IS THIS AS GOOD AS THE TEAM HAS BEEN? “We were better at Atlanta, but we don’t have anything to show for that. That’s when we had a wheel bearing go out, but we were better there at Atlanta. On the long runs today the car was really good, but it didn’t like traffic at all. You’d get in around traffic and it would kill the lap times.”
GREG BIFFLE AND CARL EDWARDS PRESS CONFERENCE
GREG BIFFLE – “We really struggled here off the truck. Our car wasn’t that good. I didn’t think it was that good and really, really struggled. We tried a lot of stuff and I felt like maybe we had a top 10 car, but as competitive as we are these days, we want to have a top five car and feel like we have a chance to win. I didn’t really feel like that going in, and then we sat down and made a lot of changes and ended up qualifying well. The car drove really good and I felt I could have qualified better at eighth, so that was kind of uplifting before the start of the race. When the race started we were just kind of right in there and just worked our way up. We adjusted on the car very little today and I’m just kind of amazed the 6 ran off there with two tires. That was pretty amazing. They had their car dialed in really good.”
CARL EDWARDS – “We had a good race. I think Tony was gonna let me go for a minute, but then he kind of thought, ‘Maybe I can hold him off for 12 or 13 laps,’ so we had a pretty good race there. Our Office Depot/Intel Ford was really good all day. We were great off the truck. It was just super-fast. To be honest with you, it’s awesome to see Mark win the race. That’s cool, and Greg to finish second, but if we would have played our cards just a little bit differently and if I would have done a little bit better job on those last two restarts, we might have been in contention for the win. Our car was awesome at the end, so, deep down a little bit frustrated to finish third, but, heck, it’s an awesome points day and it was a lot of fun. I had a blast racing.” THE CROWD WAS LOUD WHEN YOU PASSED TONY. “That’s good, but to me winning a race here would be bigger than any other race I could win. This would be the neatest thing in the world. Winning that race here last year in the Truck Series was just the most awesome feeling, so until we get to Victory Lane it’s gonna be hard to be too excited about finishes other than that here.”
GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT LETTING A TEAMMATE GET FIVE BONUS POINTS? “I think we just need to treat each other with respect. Now that the championship is on the line it’s up to you, but you really probably can’t slow down and let the guy just lead a lap just because – if he’s 10-20 car lengths back there. If he’s on your bumper, and you’re dogfighting to stay in front of him, maybe letting him go is not that bad of a deal. But just to let a guy go and get five points, Matt is right. It’s probably not the thing we need to be doing. We either need to all do it or not. Five points is five points, I guess. I had to fight Matt for the spot. Matt wasn’t gonna let me just lead. I had to go up there and take it away from him to get my five points, so I was pretty frustrated when the caution came out right when I finally got to him, but we were able to get by him and get some points." THIS ANSWERS THE QUESTION OF WHERE WERE THE ROUSH CARS IN THE FIRST THREE CHASE RACES. “I think so. Our stats kind of say it for itself. We ran really well at Dover, I think all of us did, but I got a flat tire. Talladega, you can’t really count that one. We got third and fourth at Loudon the first race of the chase, so I don’t think that’s too shabby.”
CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – CAN YOU TALK ABOUT NASCAR WANTING TO LIMIT THE NUMBER OF TEAMS? “I kind of heard a little about that this morning, but I don’t know. I’m sure NASCAR will do whatever is best for the sport and the longevity of this sport and everything. Right now I’m glad to be a part of Roush Racing. It’s a really awesome team.”
GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – “The way I really look at it is each team, we’ve run like five individual teams sharing information, so we’re rewarded for building good race cars. Nobody is handing this stuff to us on a platter. We’re doing our best. You look at the Hendrick five teams. Kyle has run really good and so has the 25 and the 48 – all of them have – so I think it’s more of the team itself than who owns the team. That’s really how I look at it. If all five Hendrick cars were in there I wouldn’t say it’s because of Hendrick that all five are in there. We just have great organization and we build good race cars and we’ve got five good drivers. If we take some other driver out of the series and put him in the 99 is that car gonna be in the chase? I don’t know. I feel we’ve got five of the best drivers in the series and it’s hard to penalize a team owner for that.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT BATTLING TONY? “He’s a tough customer. He runs really well. He’s a smart race car driver. He thinks. He executes. Greg, his crew chief, is really sharp. His team has got years of experience. They’re gonna be very hard to beat. They’re gonna have to have another off day like they did at Dover and we’re gonna have to not get a flat tire in order to close in on them. Just 10 points a race isn’t gonna do it, and what are the chances of me finishing second for the next six races. That’s pretty unlikely as well, so we can only do as good as we can do and can’t really worry about the outcome. We’re worried about it, but we really can’t do anything about the outcome of the 20. He almost got wrecked today coming off of four. He slid up in front of me off of four and was not cleared at all – not even close. I got out of the gas so fast my car got sideways and I almost wrecked myself trying not to turn him around because I certainly didn’t want to wreck him and everybody think I turned him around because he’s leading the points. I tried my best to stay off of him and I almost wrecked myself, so that wasn’t very smart of me to do, but we both survived it and moved on.”
CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – “I think that tells you something about how he’s racing. He’s not racing for points. They’re racing to win, too.” BIFFLE – “Yeah, everybody has got to go. It’s time to go.”
CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – TALK ABOUT COMING HOME. “In a way I was sitting here thinking about what I said. I feel a little bit greedy to come up here and say, ‘Wow, I finished third in a Nextel Cup race and I’m really disappointed’ because it’s an awesome achievement. I think everything we’ve achieved this year has been great. I did not expect in a million years to be in the chase, to have won two races and to be able to come here and be disappointed about third is just amazing. It’s cool. It’s awesome to come home. The fans here are great. I walk around at all these races and I’m kind of the new guy. There are a lot of fans who know who I am and stuff, and it’s pretty cool, I get to sign some autographs, but I walked from the Busch garage to the Cup garage here and I got stopped. I couldn’t move because there were so many people. I thought, ‘This is crazy.’ So the fans here are just so much fun. They’re awesome and they’ve been behind me 100 percent and that means the world. It’s always fun to come home.”
DID YOU HAVE A LOT OF FAMILY AND WAS THERE A POINT WHERE YOU WERE PUSHING HARDER ON THE TRACK? “I did have a lot of folks here. I walked in my motorhome earlier before the race and I had a big cardboard collage that says, ‘Go Carl Edwards’ up in he front windshield and there were like 15 people in my motorhome. It was awesome. Everybody showed up. It’s a lot of fun. There might have been 50 people here who are either related to me or married to someone that’s related to me, which I guess makes them related to me (laughter). I have a lot of cousins and folks like that, so that was pretty cool. There wasn’t a point in the race where I tried to push any harder. I knew right at the end we had like 15 to go or 13 to go and I got in third, I could see Mark and Greg out there and I thought, ‘Man, if I ever could give 100 percent now is the time,’ and I did but it was still too little, too late, but I gave it 100 percent all day.”
GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED -- THOUGHTS ON MARK WINNING? “I was really excited following him. That sounds kind of funny. Don’t get me wrong, I was gonna pass him if I could, but I was real excited following him. I don’t know why, but you’ve got a lot of time to think about stuff at this race track and I’m just picturing him buckled down in that race car just giving it all he’s got every single lap. Mark is just sitting there driving the wheels off of that thing and knowing that I’m behind him, but I was thinking about him winning and it would mean a lot to him to win. Certainly, our job is to win too. We want to win for all the soldiers, but I’m probably as happy as he is that he won today.”
CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – “He’s a great guy and it’s cool because he’s one of those people that gives so much to the sport and tries so hard that you can’t help but be happy for someone like that when they have success, so it’s cool to see him do that.”
GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – ARE YOU GETTING FRUSTRATED WITH ALL THE CLOSE LOSSES HERE IN BUSCH AND CUP? “I forgot that I lost the Busch race like that last year coming to the line and that was kind of frustrating. Not really, I guess if I come back next year and get two seconds I might start to get frustrated, but there’s a difference between finishing second. Today, yeah you should have probably been a little more frustrated because we led a lot of it and had a pretty fast car, but yesterday my car was so stinking fast and so dominant, and I was so much faster than Kasey. I was nearly half-a-second a lap or better faster than Kasey and didn’t win, so that kind of gets to you when you’ve got that good of a car and you basically don’t get the job done. That’s a little frustrating personally, but just didn’t have enough laps. Maybe taking four tires, I could have replayed that a bunch and maybe done things different, but when you finish in the top five like this it’s hard to not be happy, really.”
MARK MARTIN PRESS CONFERENCE
PAT TRYSON, Crew Chief – “Once we got out front in clean air he never gave up the lead, except for during pit stops and he just did an awesome job. The car was handling good and he was able to stay up front.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MARK? “Obviously, he’s been a veteran that has proven he can win and our team is pretty much the same team that he had when he finished second in points with the exception of one or two people. He’s won so many races and it was nice to go to Victory Lane with him in Charlotte and again here and at Dover. Really, he’s carried us more than we’ve carried him, but there’s just a lot of mutual respect between him and our whole team and that’s probably what makes it work really well.”
WAS IT EASY FOR THE GUYS TO STAY ONE MORE YEAR? “Yeah, it wasn’t really hard to get them convinced. They were all pretty much lined up to begin with to stay with Mark for his last year, so now we have to do the same thing for this year and try to get them all to stay again. It might be a little harder this year, but I’m sure we’ll get at least most of them to stay.”
THOUGHTS ON BIFFLE CLOSING THE GAP LATE? “It was pretty stressful. Greg was pretty fast all day. He was pretty fast on long runs and most of the long runs early in the race he was coming and catching us there. We were a little worried, but catching Mark and passing him are two different things. He would have been pretty hard to pass for the win, and, like I said, fortunately Greg’s car got a little loose one time and gave us just enough cushion where we could hold him off there to the end. Mark never made a mistake and Greg tried as hard as he could.”
WHY IS IT MARK HAS SO MUCH RESPECT WITH OTHER COMPETITORS? “He’s just really, really a classy individual. You don’t ever hear him about wrecking somebody. Nine times out of 10 he gives everybody racing room and treats them with courtesy out there. If you’re faster than him, he lets you go and then he’ll race you back later when he catches you. He just treats everybody with respect and he’s just been a class individual throughout his entire career.” YOU TOOK TWO TIRES ON THE LAST STOP? “On the last stop we did four. The stop that originally put us in the front we did two, and then we did four the last two times. It was my decision to do two when we did two that time. We did the one under green was four and then the last one was four under caution. The one that got us the lead the first time was two tires.”
CAN HE STILL WIN THE TITLE? “Anything is possible. I just look at it as we’ve got to try to make up 20 points a race and I think we made up 20 today, so we just have to do it again next week.”
MARK MARTIN – “It was a great race. We had a great car on Friday. We knew that we had a good car. I was very pleased with it. A lot of times when Sunday rolls around and you lay all that rubber down on the race track things change, but this car just kept getting better as the race went. We made very few adjustments. The adjustements we made were really right. Pat made some great calls on pit road. We got the lead before halfway and we led the whole race. That’s the formula for heartbreak in my world because more often than not something goes wrong to spoil that, so I was relieved after the race. It wasn’t the most exciting win of my career. It was one that is well deserved by my team and as long as I live I will remember it for the feeling that it feels like to give to my team. They deserve to win so much. They’re the ones that I went to a year ago and said, ‘Guys, please, let’s keep this team together so that I can have one last shot at this thing.’ So no matter what happens from here on out, we’ve had a great year, we’ve had a great race. We’ve won here. We won the all-star race. We made the chase and those guys are my heroes.”
JACK ROUSH – “I don’t feel like we had a sweep because we didn’t have all five in the top five, but certainly we had a good spread. The different race tracks wind up having a characteristic that suits maybe the package that one set of engineers put together or one set of drivers like. We really like the tire that Goodyear has given us this year. We like the fact that NASCAR cut an inch off the spoiler last year. If you get the car setup so you have to turn it with the front end, there are problems coming for it as a number of the teams have and we’ve had on some occasions.
But the formula for what the car is has a lot of speed in it for mile-and-a-half race tracks if you’ve got the courage and if you’ve got the feel for where the speed is. Happily, Mark and all of our guys have got that. We haven’t been great at road racing. Obviously, we haven’t won a road race for a while. We certainly haven’t been the heat at restrictor plate races, even though we’ve got the same engines that are doing a great job there. So we’re not great every place we go, but we have been fairly deliberate about putting our emphasis on race tracks that are the most fun and race tracks that have the greatest opportunity for a driver to make a big difference as opposed to Daytona or Talladega, where it’s almost like Russian Roulette to go to those places.
If Roush Racing, if Mark Martin can’t do his business at Kansas City or at Charlotte or at Atlanta, well then we’re in desperate trouble and we’re definitely not on our game. But what happened here today is reflected in that the cars were well driven, they were well prepared by hard working teams and the judgments that the crew chiefs made were just excellent. The crew chief stands as captain of the ship. He’s the supreme commander as he stands on top of his pit box. I don’t interfere with him and nobody else does. He makes his decisions – two tires, no tires, gas only, whatever – and Pat was the man of the hour today. He got two tires on the car early, had the car good enough and understood what he needed to do so that it would be meaningful and would get him ready for later. There were two times when Mark got a little bit in trouble with track position based on not having a car exactly the way he wanted it and not overdriving it, and Pat was able to put him in contention with two tires and had it where it would work. So the tires did a great job. Pat did a super job and all the guys stood in their spot and did what they needed to do. That’s what we’ve got to do for the trust that our sponsors put in us, for the business arrangements we’ve got with Ford and NASCAR and for all the trust and support we get from our fans.”
