OF FORD CHAMPIONSHIP WEEKEND WITH FORD 400 VICTORY
· Greg Biffle won the Ford 400 for the third straight year and gave Ford a Truck-Busch-Cup sweep of Ford Championship Weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
· Mark Martin won the Ford 200 on Friday night while Matt Kenseth took the checkered flag in the Ford 300 on Saturday night.
· Biffle now has 11 career NNC wins after posting his second triumph of 2006 (Darlington).
· The last time Ford swept a Truck-Busch-Cup weekend was at Bristol in August when Matt Kenseth won the Busch and Cup races and Mark Martin captured the Truck event.
· Ford has now won 576 all-time NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series races.
· The win was Fusion’s sixth all-time NNC triumph after debuting at Daytona in February.
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard Ford Fusion – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEWS -- “This Ford Fusion was something else this weekend. I just want to thank all of the National Guard. This win is for those guys. We really love them and we’re gonna miss them next year. I just want to say hi to my dad. He’s sick right now and he can’t be here right now, but I’m thinking of you and this win’s for you too.”
WALK ME THROUGH THE LAST COUPLE OF RESTARTS. “I tell you what, I was nervous as could be. I was scared that I wasn’t gonna be able to hold those guys off, but this Ford Fusion race car is just so awesome. Doug and everybody did a great job on it, but I was nervous. I was really nervous about the 1. He was getting a good start. He was laying back on me and I’m pretty excited to hold them off.”
NO BETTER WAY TO END YOUR CAREER WITH DOUG. “I love Doug. We’re good friends. We just didn’t hit it off like we needed to next year and we’re hoping to bring good things with Pat (Tryson) next year. Doug will find a home here at Roush. He’s a good guy and he’s gonna be crew chiefing another championship team.”
WHAT ABOUT YOUR WIN. “I tell you, this Ford Fusion race car is just so awesome. This is the same car I’ve won with three years in a row and these fans down here at Homestead-Miami race track are something else also. I’m pretty excited to come down here. I love this place and I hope we put on a good show for all the fans tonight. Congratulations to Jimmie Johnson on his first championship and hopefully we’ll be in that position next year.”
HOW MUCH DID YOU HAVE TO WORK ON THE CAR? “We had to work quite a bit on it. Doug and Bobby and all the guys just did a great job. They kept up on the pit stops and the pit stops were great tonight. Really, it was just a flawless night. I’ve got to thank everybody and the National Guard. We’re really gonna miss those guys. We love them and we appreciate what they do for our country and we’re really thinking about them.” DOES THIS SET YOU UP FOR NEXT YEAR? “Yeah, this really does. It does a lot for us, but no rest for us. We’re going to test Las Vegas the 6th and 7th of December and we’re ready to get going on next year already.”
MARK MARTIN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion (Finished 18th) – YOUR THOUGHTS? “I don’t know. I guess I’m glad that one’s over with. Pat and all the guys tried to make something happen here today. We really thought we had something better than that, but we struggled around in the middle all day. The car was good on the long runs, but we didn’t get much of that when we needed it. We certainly got some in the middle and got right up to the top 10, but we couldn’t restart with any of them, so that one’s off the list and we’re done.”
A MEMORABLE RUN WITH JACK ROUSH. “Yeah, it’s been a long time and a lot of water under the bridge. We’ve done a lot together and nothing will ever change that. We’ll probably always look back on that as the good old days.”
YOU ACCOMPLISHED SO MUCH WITH THEM. “Yeah, it was just a disappointing day. It didn’t turn out quite like Friday night did. We hoped it would, but it didn’t.” SOME PEOPLE DON’T STAY MARRIED 19 YEARS. “That’s right. It doesn’t make it wrong for me to do something else, it makes it weird. It’s not wrong just because I stayed there that long. My cup has been running over all year. That’s it. I don’t know what else to say. If it was half-full, I’d be crying right now.”
JIMMIE JOHNSON WON THE TITLE TONIGHT. YOUR THOUGHTS. “You couldn’t beat him and you can’t take that away from them. They went out there and earned that one.”
DAVID GILLILAND – No. 38 M&M’s Ford Fusion (Finished 33rd) – “I feel really good about it, not our finish obviously, but we came here and unloaded and felt like we had a great car from the time we unloaded and throughout the race. Our car was a little free on new tires, but that’s what you needed to be to be good at the end. It was definitely at car that was capable of running in the top five all day. That’s where we ran all day until we wrecked, so I’m real proud of the race team. I think that this is good for us to build on for next year. I’m real excited about having a good solid foundation and a good baseline to come back with next year.”
THE TEST HERE OBVIOUSLY MADE A DIFFERENCE FOR YOU. “Yeah, absolutely. Being the new guy coming in is just so tough. It’s just tough. I haven’t seen many of these race tracks before. Next year we’re gonna run 25 Busch races and I think that will help cut down my learning curve as well.”
WHAT GOT YOU IN THE WALL? “I just went in behind two other cars and they were side-by-side and I just got into the center and it was like I had no air on the rear spoiler and around it went. It’s a shame. We had a great car, but we’ll chalk that up to experience. I’m real happy with our progress as a team from when I came to right now. It’s head and shoulders above where we started and where they were as a team.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Fusion (Finished 6th) – “I’m pretty happy with the way we ran. We weren’t great, but we weren’t terrible, either. We were kind of in-between of what we were in the summer and what we’ve been lately. So I thought we made some gains on it and got it driving a little better, excellent pit stops and overall we had a pretty good day.”
CAN YOU PUT THIS SEASON IN PERSPECTIVE? “It’s been a great season. You always want to win, but with everything that’s going on in the chase, I’m happy to finish second to Jimmie. Them guys have been the guys to beat the last four years, really, for a championship – man, they’ve been unbelievably fast and consistent. Them guys really deserve it, and it’s been a great year.”
TWO TIRES SEEMED TO WORK WELL, AND THIS WAS ONE OF YOUR BETTER RUNS AT A MILE-AND-HALF TRACK RECENTLY. “They bring us such hard tires now that you don’t really need four tires all the time. I wish they were softer and we needed four all the time, I think the races would be a little bit better, but they were just so hard and track position was real important.”
CAN YOU ASSESS JIMMIE JOHNSON’S SEASON? “I think Jimmie’s whole career – I don’t remember a year or really a period in his career when it hasn’t been great. Ever since him and Chad got together over there at Hendrick Motorsports, they’ve been a force, they’ve been the guys to beat, really. When you try to set your standards to the season you try to look at them and you realize that they’re going to be one of the favorites. There are a lot of great teams that can do it, but you always realize that they’re going to be right there.”
ON FINISHING SECOND IN THE STANDINGS. “You always want to finish as high as you can finish. There’s a lot of prize money in there that goes into al these guys’ bonuses, which helps these guys. You want to be as high as you can – you’re the secpnd-best.”
DO YOU WISH YOU HAD A CAR LIKE THIS FOR SOME OF THE OTHER CHASE RACES? “Yeah, this has been our best car, but we weren’t a threat to win, by any means, but we were top-10 most of the day and kind of hung out there. So, we still have some work to do, but yet it was still a pretty good run for us, a pretty good effort. We know we have some work to do here.”
ARE YOU DISAPPOINTED IN FINIHSING SECOND IN THE STANDINGS, OR HAPPY BECAUSE YOU RAN PRETTY WELL TODAY? “I’m pretty happy. I’m pretty satisfied with the way’s it’s turned out. We haven’t run in the Chase good enough to win the championship, and we could’ve still won it coming into the last race if he would’ve had some trouble, so to keep in contention with some of the cars we had and some of the runs we’ve had, these guys have done an excellent job. We finished all the laps, I think, in the chase, we haven’t had any mechanical problems or anything like that. They did a great job of preparing the stuff, great job on pit road and I’m pretty happy with the way it all ended up.”
DID YOU AND JIMMIE GET A CHANCE TO TALK AT ALL? “A little bit.” WHAT WAS SAID? “Not much, really. Just normal stuff – talked about what we’re doing in the off-season, stuff like that.” WHO MADE THE DECISION ON TIRES? “Robbie did, but I think that’s what we had to do the last pit stop. Some people got in front of us from some pit strategy and cautions falling, so we got two and then we had to get two again at the end. If we would’ve gotten four, we would’ve gotten buried too far back there, so we just had to get two and try to ride it out.”
WERE YOU TOLD WHERE JOHNSON WAS, AND WHAT WERE YOU THINKING WHEN HE SOME DAMAGE EARLIER? “I didn’t know anything happened to him. I never really worried about where he was. Obviously, if there would’ve been a big problem I would’ve known, but I never really worried about where he was because we weren’t close enough in points to worry about it. But if he would’ve had a major problem, it would’ve been different.”
WERE YOU SURPRISED THAT HE GOT BACK TO YOUR BACK BUMPER? “They’ve been solid all year, man, they’ve been able to run in the top two or three all year long, so they really do deserve it and they did great job this year.” CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR RACE? “It was better than what we had. It wasn’t as good as days we’ve had earlier this year. We weren’t really a contender to win, but we were a good, solid top-10 car. We had top-notch pit stops today and that kept us in contention. So, overall it was a pretty good day for us.”
WAS THIS THE MOST TRYING SEASON YOU’VE EVER HAD? “Oh, no. This is probably one of the best seasons I’ve ever had. We’ve had unbelievably competitive cars all year, we’ve had great pit stops, we won four races, we probably could’ve won eight or nine of them if everything would’ve fell into place and went right. They give you stuff and put you into contention to win and that’s all you can ask for. We did that more times than we didn’t do it this year, so it’s been a great year.”
WHAT ABOUT TO “DOOM AND GLOOM” TALK? “If you look at how we were in the middle of the year – if you look at all the problems that people had in the chase and we didn’t have any, we would’ve come into the chase and ran like we ran in August, we would’ve been 200 points ahead last week. So that was kind of dragging me down, but once we got to this week there wasn’t much we could do about it but go do the best we could and see how it turned out and that’s what we did. Now it’s over, so we’ll go on to next year.”
ROBBIE REISER – crew chief, No. 17 DeWalt Fusion – “You hate to run second but it was a heck of a season for all these guys. Great job by the 17 bunch. Couldn’t ask for it to be any better – other than one more spot. It kind of comes down to the last four races. We just didn’t perform. It’s all my fault, it had nothing to do with the driver and this crew. I didn’t have the cars where they needed to be and we paid the price.” WITH THE WAY MATT RAN TONIGHT, DOES IT TAKE SOME OF THE STING OUT THE LAST MONTH? “Yeah, it sure wouldn’t have been no good if we would’ve run 25th tonight. Running in the top-five all night long shows we can get the job done. We’ll be back next year.”
GREG BIFFLE PRESS CONFERENCE – IT’S GOOD TO FINISH ON A POSITIVE NOTE. “Yeah, it certainly is. As everybody knows, it’s been a tough year for us. It seems like we haven’t been in the right place at the right time and then haven’t had fast enough race cars and have had a few mechanical failures, but this is something else to come down here to Miami and win again for the third year in a row is pretty incredible. I really, really like this race track. Every win has been different. Every win has been a different tire, different aero combination, different everything so it’s been challenging for us. Today was no exception. It was very difficult to get my car to handle like I needed it to. The temperature, when the temperature dropped into the evening made the middle part of the race track fast enough because that was the only place I could really run effectively, was in the middle of the race track or the upper part of it. I couldn’t run right against the fence like all those other guys were, and to be perfectly honest with you, I went up there and raced some in the middle part of the race when I had to and it’s really no fun – driving four inches from the wall lap after lap just riding around the top, there’s really not a lot to that. I really like racing down in the middle of the race track where you can pass people and get a lot of racing going on, but I think that’s a product of the tires being a little bit harder and it forced us to move all the way up against the wall to find grip. When the night fell and it cooled off, my car came back to life there in the middle part of the race track.”
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – No. 16 National Guard Ford Fusion – “It’s been a great Ford weekend here, championship weekend for us. The F-150 on Friday night and with the Busch Grand National win with Matt yesterday. We surely enjoy coming to Miami. I liked the race track the first time I saw it and I think Greg did too. Of course, it was made even better with the changes they made in it. The car of tomorrow is supposed to be saving us money by reducing the number of cars we have, but it turns out I asked how many times we’ve run this car and where has it won. It turns out Greg has won all three of his races with this same car and he’s won nine times with it throughout the time he’s driven it, so that speaks volumes for the car of today and how few of them it would take, if you get them right, how few of them it takes to really get the job done. It’s been not a great year for me and for Greg and for Doug Richert together. Like most of the teams, Jimmie Johnson and Rick Hendrick had the same problem we had last year and for that matter the year before and the year before that is when things are going really right for you, you don’t want to make much of a change because you’re just afraid that you’ll screw it up because it was so good. It turned out we didn’t make the preparations that we needed to over the winter. We didn’t anticipate what other people were doing. We came back with what we thought was gonna be enough to close the deal without taking unnecessary risk and it turned out not to be enough and we chased it all year. Plus, hopefully, I think Greg and I both kept our sense of humor as the year got going. We said, ‘Man, we’re glad we piled that problem into this year because that won’t happen again for another decade.’
We got all of those things out of the way, but we’re gonna rebuild Greg’s program next year around Pat Tryson, who is a championship contender for Mark. He’s a card-carrying guy that has got a real strong team and a good pit crew that’s organized with him, so we’re gonna bring those to bear for Greg and then rebuild with Jimmy Fennig a new team around David Ragan for the 6 car, so we’re still talking with Doug about what he would like to do next year. We had 15 cars here this weekend – 15 entries – and we’ve got lots of positions and Doug’s experience will be important to us in a lot of places. It’s great sadness that we see that this was the last race for us, at least for the time being with National Guard. Greg and I both consider ourselves to be patriots and we’re very much in support of our military people wherever they go put themselves in harm’s way for the benefit of all Americans. I don’t feel good about the fact that we weren’t able to put that deal together, but we’ll be supporters of the military every place they go, regardless of whether we’ve got them on our car next year. My compliments to Jimmie Johnson. He’s raced hard for a lot of years getting ready for this. He closed the deal. I said days ago that it would be a travesty as good as he’d run the last nine races if he couldn’t go on and close the deal and my congratulations to Rick and Jimmie for what they’ve done. We expect to be there with them next year and have another fight for it.”
GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – WHERE DID THIS COME FROM? “I forgot how to drive, actually, most of the season. I just decided it was the end of the season so I might as well work hard (joking). No, it’s tough. It’s really tough. I have not been able to get my race cars to do what I need them to do all season. I have an idea what it is and what it is is Goodyear – we blew out a bunch of tires last year – every race we went to the story was, ‘How are the tires wearing? What are the tires doing? There are cords showing.’ That’s constantly what the problem was and then people blew right-front tires and they put a stop to that. They made the tire hard enough that people didn’t blow out tires this year and it took away, to me, it took away some side-by-side racing and some good racing and made the cars more dependent on aero because you’ve got to keep in fresh air to keep that hard tire stuck into the race track. The way I ran my race cars, I wasn’t getting the tire dug into the race track good enough this year. So the coil bind deal that everybody has heard about, we’ve been working hard on trying to figure that out and still don’t have it figured out because we were like that tonight, and been testing like that and ran Charlotte like that and a few other places, but obviously it didn’t work in Phoenix.
I thought I had a chance to win at Phoenix and ended up four laps down just because it wore the tire out, maybe we didn’t have the camber right, but regardless of what’s happened this season, the reality is that if the race car will go around the corner, I’ll drive it. I loosened my race car up here to run this race I finally got sort of ticked off in the second practice and just told them to keep stacking right-rear spring to it. I raised the track bar up, I did all kinds of things, I took swaybar out of it, I did all kinds of things to make the thing loose and I went out there in the first practice and the thing was so loose I could hardly drive it and we were pretty fast after about 15 laps. The second practice it was so loose I couldn’t drive it. I couldn’t make a fast lap, so we tightened it back up just a tiny bit and I said, ‘Just leave it alone for the race. I’ll suffer with it. I’ll either gonna be hauling butt or I’m gonna be too loose and we’ll have to work on it,’ but I haven’t had a too loose race car all year. I haven’t experienced that yet and I wanted to kind of experience that. Everywhere we go the groove is two inches off the fence and everybody just sits up there and circulates a couple inches off the fence. I don’t know how it looks from the grandstands or whatever, but we’ve got all that real estate down there, let’s use some of it for racing and we’re using 15 feet of it right against the fence everywhere we go and that’s a product of having to go up there to find grip because you turn the tires and wheels less when you’re up there. It’s a big, wide radius and you start going lower on the race track you’ve got to turn the wheel sharper and nobody’s car turns, so that’s why everybody drives up there.”
DO YOU THINK THE CHANGES JACK HAS PROPOSED WILL HELP YOU WIN A TITLE? “Yeah, it’s gonna definitely give us an opportunity. I’m still worried about winning, winning, winning or in the top five. Let’s face it, Matt struggled a bunch in the chase, was off a lot, and it seems like all of our cars are and it’s not a matter of people that are just gonna snap our fingers and fix it, but we’re definitely gonna have to work at it. Pat Tryson and that group and myself, we’re capable of continuing down the road we’re going and figure it out. Obviously, we had a better race car tonight than Pat prepared for Mark and it’s a combination. Pat and I are gonna hit it off good I’m sure. We’re gonna take this race car and one of Pat’s race cars to Las Vegas and test on the 6th and 7th and do the tire test for Goodyear, which is gonna be great for us. It’s gonna give us a head start on next year. I feel, honestly, it’s an unfair advantage because Pat and I are gonna get to spend some time together before the holiday season. We’re gonna get to know each other. I’m gonna get to know the team guys some and come Daytona time we’re gonna feel like we’ve got a weekend under our belt before we take a holiday break, so I’m really looking forward to that.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED -- CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WINNING ALL THREE RACES AND THIS BEING MARK’S LAST RACE? “Whenever we get and opportunity to perform before the Ford folks like we did this weekend, we suit up for it and draw something extra. If we have any energy left, we go get and use it. The 100th anniversary of Ford Motor Company we managed to pull that off at MIS a few years ago, so we enjoy playing for our manufacturer and doing things that will help them through their issues. Alan Mulally, the new CEO was here, and I had a chance to meet him and Mark Fields, the North American guy in charge, and my friend Edsel Ford was here, of course he was grand marshal, that was great to do all that. For Ford, the truck market is real important and we have a chance to do things that would enhance the truck to their potential customers, that’s a great thing. It was Ford weekend and this is a favorite track for the guys. We clearly had a number of different setups out there, some which worked and some which didn’t and we’ll try to analyze that data. We talk about what we’re gonna try and do for next year, Dan Davis and Mark Fields and Alan Mulally have all made the commitment to us. If I’ll make a list of what we think we need technology-wise and it’s available for the simulators and apparatus that’s used to test things in the shop, and right now one of the challenges that all the teams have is because there’s not tires to go test with, you can’t get a cheap answer to a problem. You have to go get very scientific data and have very sophisticated equipment operated by expert people to figure out what’s going on and they stand with us realizing that we haven’t done as much of that as some of our contemporaries have and we’ve got to get going on that. Mark’s last race, it was great that he won the truck race the other night. It was a disappointment that we had all the things happen in the chase that caused the problem, that really frustrated his effort, but I think if he would have run clean that this was Jimmie Johnson and Rick Hendrick’s year and I think they deserved it and I think it was gonna be for naught. I hoped the last race with Mark would be something he would remember it with more positive feelings than I’m sure he will because he was frustrated. The car wasn’t as good as he thought it was gonna be in practice and that was a disappointment.”
GREG BIFFLE, continued – COULD YOU RATE YOUR VICTORIES HERE, IN TERMS OF DIFFICULTY? “To be perfectly honest with you, this was one of the more difficult ones. I mean, they’re all difficult, but because we qualified 22nd, but the other victories – I qualified second one time, outside front row and led a lot of it and the car was real fast – here, I worked my way up, worked my way up, worked my way up. The 10 car, when he was pitting, knocked the tire out of the carrier’s hand and went back to 20th and had to work my way all the way back to the front by passing cars on the race track. And, constantly changing things on the race car – wedge in, wedge out, track bar, lower the tires, raise the tires – were trying everything, every stop. So, it was a lot to win this race. It wasn’t handed to us – I’m not saying the other ones were handed to us, but we had a pretty [good] race car in those other races, and it was a lot easier to win. I remember the one was kind of hairy getting into three last year or the year before, but somebody ran out of gas and I almost ran into the back of ’em. I was up in the middle and Jimmie Johnson, we were two- or three-wide, and I ended up winning the race, but I remember that was pretty spectacular as well. This, obviously, was a little easier. I was thinking that through my head when we were getting ready to go back green and I was thinking, ‘Kasey and I are going to be side-by-side at the start/finish line – and hopefully I’ll be a foot ahead of him when the checkered flag flies. But they got to racing back there; I think Kasey spun the tires on the re-start and I was committed to paying attention to how my tires warmed up, and didn’t use too much throttle, and then pushed it down as I felt the tires would take it, and got a good clean start.”
IT’S SAID THAT NOBODY REMEMBERS WHO FINISHED SECOND. YOU’VE WON ON THREE WEEKENDS HERE WHEN SOMEBODY ELSE WON A CHAMPIONSHIP? DO YOU FEEL OVERLOOKED? “Yeah. Yeah, I do. But I’ll tell you what: I still get the check and I still get the trophy. And, when we go to Daytona, I’m the most recent winner. Unfortunately, I’ve come up short a couple of times. Last year it would’ve been something sweet to win the championship and the race. Obviously, we were 35 points behind Tony, but Tony was close to going a lap down last year and got a mercy caution flag, I think, and kept him on the lead lap – he was the next car to go a lap down, the caution came out, I don’t know what that means. It would’ve been tight. And who would’ve known it would’ve been 35 points. We came into the race a hundred and something back or seventy-something back – I don’t know what it was, it was a lot – but we picked up a bunch of positions. I never even thought I had a chance of winning the title, but it was pretty close.”
JACK ROUSH, continued – JACK, YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO WIN ONE OF THESE THINGS. WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT RICK HENDRICK THAT HE’S BEEN ABLE TO WIN SIX CHAMPIONSHIPS NOW WITH THREE DIFFERENT DRIVERS? “I’m a slow study; it took me 17 years to win my first one, and of course the second one came easy, which lulled me into complacency. So in 18 years we won two and in 17 years we won one, and of course we came up short last year, a little with second and third, and this year we were not as close as we were last year. But, it takes a tremendous effort. This thing goes from the middle February to Thanksgiving time, and it consumes your life and the lives of the people doing this. You’ve got to have focus on it. It’s unbelievable how much energy goes into this thing and for the Hendrick organization to be perennially competitive, it certainly set a standard for me, and that’s what I request and the goal that I set for my organization as well. Unless they’ve found some shortcut on things, it’s a monumental job and they’ve got a lot of people working at it, and they certainly deserve what’s happened to them.”
