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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Kenseth Has A Need For Speed
Matt Kenseth missed the Chase for the first time in his career in 2009...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted January 16, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Matt Kenseth is winless in 2010. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Sometimes the best answers are the most basic ones.
Matt Kenseth captured the 2003 NASCAR Sprint Cup championship on the heels of a lone victory. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Such is the case with 2003 NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Matt Kenseth, who after opening last year with a victory in the Daytona 500 and another a week later in California, saw his performance gradually deteriorate. And by the time NASCAR’s 26-race Cup regular season was over, Kenseth had missed the Chase for the Sprint Cup for the first time in his career.

So over the off-season, Kenseth did some soul searching, some deep thinking about what needs to happen for his No. 17 Roush Fenway Racing Ford to return both to victory lane at the end of the day and the Chase at the end of the season.

And here’s what he came up with: “I think really what we had to do was get our cars faster.”

As simple and basic an answer as that is, it’s probably a very accurate one. Roush Fenway Racing is certainly one of the best-funded and most senior teams in all of NASCAR, but for virtually the entire 2009 season, the team wasn’t quite as fast as the Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolets and some of the other front-runners. Obviously, fixing that is the team’s top priority for 2010.

“Really when I sit down and look at it at the end of the year, I looked at it hard,” said Kenseth. “Do we need to change something on our team? Is it leadership, is it me, is it — what is it? What do we need to mix up to make it better?”

And then he realized that his car’s performance was pretty much in lockstep with those of his teammates.

“I really look at it as an organization, and I look at it, okay, in 2008 Carl (Edwards)won nine races, in 2009 he won zero,” said Kenseth. “Greg (Biffle) won some races (in 2008). I started looking at it, you know, if I'm really objective about it, we probably ran as good as anybody in the organization overall even though we didn't make the Chase. Flat tire here, engine there, gas mileage there, we would have made it like Carl and Greg did and would have had a couple of wins.”

And left Kenseth convinced that the building blocks were in place for renewed success in 2010.

“When I looked at it, I felt pretty good about my personnel and their performance. Me and Drew (Blickensderfer, crew chief) have been you together for a year, and I think that helps. The relationship grows over the year. He's worked with Chip (Bolin, engineer) for a year. We're just getting comfortable with each other and we understanding each other a lot better than we did at this time last year or mid-season last year or even the end of the season last year.”

And that leaves one area to focus on: speed.

“Really what we had to do was get our cars faster,” said Kenseth. “When we show up at the track the hardest thing for us is as a group we'd all unload relatively slow. We'd all unload toward the bottom of the (time) sheet, the right side of the sheet, and we'd be off. With these cars, and the way the rules are, it's very difficult to take something that comes off the trailer a 30th-place car on speed and turn it into a winner. It's just not going to happen, or if it does, it's not going to happen very often.”

Armed with that knowledge, the RFR squad has spent the offseason playing catch-up, trying to put some more speed into the team’s Fords so they can run like they did in 2003-05, when Roush won two championships and 29 races.

“Everybody there has been working really hard on just getting our cars faster, just refining our cars, figuring out how to make as much downforce as we can within the rules, how to make the cars as light as we can, how to make the motors run the best, just going through everything on our equipment top to bottom and hope that we can get it better,” said Kenseth. “I think they've made some improvements. I don't know how much. I don't know if we've made enough improvements to go win right away. We've still got to, I think, work on our setups and work on other things that we can control at the track as hard as we can, but I feel like we've made some improvements.”

Will it be enough? Only time and few races will tell, but the droll and dry-humored Kenseth is trying to keep a positive outlook.

“Well, you know me,” Kenseth deadpanned. “If there's one thing I am it's optimistic.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED, and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com! Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to

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