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CUP: Next Year Already In Works
Written by: Tom Jensen   
11/05/2009
Charlotte, NC
 
With no hope of capturing the Chase for the Sprint Cup,Jack Roush and his four drivers at Roush Fenway Racing are getting ready for another run at Johnson next season. (Photo: LAT Photographic) ยป More Photos

The cold, hard reality in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series is that each race, one driver wins and 42 lose. And at the end of the season, there’s only one champion.

So if your name isn’t Jimmie Johnson, you and your team are already firmly fixated on the 2010 Sprint Cup season and what you can do to finally knock Johnson off of the lofty perch he’s held since 2006.

And that’s exactly what Jack Roush and his minions at Roush Fenway Racing are busily doing right now. With no hope of capturing the Chase for the Sprint Cup, they are getting ready for another run at Johnson next season. So the final three races of the season will be critical to that process.

“They’re all we’ve got left,” said Roush. “I thought as we started the Chase we were going to be able to be a factor in this thing and it hasn’t worked out for us. We spend the first 26 points races in the Cup Series building the points necessary to qualify for the shootout, and secondarily to try things that would maybe be low percentage opportunity things that might be beneficial, that you can know better about when you start the race. Well, we didn’t find enough things in the bulk of the year so that we were able to fall back on the high percentage things that were beneficial and have those carry us to a championship in the final 10 races.”

And that means its time for Plan B.

“We’re faced with the reality of saying that what we need to do is to focus on the things that we can learn in the time that is left to benefit us in the start for next year,” said Roush. “Happily, there’s not going to be a big change in the car over the winter, so what we’ve got in front of us is pretty much what we expect to be faced with in Daytona and beyond.”

One of the team’s big challenges will be to improve its short-track program, which this year was disappointing.

“We’ve got a strategy for things we can do over the winter with our computers and our seven-poster and with some of the testing that the climate and the opportunities will present
us to improve our short-track dilemma,” said Roush. “That’s certainly going to be our big challenge over the winter is trying to get ourselves ready to do as well for the short tracks as we do at the other tracks in 2010.”

On balance, the season has been disappointing for the team. Matt Kenseth won the first two races of the year, and then the team went 30 races before Jamie McMurray won at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday. On top of that, Kenseth missed the Chase for the first time in his career, and Edwards is winless after nine Cup victories in 2008.

Still, Roush is confident about turning things around for next season.

“We’ve just seemed to be off a little and it’s not something that was foreseeable, but sometimes you can flip the coin and you can get heads three times in a row, and other times it will wind up tails,” he said. “Some of the calls that they made have not worked out as well as they should be expected to on average and that too will change. It’ll swing back in our favor next year.”

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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