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Sprint Cup
CUP: Title Hopes Toast For Roush Fenway?
All four Roush Fenway drivers had big problems on Sunday at Auto Club Speedway...
Greg Biffle (Left) and Carl Edwards (Right) both suffered from mechanical troubles at Auto Club Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Roush Fenway Racing, one of NASCAR’s elite teams, headed back to Charlotte this week after a nightmarish odyssey in Southern California that likely has doomed any hope the team had of winning a Sprint Cup championship this season.
All four Roush Fenway Racing Fords wound up 30th or worse in Sunday’s Pepsi 400 at Auto Club Speedway: Greg Biffle broke the bottom end of the FR9 engine after just 40 laps and finished 41st; Carl Edwards had to go to the garage to change a faulty distributor and ended up 13 laps down in 34th; David Ragan clobbered Kurt Busch on the fronstretch with five laps left and wound up 32nd; and Matt Kenseth’s Ford belched toxic white smoke over the closing laps of the races as he staggered to a 30th-place run.
All of this happened at a track where the team had won seven of the first 20 Cup races run there, dating back to 1997.
As far as afternoons go, it literally couldn’t have been much worse. All three RFR drivers in the Chase for the Sprint Cup — Edwards, Biffle and Kenseth — are now more than one full race behind leader Jimmie Johnson.
And it was doubly painful given that Biffle had been victorious a week earlier in Kansas.
“It’s disappointing, but what can you do? It broke,” said Biffle. “Everybody is giving this program 110 percent, so you can’t blame anybody. We were trying hard to win the title and it isn’t gonna happen this year.”
Biffle, a past champion in the NASCAR Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series, said he had no idea what occurred under the hood of his Ford.
“The guys have been working really hard on the durability and something broke in the bottom end of the engine,” he said. “It came out the bottom, but there was no indication. I don’t really know what happened. We had good oil pressure, the temperature seemed to be good, it was just unexpected. It’s unfortunate for us. This was our opportunity to get back in the Chase and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen.”
The news wasn’t any better for Biffle’s teammates.
“That probably took all three of us out for a legitimate shot in one race, so that’s really disappointing, but I’ve already made my mistakes and had us in a hole anyway, so we certainly couldn’t afford any bad finishes,” said Kenseth.
With that in mind, Kenseth said he and his team will focus on the remainder of the season.
“You know that you’re not gonna be able to win it now from where we’re at, barring a miracle, so we’ll just keep trying to build on it this year,” said Kenseth. “We’ve been running better the last month or two and try to hopefully get a win or two before the end of the year and have some momentum going into next season.”
“There are so many moving parts in a race car,” added Edwards, who is seventh in points, with Biffle 10th and Kenseth 11th. “You’ve got to run well enough to absorb these kind of days. We’ve run really well. We’ve got six races left and we’re 162 points back, so over six races that’s not a lot of points per race, so I think we can do it. We just have to keep digging.”
Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.
All four Roush Fenway Racing Fords wound up 30th or worse in Sunday’s Pepsi 400 at Auto Club Speedway: Greg Biffle broke the bottom end of the FR9 engine after just 40 laps and finished 41st; Carl Edwards had to go to the garage to change a faulty distributor and ended up 13 laps down in 34th; David Ragan clobbered Kurt Busch on the fronstretch with five laps left and wound up 32nd; and Matt Kenseth’s Ford belched toxic white smoke over the closing laps of the races as he staggered to a 30th-place run.
All of this happened at a track where the team had won seven of the first 20 Cup races run there, dating back to 1997.
As far as afternoons go, it literally couldn’t have been much worse. All three RFR drivers in the Chase for the Sprint Cup — Edwards, Biffle and Kenseth — are now more than one full race behind leader Jimmie Johnson.
And it was doubly painful given that Biffle had been victorious a week earlier in Kansas.
“It’s disappointing, but what can you do? It broke,” said Biffle. “Everybody is giving this program 110 percent, so you can’t blame anybody. We were trying hard to win the title and it isn’t gonna happen this year.”
Biffle, a past champion in the NASCAR Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series, said he had no idea what occurred under the hood of his Ford.
“The guys have been working really hard on the durability and something broke in the bottom end of the engine,” he said. “It came out the bottom, but there was no indication. I don’t really know what happened. We had good oil pressure, the temperature seemed to be good, it was just unexpected. It’s unfortunate for us. This was our opportunity to get back in the Chase and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen.”
The news wasn’t any better for Biffle’s teammates.
“That probably took all three of us out for a legitimate shot in one race, so that’s really disappointing, but I’ve already made my mistakes and had us in a hole anyway, so we certainly couldn’t afford any bad finishes,” said Kenseth.
With that in mind, Kenseth said he and his team will focus on the remainder of the season.
“You know that you’re not gonna be able to win it now from where we’re at, barring a miracle, so we’ll just keep trying to build on it this year,” said Kenseth. “We’ve been running better the last month or two and try to hopefully get a win or two before the end of the year and have some momentum going into next season.”
“There are so many moving parts in a race car,” added Edwards, who is seventh in points, with Biffle 10th and Kenseth 11th. “You’ve got to run well enough to absorb these kind of days. We’ve run really well. We’ve got six races left and we’re 162 points back, so over six races that’s not a lot of points per race, so I think we can do it. We just have to keep digging.”
Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.
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