NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: Too Little, Too Late For Roush Fenway?
Roush Fenway Racing has had a disappointing Chase for the Sprint Cup...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted November 05, 2010   Fort Worth, TX
Greg Biffle led the first Sprint Cup Series practice at Kansas. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Friday afternoon at Texas Motor Speedway, there were some familiar faces high up in the speed charts during practice for Sunday’s AAA Texas 500: The Roush Fenway Racing Fords of Greg Biffle , Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth finished the 90-minute session first, second and fourth, respectively.

That’s no surprise, really.

Mile-and-a-half tracks like Texas Motor Speedway have long been the team’s bread and butter, the place where the combination of Jack Roush’s chassis and engineering prowess and Doug Yates’s horsepower really made the team’s Ford Fusions shine. Those are the big reasons the team has won seven NASCAR Sprint Cup races since TMS opened in 1997.

Towards the tail end of NASCAR’s 26-race regular season, the Roush Fenway drivers came on strong, with Biffle winning at Pocono and Biffle, Kenseth and Edwards all earning top fives at Michigan.

At the time, it appeared the team might be poised to challenge for its first championship since Kenseth and Kurt Busch went back to back in 2003-04. Alas, it was not to be. Edwards sits in sixth right now, Kenseth eighth and Biffle 11th, leaving all three wondering what might have been in this year’s Chase for the Sprint Cup.

Biffle, for one, is frustrated by the team’s inconsistency.

“We feel like we have really closed the gap on the mile-and-a-half tracks,” Biffle said Friday at Texas Motor Speedway. “We know that the short track program still needs to improve. We felt like our restrictor plate program is really good. I got really good finishes at Talladega, almost won the Daytona 500, then go to Talladega this last week and we were way off.”

Part of it is the rapidly evolving change in car setups, according to Biffle.

“It is an ever-evolving cycle of being fast one week and not the next,” said Biffle. “It is like you try to figure out why because we expected to go to Talladega and be very good. We go there and qualify 34th in race trim. The car is not going to get any faster than that, and that was disappointing. We will keep working on it, though, and figure out why we aren’t as fast as we need to be.”

Kenseth said he, too, is unhappy with the team’s pace.

“This season has been frustrating for me and we expect more,” said Kenseth. “It was good that we made the Chase and all that, but we expect to win and be a contender for the championship. We haven’t been able to do that for a few years now. We have to keep moving forward and try to make every part of it the best we can and try to get better.”
Matt Kenseth's runaway championship in 2003 was likely one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Chase. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

So now, it’s back to the drawing board.

“Every week I think you learn something,” Kenseth said. “I certainly have made my share of mistakes trying to hard for sure. I think the main thing is that you look at all aspects of your program and try to figure out how to make yourself better and make your program better.”

As for Edwards, the task at hand is easy to identify but hard to execute: Build faster race cars.

“The biggest thing is that our performance has not been where it needs to be,” Edwards said. “We ran really well there for a stretch, but we have yet to have dominant race cars. In this sport you have to have very fast race cars ... In general I feel like we are doing a very good job with what we have at the race track. We are slowly trying to make the performance of the car a little better and if we can do that we will be good. I think gone are the days where you find an advantage and just dominate. I think it is all about who runs really well and doesn’t have any trouble.”

Edwards is hoping the breakthrough comes soon.

“If we can just run a little better and have some good luck we will be alright,” he said. “You can’t run like we are running and have a little bad luck and expect to be in the top two or three of points.”

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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