YOU AND CARL EDWARDS ARE IN THE CHASE, AND ANOTHER TEAMMATE, MATT KENSETH, FINISHED THIRD LAST WEEK AT DOVER. IS ROUSH FENWAY TURNING IT AROUND? “It’s been obvious we’ve been off a little bit all season, and we’re continuing to search to get our cars better. I feel like we were off a little bit last week because Matt was running good. We got on some bump stops that Matt ran on and he liked, and we didn’t have enough history – we only ran them for about 30 minutes and then tried to race it, and we didn’t have it quite right, and that’s probably what cost us last week. Matt had spent the whole weekend on them and kind of got them adjusted around right, so we are trying new things and when we see our teammate running well, we hop over there and see what he’s doing and try to get on that program. But that was just a little premature for us; we didn’t have quite enough time to science out everything we needed to. It caught us off guard. We know what we did wrong, and it’s kind of like, ‘Next time.’ When you’re searching this late in the going for something that runs good, it’s a little tough.”

 

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT KANSAS? “I love this place. I really do. I led some last year and finished third, and saw a spectacular race in front of me with Jimmie [Johnson] and Carl [Edwards]. We’ve just come back and polished on what we came here with last year, maybe try something new, maybe what we did last week but work on it a little more and see what we can come up with.”

 

YOU HAVE SOME OF YOUR BETTER TRACKS COMING UP. WHERE DO YOU NEED TO BE HEADING INTO THE FINAL FEW RACES? “You’ve got to be within striking distance, and right now we’re not, you know? It’s clear that it’s going to take some wins from this point – I was saying top-10s – to stay in it. We’re 35 points out of fifth, okay, but fifth doesn’t win us a championship.”

 

HOW SOON DO YOU NEED TO FIND THAT TRACTION? “Ten races ago. We tried last week, we made some changes to our program that we hadn’t really been on much, and it bit us a little bit, but I think we learned something. Is that good or bad? To me it’s good because we learned something for down the road, but maybe it’s bad because it cost us, maybe, a top-five finish versus finishing 13th. It’s a tight battle.”

 

WHEN IS THE NEW FORD ENGINE GOING TO DEBUT? “I think it’s going to debut at Charlotte – was the last information I got. Now, whether they changed that program to speed it up or push it back, I don’t know, but Charlotte’s really it. And, by the way, we just got the results from the engine dyno numbers from Michigan, and we’re right with the best of them, so the engine is not the issue.”

 

ROUSH FENWAY RACING HAS ALWAYS DONE WELL ON 1½-MILE TRACKS. EVEN THOUGH THIS YEAR HAS BEEN DIFFERENT, IS THERE SOME COMFORT IN GETTING BACK TO A TRACK LIKE THIS? “A little bit, but to be perfectly honest with you, I was more looking forward to Dover than here – simply from the fact that if you look at my last three finishes at Dover – a third, a win and a third, and leading the race in the spring with five laps to go – I felt like a left a little unfinished business, you know what I mean? And so it was disappointing to go there and finish 13th – really disappointing. If you would’ve said I’m going to finish ninth at Loudon and 13th at Dover, I would’ve told you that you were crazy, because Dover is like it’s our house. We’ve run so well there. And this is a race track, stats show, ironically this is my best track for finishes, even though I’ve got three wins at Homestead and multiple wins at other places and only one here, state-wise, this is our best track, I guess. So, I guess we’ll just see what happens.”