Ford Drivers Look Forward To Daytona 500

 

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – THOUGHTS ON THE YEAR. “My thoughts right at this second are hopefully that before Speedweeks is over I get to finish a race is what I’m thinking about right now. We’ve had a few off-road excursions so far and these cars aren’t nearly as good in the grass as they are on the pavement. We’ve had some fast cars so far and they’re driving very well, so that’s definitely positive news for us, but we have been involved in a few incidents and hopefully we’ve got them all behind us now. I’m looking forward to this season. We tested well at Atlanta and we’re ready for California and Vegas – some of my favorite race tracks to go to. Like I said, we’re running fairly well here. I’m pretty happy with the way the cars is driving. We’re certainly still off a little bit on speed and driving ability compared to some of the cars around us and that showed in the second race as well with Carl’s race. He ran ninth or so or eighth and you can just see that we’re not quite as good as our competition. The guys are still continuing to work as hard as they can on handling and pure speed, so I’m pretty optimistic that we’re gonna get off to a good start.” 

 

HOW DO YOU SEE THE RACE UNFOLDING AND WHO ARE THE FAVORITES? “I think it looks like the Gibbs camp and the Hendrick camp are obviously in the lead on restrictor plate cars at this point. It’s pretty clear. They qualified up front and watching the 18 and the 11 up front yesterday, they’re just in a league of their own with the 5 car. It just doesn’t look like anyone can run with them. Those are gonna be the cars that are gonna be tough to beat in the 500. It always gets mixed up with Kevin winning the Bud Shootout. It just depends on being in the right place at the right time if you get the right push, you’re right up there. I think it could be any number of guys, but I’d have to say that those guys look the best as far as just pure speed and drivability. I think it’s gonna be an exciting race. I think that the car seems to be a little bit harder to drive, meaning it doesn’t quite have as much grip in the race track like it does at Talladega and that’s just Daytona, but there’s a little different tire as well, which is probably giving the car a little instability and making it a little harder to push and be right in there.” 

 

DID YOU EVER EXPECT TO SEE A BILLBOARD LIKE THAT OUTSIDE THE MEDIA CENTER OF YOUR CAR? “No, I didn’t. They’ve done some amazing stuff with that. I actually saw that last year in Kansas, if I’m not mistaken, or maybe a little later than that when they were coming up with those renderings, so that’s been in the works for a little while and we’ll just hope that the fire and all that stuff stays on the picture than on the car. But it looks pretty neat.” 

 

DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE TESTED IN JANUARY OR HAVEN’T TESTED IN JANUARY? “I feel like right now I really feel like we have with all of the track time we’ve had, especially with today and tomorrow. That’s the thing about here is I didn’t think the testing was gonna be that big of a deal at the start of the season just because we have so much track time here in Daytona and we were one of the cars that qualified for the Bud Shootout last year, so we knew coming into Speedweeks with no testing that we were gonna be in a pretty good spot with all the track time that we were gonna have.” 

 

WHEN MARK MARTIN TALKS ABOUT HIS HENDRICK CAR BEING THE BEST CAR HE’S EVER HAD OR THE BEST TEAM HE’S EVER HAD, IS THAT HURTFUL? “I don’t think so. I think if you look back historically, and I love Mark Martin, he’s a character, but if you look back historically I think every interview you see Mark in you can just hit the record button. ‘Man, I’m having the time of my life. This is the best race car. This is the best group of guys. I’ve never seen anybody work so hard in my life.’ I see it over and over.  It’s like a replay. It’s like a bad dream (laughter). I’m just telling you what I see on TV. I see the same thing in the interview and there’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve got to be positive, right? He’s being positive and that’s Mark Martin – being positive. When he went over to DEI it was the chance of a lifetime and they were the best cars in the garage. I don’t know. I think it’s the same thing now, but I would have to say that Hendrick probably has the best stuff in the garage with Jimmie winning the championship three years in a row. It’s obvious that that organization has proved over and over again that they’re stout – there’s no doubt about that. Probably what he’s saying is true by qualifying on the outside front row and watching that 5 car in the race yesterday. He’s probably in the best stuff he’s been in in a while and it’s showing. He’s really fast.” 

 

CAN YOU FORECAST WHAT IT WILL BE LIKE AT CALIFORNIA AND VEGAS WITHOUT TESTING? “I’m not gonna say it’s gonna be a gamble, but let’s compare it to last year. Last year, we didn’t test at California. Last year we tested at Las Vegas. This year we’re gonna go to California without testing, similar to what we did last year, so California isn’t really gonna be any different. Going to Las Vegas will be different. We’re gonna go to Vegas with no test, so we ran third at Las Vegas last year and felt like we had a little better car than that. Junior and I got to racing on the white flag lap and I got run up the hill a little bit, but Carl won, so I’m sure we’re gonna go back with the same setup as we ran there and Carl did the tire test there. So one of our cars has tested there, so, really, it seems like the testing is more of a non-issue now that we’ve had a little track time with this new car. With the new car you have to test a lot, but with the old car we were able to change nose offsets, we were able to change all this stuff on this car to try different aero platforms, try different side force, try this, try that, try all these crazy things about moving the bodies around and all that. We can’t really do that anymore, so with this new car we’re so limited to what we can do that at some point testing will obviously become almost obsolete with the new car because we’re in such a tight box already. I think without testing this year and with us having a couple years under our belt with this thing and no new tracks and no new repaves, I almost think it’s a non-issue. I honestly do.” 

 

WHAT IS YOUR PLAN WITH THE ENGINE CHANGE? “We’ve already changed engines.” 

 

WHAT IS YOUR PLAN FOR PRACTICE? “If the car is handling well in this first practice session, we’re gonna do one of two things. We’re probably gonna run this session and maybe not the next, or maybe run a limited amount of time in this session and a limited amount of time in the next one – so keeping the laps down on the 500 engine is basically what I’m getting at. Probably what we’ll do is run this session in case there’s something wrong with the engine. If you change engines now and you don’t run this session, there’s an outside chance – let’s say this engine blows up or there’s a problem with it – if it was the next practice session, then you’d have to change again and you wouldn’t have any laps on that one for the race. So the logical thing, I guess, would be for me to run this session, check the engine out – run five or so laps – just to make sure there are no issues and then maybe run a little bit in the last one and be done with it. The Vegas thing, I’m gonna do a blog on Monday nights at 9 o’clock. I’m working on getting that done on the internet, so if you want to come and check out my comedy. Yeah, I’ll do a Mark Martin on Monday night at 9 o’clock. You can come and listen to it.” 

 

ANY TIRE ISSUES? “Yeah. We’ve had a few tire issues. The Cup car has shown cords on the right-front a couple of times and the Nationwide car has been, the first practice session I was screaming, ‘Loose! Man, I can’t drive this thing. I’m loose, loose, loose.’ The car was not driving very good at all. I was loose by myself. I went down into the corner by myself and was sideways. I was swatting flies inside there and I’m like, ‘You’ve got to believe me that I cannot drive this car.’ I came in and we decided to park it for that session and there are cords showing on the left-rear tires, so the thing had to have been pretty loose to have cords showing on the left rear, so we’ve worked on it and the later practice it seemed to be a lot better, but there have been some minor issues. With a green race track you’re gonna see that. I was very shocked to see the tires issues in the second race because we really didn’t see any in the first. I was really shocked. The race track will continue to take rubber and get rubbered up and if I was gonna see any tire issues, I think we would have seen it in the first one let alone the second one. I’m not sure what guys have got going on with their cars, but they definitely don’t have as much grip and they’re up on top of the track, so they’re sliding around more, which is gonna make some tire heat in the car and the tires.” 

 

WHERE IS CARL EDWARDS HERE AT DAYTONA? ARE YOU GUYS SURPRISED YOU’RE NOT BETTER? “A little bit and that could be a derivative, possibly, of the no-test but you never know. We come down here and couldn’t find speed or maybe we would have found something in the test, but you just don’t know. From one year to the next or one part of the season to the next we feel like our cars are better. We know our cars are better than before. We know they’re faster. Aero-wise, we have a little bit better drag numbers. We know our engines are a little bit better. We know all these things, but everybody else has gotten better than we have, so that’s a little frustrating. We were pretty optimistic coming here like we’d have pretty good stuff and they’re a little bit better than we are. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna beat us yet, but if it’s just on pure speed and handling, they’re a hair better than we are right now and that’s obvious. We’ll work to try and close that gap. There’s not a lot we’re gonna do between now and the 500. We’re kind of locked in, but we will do the best we can.” 

 

CAN YOU THINK OF A TIME WHEN YOU SACRIFICED FOR YOUR TEAMMATE LIKE THE PETTY GUYS DID YESTERDAY? “It’s really important and this is a place – here and Talladega – where you can try and help a teammate or a partner. It’s hard to do, but certainly at Talladega and other places we’ve backed up to try and bring that other group up or fan out. One thing you can do is fan out. If one guy is losing the draft, you can fan your cars out and it makes a bigger hole in the air to try and draw them back up. There are certainly things we’ve done in the past to try and help get guys in and having teammates like that and good handling cars is a key and it worked out for them.” 

 

HOW MANY NATIONWIDE RACES ARE YOU RUNNING AND WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THAT SERIES? “Right now it looks like we have around 15 on the schedule for the Citifinancial Ford Fusion. We might do a few more than that or we might do a few less than that, but that’s roughly the number. I was shooting for 15-18 races, so I’m pretty happy with that. There again, that might pick up if they get a sponsor for Matt Kenseth. Then some more of those Citi races may move over to me and I’m pretty happy with 15 or 18. That gives me a little time off. They should have never not given me any races because I sort of like having the day off sometimes and not that rat race of running back and forth, but that’s what we’re planning on doing. As far as the Nationwide race, my opinion is gonna be that with the way the cars are handling and handling being a premium, I think it’s gonna get spread out again like we saw it last year. I think the cars that handle well and stay in line are gonna be able to drive away, and when you put tires on them and everybody’s got new tires, there’s gonna be a big pack and they’re gonna be racing hard. But then I think it’s gonna string out just because you can’t keep in the throttle and the cars slide around a lot. I think it’s gonna get strung out. It’s gonna be interesting. It’s obvious that your favorite would be Carl or I think Kyle Busch said he’s gonna run the whole season – you can never tell what Kyle’s gonna do – but it sounds like they’re gonna run the whole season so I would say that those two guys are gonna pretty much go head-to-head and given the past history, it looks like Kyle might be the favorite for how well that those Gibbs cars run in the Nationwide Series. We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but hopefully I can get in there and get myself a win. I’ve got 15 tries this year, so we’ll see what I can do.” 

 

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – WAS THE OFFSEASON TOO SHORT, TOO LONG OR JUST ABOUT THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF TIME? “It was alright. I was anxious to get to Daytona.” HAVE YOU CHANGED THE MOTOR YET? “Yeah. We changed the whole car. We wrecked in the 150s and had to change the car, so we just put the race motor in then.”

 

IS THERE ANY BENEFIT TO CHANGING NOW AS OPPOSED TO AFTER HAPPY HOUR TOMORROW? “I think if I had my choice, I would wait until the last practice tomorrow, just to keep the miles off of it. So, as long as you get one practice on it, just to make sure you don’t have leaks or anything on it or anything goofy going on, I don’t really think it matters.”

 

HOW HAS DAYTONA BEEN GOING FOR YOU? “We’ve been kind of missing it, I think, on the handling. We haven’t had this car out, so this is a whole new car since yesterday. So, my plan is to put as many miles as we need to on it to get it to handle the way we need it to handle.”

 

SINCE THIS RACE IS SO MUCH DIFFERENT THAN THE OTHERS, DO YOU NEED TO WAIT UNTIL YOU GET TO CALIFORNIA NEXT WEEK BEFORE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA ABOUT HOW THE TEAM WILL DO THIS YEAR? “You’ve probably got to get to the first break, get through California, Las Vegas and Atlanta, through some of those downforce tracks and see what your stuff is like and have a better idea for the season. Usually, Speed Weeks isn’t a good indicator of what the rest of the season will be like. Everybody puts a lot of focus and time on the Daytona 500, it’s obviously our biggest event of the year, and everybody always puts forth a lot of effort for this race, but you’ve really got to get through that first four or five or six races to see what you have and have a better feel for the season.”

 

DO YOU APPROACH THE SEASON WEEK TO WEEK? OR, DO YOU BELIEVE THE EARLY PART OF THE SEASON CAN SET THE TONE FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR? “I go by race by race. I mean, the better you run, the more confidence everyone has, but I take it race by race.”

 

HAVE YOU HAD ANY TIRE ISSUES HERE? “So far, we haven’t had any tire issues, really, that I’ve been aware of since we’ve gotten down here, which is pretty normal. Other than that, that hasn’t been a problem for us, yet.”

 

DO EXPECT TO HAVE ANY TIRE WEAR PROBLEMS? “Hopefully, everything will be okay. Typically, down here during the week, the more races that are run, the more practices that are run, you get more rubber built up on the track and usually tire wear gets better. So, hopefully, we won’t have any issues.”

 

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT YOUR TEAM RIGHT NOW? “I feel really good about our race team. I think we’ve got a great bunch over the wall. I think with the addition of Drew on our team this year, he can add a little energy. We pretty much add another person. Chip was trying to do an awful lot by himself last year. I feel real good about our team. I feel as good about it as probably I’ve ever felt about our race team. You never know what’s going to happen at Daytona, but I’m really looking forward to running the Daytona 500 and getting out the next couple of weeks and see what we really have.”

 

WHAT ABOUT THE ROUSH FENWAY ORGANIZATION AS A WHOLE? “I feel good about the organization as well. Obviously, Carl won nine races last year, Greg won a couple, and Carl was real close to winning the championship. We were a little off that, but with those guys doing that good, it gives us a lot confidence because we knew the equipment is there and the technology is there, everything’s there that we need. We’ve just have to get it put together. So, I feel good about the organization and where we’re at.”

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – WAS THE OFFSEASON TOO SHORT, TOO LONG OR JUST ABOUT RIGHT? “I’d say the offseason was just about right. They usually seem extremely short; this one seemed pretty nice without the testing. I liked it.”

 

BUT, YOU WERE STILL PRETTY BUSY… “I was busy, but I really got the month of January pretty much to myself, and that was a lot of fun. There was one stretch of 10 days or something that I didn’t have anything planned, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had that. That was pretty cool.”

 

YOU GOT MARRIED. “Yeah, getting married. By far, the best thing I’ve ever done, and it’s still going well. It’s early. That’s what everybody tells me when I say it’s great. In 16 years, I’ll get back with you. It’s been cool. She takes cares of me.”

 

HEADING INTO THIS SEASON, EVERYBODY IS PICKING YOU AS THE FAVORITE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT? “That’s great that people are picking us to win this thing, but we’ve got 38 races or something before the season’s over, so we’ve got a lot of time to hopefully prove them right, but there’s a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong, I know that, so we’ll just do our best.”

 

WHAT ARE SOME OF THINGS YOUR TEAM WORKED ON IN THE SHOP TO PERHAPS BE EVEN BETTER PREPARED IN 2009? IT WILL BE TOUGH TO TOP LAST YEAR. “You know, you try not to mess ourselves up. Bob and the guys worked on a lot of things. Bob doesn’t tell me all the time what he’s working on, so I hope they’re all good things. It seems to be running really well here. We tested really well. We had one test, the tire test, and it was great. So, as long as we don’t lose any ground, I think we’re in really good position starting the season.”

 

THIS RACE IS SO MUCH DIFFERENT THAN THE OTHERS, SO DO YOU REALLY NEED TO GET TO CALIFORNIA NEXT WEEK BEFORE YOU GET A GOOD SENSE OF WHAT THE TEAM HAS THIS YEAR? “This race is a different style race than the meat of the season. It’s been said before and it’s been proven that a good race or a bad race here doesn’t portend how your season is going to go, but it would be nice to get a 500 win. That would be cool.”

 

IS THE TEAM PRETTY MUCH INTACT FROM 2008? “The thing that we gained the most is Pierre Kuettel coming back. He’s a championship-level crew chief on the Nationwide side, and he came back to be a car chief here, and we retained Jason Myers, who’s been the car chief for a lot of our wins, so that’s a pretty stout team right there – Bob, Jason and P.K.”

 

AND THAT CONTINUITY IS IMPORTANT? “Oh, yeah. P.K. was the car chief here for I don’t know how many years at the 99 and through my first season, 2005, with all of those wins. That’s a big deal to have a guy like that come back and do this.” C

 

AN YOU DESCRIBE THE RELATIONSHIP WITH CREW CHIEF BOB OSBORNE? “Bob and I have a great relationship. It’s one that has been the same since day one. He tells me exactly what he thinks, whether I like it or not, and I’ve learned to do the same with him. It ends up being a really productive relationship on the track. I can just be brutally honest with him, and he’s the same with me and we get right down to business, and that’s the way you have to do it with limited time.”

 

HOW’S YOUR CAR FOR THE 500? “I think it’s pretty good. This practice was crazy. I mean, there were cars – I saw cars hit the fence, sideways, I mean, this is practice. It’s going to a crazy race. It’s going to be action-packed – no clue what’s going to happen. Let’s hope I’m running at the end, and I think if we are we’ll be in the top 10.”

 

WHAT ARE THE DYNAMICS, SAY, FOR THE FIRST 400 OR 450 MILES AND THE REST OF THE RACE? CAN YOU EXPLAIN HOWIT S DIFFERENT RACE AT THE END? “It’s probably like the difference between a Neil Diamond concert and Pantera. They’re both great, but way different. The first Daytona 500 I was in, I would say about halfway through the race, I’m running around and I was thinking, ‘Hey, this is just another race.’ I had run 14 Cup races before that, came here in 2005 and and that was just normal, and then I think it was the last re-start, 15, 18 laps to go or something like that, and I’m telling you, you could see all the fans go crazy, the drivers all of a sudden where they would give somebody three inches before, they were rubbing against them. The energy level goes through the roof, and I think that’s the difference.”

 

DOES IT FEEL ANY DIFFERENT THAN, SAY, THE LAST 20 LAPS OF THE JULY RACE HERE? “Oh, yeah.”

 

CAN YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE? “I can. It’s a couple of things. It’s the Daytona 500. Everybody, no matter what they say, wants to get out of here with a good points day, everybody, in their mind, rationalizes it as, ‘I’ve got plenty of time to make up points. Go for it.’ So it just ends up getting crazy.”

 

CAN YOU FEEL YOUR HEART RACING FASTER? “Oh, yeah. We’re all real calm, cool, but this is the biggest race we could win. Other than the Indianapolis 500, this is it, it may even be bigger. If you’re up front, if you happen to see the lead, I’ve been there a couple of times where I’m close enough, it starts to get exciting.”

 

IS IT BECAUSE OF THE HISTORY OF THIS RACE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR A DRIVER’S CAREER? “Yeah. Everyone wants to stand there and say, ‘We won the Daytona 500.’ I just can’t imagine going to sleep Sunday night and being able to say that. Last year, I put it in my memory bank, after the race, my motorhome was right next to Ryan Newman’s and I stayed the night last year, and he got back from all of the Victory Lane stuff and walked over there, and literally it was like he was walking on a foot of air. I’ve never seen a guy with that kind of – I just wanted to stand next to him for a while. He was so pumped up. I want to know what that feels like.”

JAMIE McMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion – “This was, I think, one of our toughest tracks last year, so I needed to come down here and have a good Shootout and then a good race yesterday. We put a new engine in today and it seems to run well, so, yeah, so far, so good.”

 

THE CONSENSUS HERE IS THAT THE CAR THAT COMES OFF THE TRUCK IS THE CAR YOU HAVE. SO, ALL OF THESE STRONG SHOWING JUST KEEPS CONFIRMING YOU’VE GOT A GOOD CAR, CORRECT? “Well, the car that we unloaded off the truck, we wrecked, so this is actually the car from the Shootout, but it ran really well in the Shootout and it raced really well yesterday. And, for some reason, it was just faster than the other car. They’re all built the same – I mean, all the cars at Roush are, but certainly that car, the two that we have are a little bit quicker than the others.”

 

YOU FINISHED LAST SEASON WITH THREE CONSECUTIVE THIRD-PLACE FINISHES. BECAUSE OF THAT SUCCESS, DID YOU SPEND THE OFFSEASON WISHING THIS WEEK WOULD GET HERE SOONER? “I wanted it to end, but I didn’t want it to end because we were running so well. And you just never know when you take that break how you’re going to start back up. But it was really goods I think for the Shootout to go the way it did, and our car for the 500 is going to be really good, too. If we can just survive until that last caution, I am just positive that we’ll have a car that can win, whether you can get the push at the point that you need it. I mean, you can’t set yourself up for that, there has to be a little bit of luck. We’ll have a good car for the 500, for sure. And then we’ll go to Fontana and Vegas and Bristol, all those races that are coming up towards the beginning of the year, those are all places where we ran well at the end of last year. You have a really good starting point because of your set-ups from last year, so you just work from there.”

 

NOW THAT YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A GOOD CAR, WHAT IS YOUR PLAN FOR TOMORROW’S PRACTICE? “Today, we ran just a few laps to be sure that you didn’t have any oil leaks and no vibrations – nothing felt way out of the ordinary. Then, tomorrow we’re going to work on the handling a little bit. I think our car is really close after the 150s and the little bit we did today. It’s still just a little bit tight, so we’ll come up with some ideas, maybe just try two or three runs tomorrow. This is the same car we ran in the Shootout and it was nighttime when we ran that race, and this race is going to end at night, so we think we have a pretty good starting point.”

 

DONNIE WINGO – Crew chief, No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion – WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH IN TOMORROW’S PRACTICE? “We just need to get a little bit freer without having to do it with something we adjust during the race. We want to leave the air and stuff like we’ve got it, so that’ll give us more of an adjustment during the race, and we’ll try to leave the wedge and trackbar the way we have it, so we can just work with the springs and the bump stops and hope to get a little bit better with that.”

 

THIS TEAM IS OFF TO A GOOD START. DO YOU BELIEVE THAT THE BEGINNING OF A SEASON CAN SET THE TONE FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON? “I think that’s probably the first thing I told him when I came over here. The first five races of the year is usually what sets your tone for the year, so if you can get off to a really good, solid start in the first five races and get some good runs out of it, and maybe some wins, whatever, just the best runs these first five races, it kind of sets you up getting into the season, as we get going, to make the Chase. Those first five races set the tone for the rest of the season.”