Kenseth Talks About Going For Three Straight

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – “I’m excited to be at another mile-and-a-half, two-mile venue for the season. We ran really good here last year, so I’m hoping to pick up where we left off in Las Vegas. Junior and I had a pretty good race in the closing laps at this place, so, hopefully, we start off in that same area. We’re coming off a pretty good run at California, so I’m pretty excited about our chances here.” 

 

THIS IS THE THIRD YEAR SINCE THE TRACK WAS RE-SURFACED. HOW IS IT NOW? “It certainly was a bumpy reconfiguration, but at the same time that kind of gives the track a little bit of character of something a little bit different out of the ordinary. It makes it a challenge for us to get the cars to adapt to the race track. Those bumps, we’ve got to keep the splitter off the race track and we’ve got to keep the car turning good. What the bumps have done is make the upper groove a little bit more desirable because it’s a little smoother, so that does make for some side-by-side racing. I was referring to Junior earlier about last year’s race. I was running the top and he was on the bottom and we had a pretty good race going, so it does promote some side-by-side racing and it’s gonna continue to do that. I don’t think we’ll probably ever see this race won on the top. I was gonna say I don’t think we’ll ever see running way up against the fence, but you never know. We might be all the way up there.” 

 

YOU WERE HARD ON YOURSELF AFTER LAST WEEK’S RACE. HOW LONG DOES THAT KIND OF THING STAY WITH YOU? “I suppose after a couple days I quit thinking about it. I think when you first get out of the car you’re really upset about it, and the first day and then the next day, but probably after Tuesday I quit thinking about it. I certainly exaggerated what my feeling were. I was like, ‘Those guys should fire me for taking a car that fast and finishing fourth with it,’ but it was kind of a joke. We had a really good car and it’s tough when you have to go home not winning a race like that, but there are so many factors. The other thing was, was I gonna be able to beat Matt? Matt had a fast car. Matt was out front. We probably weren’t gonna beat Matt out of the pits. He beat the 24. We were behind the 24. I don’t know how that would have shaken out, so you could always look back on the fact that it wasn’t a gimme that we were gonna be able to pass the 17 for the win. Maybe the 24 would have beat us out of the pits and maybe I wouldn’t have been able to get around the 24, so looking back on it, I finished fourth, which is possibly one position worse than I would have finished. That’s one way to analyze it. The other way is you gave up a win with a good car. You can’t blame the entire situation on what I did. I stopped in the box. I wasn’t out the box. I didn’t have to back up, and we got on the air hose. You can’t blame it on the pit crew either because they had done what they had done all night and I just stopped deeper than they expected me to and pinched the air hose on the left front. So I really wasn’t out of the pit box, I just stopped a little bit deeper than they expected. So there were a number of things that could have changed the outcome of that, but I was pretty confident that it kept us from our opportunity to win. We don’t know if we would have won, but we felt pretty confident we could.” 

 

WHY DO YOU THINK MISTAKES LIKE THAT HAPPEN? “That’s a good question and probably a lot of people, I guess, don’t understand the importance – they understand, but they don’t understand what we do inside the car to try and get an advantage. We’re racing on pit road just as hard or harder than we’re racing on the race track. We’re going 55 miles an hour down pit road, so that’s close to the speed that most everybody drives on the freeway, and we’re pulling into a parking space and coming to a complete stop at 55 miles an hour. At the other end, when you’re crossing the line – when they’re taking the picture – it’s tenths of a second difference. So if I count one-thousand-one before I lift on the gas and go to the brake versus not, that’s gonna make the difference whether I beat the 24 out at the other end. So we’re trying to get that last milli-second of speed and at California when I turned off for my pit box, I was against the bumper of the 24 – right near him – I turned off and gave it a little bit of gas and held the gas on just a little bit longer than I had the couple stops before just to try and beat the 24 out. I knew it was the last stop of the night and when I got stopped, I was about a foot from the yellow line in my pit box, which is about three feet deeper than I had been stopping, just because I was going too fast to get stopped on the mark. I was just trying to get an advantage to beat the 24 out of the pits. That’s all we’re trying to do. If you give up and just kind of ease down in your pits, you’ll lose four positions. Or let’s say you get caught up behind a car and you have to go a little slower than you expected into your pit box, it shows up at the other end when you leave. So I guess what I’m saying is we go as fast as we can and sometimes you slide over or you make a mistake or you don’t get in the box right.” 

 

WHEN YOU KNOW THERE’S A CHANCE FOR A STRONG RACE, DO YOU PLAY OFFENSE THAT WEEKEND OR HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT IT? “It’s sort of both. You look back at California, you try not to make a mistake because you have such a good car. On the other hand, you’ve got to play offense because you’ve got to get all you can get because you do have a fast race car and that’s what I tried to do at California. I was faster than the 24, I was catching him, but it was so hard. I couldn’t get an opportunity where I could pass him, so I tried to get him on pit road and it cost me. It’s the same thing here. We feel like we’re gonna have pretty fast race cars. We had the luxury of one of our cars tire tested here, so we may have some information, but at the same time I’m gonna guarantee we’re coming off the truck exactly how we finished here last year because it was pretty good. But I think mostly offense. We’re mostly trying to win here. We’re not points racing. We definitely want to win early in the season like we weren’t able to do last year.” 

 

HOW APPREHENSIVE ARE YOU ABOUT ATLANTA NEXT WEEK? “We tested tires there for Goodyear. I tested there in January and there’s a tire that we tested that was really good on that race track, and it put a lot of drivability back in the car. That’s what we’ve been complaining about is it didn’t have a lot of grip, and there was a left-side tire that gave the car a fair amount of grip and picked the speed up a little bit and it had some fall off as well as it wore. I don’t know what tire they chose to go back to Atlanta with, I’m hoping and I’m pretty sure that they’re gonna choose that left-side tire, but that should improve the racing for sure at Atlanta – that tire. So I’m pretty optimistic. I have to look and see what tire they chose to go there with.”

 

 

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – ARE YOU PLEASED WITH THE WAY THE FIRST TWO RACES HAVE GONE? “We’ve really had Daytona and one race. Daytona, we were running really well. I felt like we were gonna be in the top four or five with the way our car kept going to the front, but we just got caught in that wreck, but that’s Daytona. I was proud that we finished 18^th. I was really happy with getting back up there because when that all broke loose I thought, ‘Man, we’re gonna be about 40^th.’ And then last week with the way practice went it was terrible and for us to finish seventh I thought we did a good job. Finishing in front of Jimmie, that made me feel a little better about it, that he could have the same trouble considering how well he ran there the last race. So really I feel not happy with our performance at California. I’m really not happy with it, but the fact that Greg was probably the fastest car and Matt was the second-fastest, I know that our whole team is gonna be fine. It’s still so early, but, yeah, it feels like two races and we haven’t won one – with the way we were going at the end of the season that feels like an eternity, but I think we’re gonna be OK.” 

 

YOU WON HERE LAST YEAR AND THEN HAD THE PROBLEM WITH THE CAR. CAN YOU GO BACK THROUGH THAT? “The deal is that no matter what everyone says you’ve got to know in your heart what really happened and the truth and as long as you know the truth, you’re fine. It still was difficult to hear everyone’s commentary that they thought we were purposely cheating. We came here to test last year and we were the fastest car by far. In practice we were fast. In the race we were the fastest car, and if we were gonna cheat, we would have made it a little more discreet. I mean, that oil tank cover was blown off up in the race car.  The cool part about it was even with that 100-point penalty, we still scored more points than anyone the whole season and I was really proud of that. If we wouldn’t have won another race after that, that would have been tough. When we won that next race at Texas that felt good just to win another one and move on. That kind of silenced all that. When I heard that happened it was a little bit deflating because I knew what was gonna be said, but there’s nothing you can do about that.” 

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT DREW BLICKENSDERFER AND WHY HAS HE BEEN SO SUCCESSFUL WITH THE 17? “Drew is a really, really cool guy for a number of reasons. He’s a real nice person. He’s probably one of the most competitive people I’ve ever been around. He’s a lot like Bob Osborne in that respect. He wants to win more than anything and he’s got street smarts. He’s real savvy on a lot of subjects, not just the race car but with people and motivating people and things like that. I think that Drew’s success is no accident. He’s going to be successful. Right now he’s batting 1.000, which is amazing, and hopefully he can keep it up. He’s a really good guy and I’m proud to call him a friend.” 

 

WE’VE SEEN SOME UNCHARACTERISTIC MISTAKES BY DRIVERS, BUT YOU HAVEN’T HAD ANYTHING LIKE THAT HAPPEN YET. WHY DOES THAT HAPPEN? “Well, we haven’t been racing long enough for me to make those mistake. I’m sure I’ll make them. I’ll never forget at Dover I drove right by my pit stall leading the race a couple years ago on that first pit stop. I drove right by it and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s genius.’ It’s just easy to do. You’re out there racing and the season is just getting started and there are a lot of new things going on. Who knows if people have changed pit signs or they’ve changed the color of their uniforms. I know it’s been difficult for me to look down the pits and see a black box. I can see Tony Stewart’s real easily, but getting used to seeing the black box and things like that, it’s probably just those little cobwebs and things like that. We all do that stuff. I don’t know the exact reasons, but it’s easy to do is what I’m saying.”

 

IT’S EARLY BUT WE SEE SOME DIFFERENT PEOPLE IN THE TOP 12 AND SOME YOU WOULDN’T EXPECT OUTSIDE THE TOP 12. CAN YOU MAKE JUDGEMENTS ABOUT THESE TEAMS OR IS IT TOO EARLY? “I think it’s too early. I think this race, we’ve got kind of a strange start to the season. Daytona is what it is. Everybody knows the points there aren’t representative of the season probably. California is a good indicator, but these next two tracks are gonna be the best ones. Vegas and Atlanta, I think, are gonna apply to whole season more. I think after those two races and then we’ve got the week off after Bristol. I think after Martinsville you’ll be able to say, alright, maybe three-quarters of the top 12 will stay this way, but I think right now it’s too early just because of chance at Daytona and California is kind of not the perfect representation of the season. It’s that two-mile track that is a little different.” 

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT WHAT THE TRACK HAS DONE TO THIS RACE TRACK? “I haven’t gone out and looked at it, but in my opinion, wherever you can put those SAFER barriers you’ve got to put them. I’ve seen some of those rescue vehicle escape areas, kind of where the wall bends – those areas at some tracks – I think we saw, I can’t remember who it was, but someone crashed at Kentucky a couple years ago and it was a horrendous crash. You could almost hit 70 or 80 degrees into one of those and I think those have to have SAFER barriers and it looks like they’ve done that. It just means a lot. I know it costs a lot of money and it’s great for them to have stepped up and done that. I hope they’re doing it at all the tracks, whether they’re ISC or SMI tracks.” 

 

DID THE INCIDENT HERE LAST YEAR WITH THE OIL TANK LID CHANGE HOW YOU THINK ABOUT OTHERS WHO HAVE ISSUES LIKE THAT? “I learned that a lot earlier than a year ago. I raced at my local dirt track and this one guy named Jeff Wagner would beat us every night. He beat everybody. It was my first year there and I was the guy who ran like 15^th every week or 10^th on a good night and everyone just always knew he had traction control and knew he was cheating and it was common knowledge. We all thought, ‘That’s why we’re getting beat,’ and consequently he kept beating us because we didn’t work harder. The year after that we got a new car and I think I won 11 or 13 races or something and now all of a sudden I was cheating and everybody knew we were cheating. And I realized right then that Jeff Wagner had just been doing a better job because I knew we weren’t cheating and I realize that’s common in racing. If you can’t beat them, you’ve got to point your finger at them. So I’ve tried to hang onto that and not do it as much as I can, but we all fall into it.” 

 

DO YOU BREAK THE SEASON DOWN IN SEGMENTS OF WHERE YOU WANT TO BE IN POINTS? “We all know that we just have to be in the top 12 with 10 races to go. Bob and I talked about it. Yeah, we won a lot of races last year and that was great, but we didn’t win the championship. We know what it feels like to win races, we just want to win the championship, so, to me, whatever puts us in the best position to do that. If we’re 12^th at Richmond and we’ve got a shot at it and we can still go win the championship, as long as we can still do it, then that’s no worse than being first going into it. I guess what I’m saying is I have a couple goals. Number one, just make the chase. Number two, to win the championship and I don’t really care how many races we win doing it as long as we can achieve those goals.” 

 

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 USG Sheetrock/DeWalt Ford Fusion – THREE IN A ROW. WHAT DO YOU THINK? “I haven’t really thought a whole bunch about it, to be honest with you. I didn’t think we would have won the first two races, so I haven’t really thought about the third. We’re just gonna take it one race at a time like we always do and just be business as usual. Hopefully we can get our car to handle good this weekend and have a shot. The pit crew has been operating at an extremely high level, and so have all the guys getting the cars to handle and run – the engine guys and everything – so I feel like we have the tools to be competitive and we’ll just try to be as competitive as we can and hopefully be somewhere in position at the end.” 

 

WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT THIS TRACK? “There’s a lot of things I like about Vegas. Obviously the track is different than it was a few years back when we had all the success here, but it’s fun. It’s high-banked. It’s real fast. It’s actually got some pretty big bumps in it, which makes it challenging. It’s just a fun place to come out to this time of year and it’s a fun, competitive track.” 

 

WHAT’S IT LIKE COMING HERE WITH TWO STRAIGHT WINS? “It doesn’t really feel that different. In a way, it doesn’t seem really seem real that we won the first two races, plus we’ve been really busy and had a lot going on the last two weeks, so I haven’t really had a lot of time to sit and thing about it or reflect on it. I haven’t even really got to watch the races on tape yet or anything. I just haven’t had time to be honest with you, so it doesn’t really feel as different as you might thing.” 

 

WHAT DO YOU ATTRIBUTE THOSE TWO WINS TO? “Everything. It takes a combination of everything to be competitive these days and to be able to win. The pit crew has been operating at a super-high level. Obviously, the pit stops and getting the track position at both races was the huge key to the victory. Daytona was a little different than California. Obviously we had the luck of getting through that wreck and missing that, which is a big deal toward us winning as well, but everything from the car prep to the guys building the engines to the pit stops at the track, it’s just the whole thing.”

 

IT LOOKED LIKE THE AIR HELD JEFF UP LAST WEEK WHEN HE WAS BEHIND YOU. DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING FROM THAT? “I didn’t really get to watch it a lot. A few things I really learned and our team learned in trying to take some lessons from last year, and of course everybody knows it and everybody tries to do it, but you really need to be in front and beating them out of the pits at the end was very important. If he would have beat us out, I’m not so sure that we would have won. He probably would have drove away, so it’s just really important to be in the front with these cars. They don’t have much downforce and they’re always pretty tight and when you get behind somebody it makes it a lot worse. Another thing is he needed to run the line I was running, which hurt him. If he could have run the top a little better or something like that with clean air, he maybe would have had a little better shot, but with his car being tight, I think he wanted to be on the bottom and my car had to be on the bottom, too.” 

 

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO BE THE FIRST DRIVER TO WIN THE FIRST THREE RACES OF A SEASON? “It would be huge, obviously, to win this week, but every race is difficult to win. It took us a whole year to win a race, so everything has got to line up just right. We’re not gonna approach this any different than any other week or really even think about that. If it happened, that would be pretty wild. That would be pretty crazy and something I’ve ever really thought about, but we’re just gonna concentrate on going out business as usual and trying to perform.” 

 

HOW MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE HAS DREW MADE? “He’s made a big difference. It’s only been a couple of months since he got over there, but it’s really helped a lot to move Drew into that role and give Chip so much more time to work on the cars and for Chip to be able to sort through data and work on setups and all that stuff, and not worry about a lot of other stuff. That’s been a huge difference as well. It’s helped to get our cars run and helped him to be more prepared for adjustments and stuff like that. To bring Drew in with a leadership role and to work with the guys on the pit stops and the pit crew and keeping the group together and all that has been a big deal.” 

 

CAN YOU DESCRIBE WHAT KIND OF MAGIC DREW HAS BROUGHT? “I hope it’s magic. I just hope it keeps going. It’s a combination of everything. It’s really a huge team effort.   We were just lacking that guy last year. We all knew it. Chip knew it. Chip didn’t have an engineer to help him most of the year. He was trying to be the engineer and the crew chief and that was just way too much, so to let him go back and work on the cars has been as big a deal as anything. And to bring Drew in as crew chief with his leadership abilities and experience, and to be able to work side-by-side with Chip to help each other make us perform has been a big deal. I really think he’s gonna be the guy for a long time. I think he’s kind of the young version of Robbie when he got in to lead the team, so I think it’s pretty cool that he’s fit in that well. He fits in with all the guys really well and he’s been doing a great job so far, obviously.” 

 

IS THERE MORE CONFIDENCE OVERALL? “It’s kind of hard to explain, but bringing Drew in there – as soon as I saw him after a week with how he and Chip got along and how he got along with the guys – even after he just started at the shop and we were preparing our cars you could tell that the morale was boosted already and it just had a better feeling. It just felt like there was more energy there and there was more enthusiasm there. Everybody was happier when they were at work and it just felt good. It just felt like that was the right move and we’ve always had a really great group of guys here, but you’ve got to have the whole thing. I just felt like that was the spark that was gonna help us be more competitive and help us work better.” 

 

THE ROUSH CREW CHIEFS LIKE THE FACT THERE WAS NO TESTING WHILE OTHERS SEEMED TO BE CONCERNED. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT WAS THE CASE? “I think the no-testing rule is really good for a lot of reasons.  Obviously, saving money was the first reason they did it, which is obviously good for that, but the other thing is with this car there have been no rules changes, so we’ve got the same exact aerodynamic package we’ve had the last two years. There’s not a ton of things we can do. There are a lot of little things we can do to the cars, but a couple years ago with the other car you could move body parts around, you could change all kinds of stuff. You could show up at the track and be right on, or you could be way off and not be able to fix it because of how you had the body on the car or something like that, so with running the same car and all that, I felt good about not testing. It gets all the crew guys, I think, rested up more and ready for the season and I think it actually makes the races in a way more competitive. I think it makes passing a little easier because it separates the field a little bit and I felt good about that. I felt like our cars at Roush all performed pretty well last year and we had a lot of stuff to look at and go on without testing.” 

 

CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHY YOU GUYS SEEM TO BE HAVING FUN AND PERFORMING? “I think that’s the key to it – to a certain point. Obviously, you’ve still got to be serious and focused and do your job, but when you can be doing your job and be focused and all that, and be having fun at the same time and be loose and all that, I think it helps everybody perform. I think sometimes when you’re under pressure if you’re still having fun at the same time it’s easier. If you’re under a ton of pressure and maybe nobody is having fun and all that, I think you may be more prone to mistakes, and so far it’s been good because everybody has been extremely focused, but yet they’ve been having a good time at work, too. And whenever you can have fun at your job, that’s a good thing.” 

 

WOULD YOU FEEL REALLY GOOD ABOUT THE PROSPECTS FOR YOUR SEASON IF YOU HAVE A GOOD OUTING SUNDAY? “That would be great. It’s always important to get off to a good start, which we’ve done the first two weeks. Obviously, there are ton of races but if we can come here and run real competitively on Sunday and have a decent finish, we’d feel good about that. Running good at California was a big deal to us and this place is a lot different than California and some of the other tracks we go to right now with the new pavement and tire combination, but, still, if we could come out of here with a good run, that would give us some more confidence going to Atlanta and the upcoming tracks.”

 

JACK SAID YOU SOMETIMES MAY NOT SHOW EVERYTHING YOU HAVE DURING PRACTICE. IS THAT JUST AN OBSERVATION OF HIS? “In practice we don’t really necessarily race the speed chart as far as where you’re ranked on the speed chart, but yet we go more for the feel we’re looking for and the consistent lap times and all that stuff, so I don’t really pay a lot of attention to practice speeds. I used to look at everybody’s stuff and all that, but if we have the car driving how we want it to drive and have the balance where we want it, if you’re a little off on lap times but you’ve got it driving where it feels good and as good as you get it to drive, a lot of times there’s not much you can do about it anyway. We look for that feel and then during the race we just really try to keep up with the race track and the changing conditions and get it to drive as good as you can.” 

 

IS IT TOO EARLY TO TALK ABOUT THE CHASE AND THE CHAMPIONSHIP? “It’s never too early to think about points. You’re trying to get points all year long to get in there, but after Daytona I would say that has zero effect on whether you make the chase or not, but running good at California maybe builds a little extra confidence, so we’ve got a lot of racing to do before we get in there, but if we can stay competitive and run as good as we did last week – if we keep running competitively in the top 10 and stuff – then I’ll feel better about that or think about it a little bit more.” 

 

WERE YOU WORRIED ABOUT THE CREW CHIEF CHANGE AT ALL? “No. I mean, actually that whole thing this year is probably the first time I ever got involved in the team and those decisions. That was really my deal. I went and talked to Chip by myself and we worked it out together and decided that maybe we should do something different and get him back to where he’s got time to focus on the cars and all that stuff. Really, I talked to Chip before I talked to anybody else about it. Then I talked to Drew and then I talked to Robbie and then I talked to Jack, so we had it all worked out in a day or two, actually, and I think everybody was happy with the final result when we got done after those couple of days of getting all that stuff changed around. I think Chip felt a lot more comfortable that he could contribute a lot more – freeing up some of his time and working on the car. He didn’t have to deal with all the stuff he hates dealing with, so I think he was really comfortable with that. I was really comfortable with Drew. He was my personal selection. That’s who I wanted to get in there is somebody young and somebody who hasn’t been a Cup crew chief before. I think if you get somebody in there like that who hasn’t been there and done that and seen that, that they work that much harder, they’re that much more loyal and all that stuff because they’re getting an opportunity to go do that.” 

 

WHAT WAS DREW’S REACTION? “He just said, ‘Yeah, I want to do it.’” 

 

HE SAID ONE REASON IT HAS CLICKED IS BECAUSE YOU HAVE SIMILAR MENTALITIES. “Yeah, we worked together a couple of years in the Nationwide Series and I think we learned some stuff from each other. I liked working with him right away in the Nationwide Series and when we started I said he was probably the next guy in the company that had the potential to move up when there was an opening. Now when I said that, I didn’t think that would be for us. I didn’t think we’d have the opening, but I knew that he was probably the guy with the most potential over there that had the chance to move up and had the leadership ability, the work ethic, and all that stuff to step up if he wanted to.”