Top 10 Drivers Kenseth and Edwards Prepare For Phoenix

 

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – HOW DO YOU LIKE RACING HERE? “I like coming here to Phoenix. This is probably, at least for me anyway, is probably the most fun flat track that we have. It’s real unique with a really long sweeping corner in three and four – kind of like Milwaukee – and then kind of a tight one and two and the dogleg in the backstretch is unusual. I think it’s the only track we have like that, so it’s a fun track, it’s challenging. I think you can pass on it a lot better than most flat tracks, especially down in one and two it seems like there’s always a lot of action and a lot of passing, so it’s one that I always look forward to.” 

 

CAN IT BE FRUSTRATING TO PASS HERE? “Man, I can hardly remember last week much less last fall, but it’s a track, I think, if you compare it to New Hampshire and maybe some other flat tracks like Martinsville and stuff, I think this is the best one we have for passing actually. Three and four gets really wide, it gets probably three grooves wide. I’m not saying you can run three-wide, but it gets really wide where you can move up the track and try to get some momentum off the corner and move around, whereas most flat tracks this size is more of a one-lane track. So here there are several lanes and there are several options. The tougher the competition gets and the closer the cars all get to the same, and the closer in speed all the cars get, of course, makes it tougher to pass. If somebody is almost the same speed with you, then no matter what track you’re at, it makes it difficult to get around them. But I think this is one of the better tracks. I think if your car is handling good, it’s really a lot of fun and you can move your way up through the field.” 

 

HOW HAS THIS SEASON GONE FOR THE WHOLE ROUSH FENWAY ORGANIZATION COMPARED TO WHAT YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE WHEN THE YEAR STARTED? “It’s hard for me to speak about the other teams other than our own because we’ve kind of got our hands full our own stuff, really. If you look straight at the numbers, I don’t know how many times we race, but to have a couple of wins in the organization, I think, is good. Certainly we could be doing better. I think that at our intermediate tracks we’ve ran about basically on average how I thought we should for an organization. I think at Texas there was probably at least three of us that, if things would have went right, we could have had a shot to win and we had a really off day in the pits as an organization. The short track stuff is probably a little bit of a disappointment. I don’t think any of us ran very good at Martinsville or near as good at Bristol as we usually do. Carl usually runs really good there and has won a couple of races, so I think our short track stuff needs some work. We’ll probably know a lot more here after Saturday night to see how our short track, flat track stuff is so it seems like we’ve been off more so than we were last year. I know everybody is working hard on trying to figure out how to make our stuff better. It didn’t seem like we really improved a lot of our stuff since then the end of last year and you’ve got to keep doing that all the time or the competition is gonna get by you, so I don’t know. There’s room for improvement, but yet things could have been worse as well.” 

 

IS THIS A TRACK WHERE YOUR PIT CREW CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE WITH TRACK POSITION? “I never take it for granted and it can go either way. Every track we go to these days, really, probably with the exception of Talladega and probably a little bit Daytona, is very, very important. Track position is very, very important. My team has always historically done really well. Without our pit stops in Daytona and California, we wouldn’t have been in position to win either one of those races and they really helped us win those races, but then on the other hand we’ve had a few off weeks on pit road, too. At Martinsville, we lost our lap on pit road and could never get it back and that hurt us, and last week we went from second to 12^th or something like that with having a nut fall off the right-rear and that hurt us. So it kind of goes both ways. We know we’ve got to be perfect to be able to win these days – on the track, on pit road, car prep, everything – so the pressure is always on. The pressure is always on for nobody to make a mistake because the competition is so tough that if you make any mistakes, it’s gonna be tough to overcome them and still be able to have a shot to win.” 

 

THERE HAS BEEN MENTION ABOUT THE 26 GOING AWAY AT THE END OF THE YEAR WHEN YOU HAVE TO DOWNSIZE. WHAT WILL THAT MEAN AND WHAT DOES JAMIE BRING TO THE TABLE? “I don’t know and I don’t know that anybody knows what’s gonna happen or how they’re gonna move that team. With the Yates Racing team being right across the street and sharing an engineering department. The car builds are the same. The engine department is the same. Really, those guys are two more teammates, so I imagine – I don’t know – but I imagine whatever team has to move out of Roush under the new four-team cap that goes into effect next year, I would assume it would just go to the Yates team and things really wouldn’t change that much. We still work together with both of the drivers over there, sharing all information together in the meetings and doing all that stuff, so unless they totally get rid of a team and don’t have it in either one of those camps, I don’t think it’s gonna be a big deal whichever team goes over there.” 

 

DOES THE ROAD THROUGH VICTORY LANE HERE AT PHOENIX GO THROUGH HENDRICK? “I don’t think it matters what track we go to if you’re gonna win, you’re probably gonna have to beat the Hendrick cars. I haven’t found a track where Jimmie is not good at yet, where him and Chad aren’t a threat to win every week, so I think if you think about any track and trying to go there and win and get a victory, I think you’ve got to think about the 48 and the 24 and Mark and Junior – all the Hendrick cars. I think if you’re gonna win, you have to beat those guys.” 

 

WITH THE ECONOMY THE WAY IT IS WOULD IT BE WORTH TAKING ANOTHER LOOK AT THE FOUR-TEAM CAP LIMIT AND PUTTING IT OFF? “Everybody is probably gonna have a different opinion on that, I honestly don’t know. I don’t really know what it takes to run a team. I don’t know financially how they make all that stuff work, and I don’t really know how NASCAR does their stuff to make it work, either. So there’s people that are a lot smarter than me on the business side of it that would know way more than I do. I really don’t know how they make it work.” 

 

DO YOU HAVE A THEORY AS TO WHY WE’VE SEEN SO MANY PIT ROAD ISSUES THIS YEAR? “I can’t comment on everybody’s problems that they’ve had because I don’t know about the other teams, and I don’t even know about some of our teams and what we’ve had for problems, but the biggest thing that is different is they changed the rules on the stud lengths and I think that’s probably the biggest thing that is different for our tire changers because that changes the timing a little bit. You have to be on the nuts longer to get them tight and I think the shoulder has changed a little bit on it, so I know there’s been a little bit of a rule change on the wheel studs, and I think that’s probably been a little bit of a challenge at least for our team. I can’t really speak to anybody else, but I know that’s been one of the challenges that we really had to look at this winter when they made that rules change -- to practice pit stops and you have to be on them longer, so that’s really been the only change. It’s really competitive out on the track and it’s really competitive on pit road and whenever you’re trying that hard to turn in the perfect stop, once in a while you’re gonna have mistakes or have things not go quite right, so you’re just trying to push it that extra little bit.”

 

 

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Subway Ford Fusion – HOW WAS YOUR CUP SESSION? “I’m glad to have Subway on the car. The only problem with that is I never had that color of a car before, so I had trouble finding it in the garage. But once I got in my car, it was OK. We weren’t really fast on our fastest lap, but I feel like we’re very competitive once we get a few laps on the tires. Bob still has a bunch of stuff he’s changing and the big thing is we just want to run really well here in the Subway 500 with the Subway Ford Fusion and it’s just really cool to have them on the car.” 

 

HOW MUCH DO YOU RELY ON BOB FOR CHANGES AT THIS TRACK? “At almost every track we go to now it’s Bob and the engineers that make the real decisions. I’m just there to relay what the car is doing and give them feedback. They make a ton of decisions, which I’m glad. It’s tough to make calls on what to do with the race car when you have a limited amount of practice.” 

 

WHAT MAKES THIS TRACK DIFFERENT? “The thing that makes this track different, that’s going to be different this weekend, is we’re practicing in a different climate than we’re going to race. We were just talking about how do we predict what’s gonna happen the last 100 laps of this race.” 

 

WHAT HAPPENED IN NATIONWIDE PRACTICE TODAY? “I was out there running around at speed and the 32 car pulled out. He didn’t know, I guess, anywhere near and we were closing at a big rate. He moved up a lane, I went underneath him and then he turned back down. He told me the first time he knew I was there was when our cars hit one another, so it’s frustrating for sure, but that stuff happens.” 

 

HOW DO YOU LIKE COMING TO PHOENIX? “I love coming to Phoenix. Yesterday we hiked over at Camelback and had a really good time. Then we just kind of drove around. We went out to that big mall they’ve got out there in Scottsdale and that was kind of fun. We just hung out. I love the weather here, the hiking and stuff like that, and the people here seem to really be into racing, so that’s cool.” 

 

HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THE SCHEDULE LIKE THIS WEEK? “I wish every weekend was like this. This is great. A two-day race weekend is perfect. We can obviously get everything done we need to get done in one day for the Nationwide Series. It’s less expensive for everyone and it’s less time consuming, so this is great. I’d rather be hectic like this for two days then be twiddling our thumbs for four.” 

 

HOW TOUGH WAS IT LAST WEEK? “It’s always tough when you have trouble of any type. The week before in Texas we were gonna run third or fourth and got run into, and then last week to be on pit road and have trouble, that’s just part of it. You have to learn to deal with that stuff. You can’t change it once it happens no matter how hard you try and I all the time in my mind. I think that there’s that first few seconds of denial, but once I get over that, you just have to do what you can. All of my guys work hard and I’m behind them 100 percent.” 

 

WHAT WILL THE PIT CREW CHANGE MEAN? “I hope that our new tire changer does well. I wish we were going to Talladega first and not here because it’s gonna be imperative to have great pit stops and it could be pivotal if you have a bad one. I wish we weren’t starting him right here at Phoenix, but you never know, he might perform very, very well.” 

WHERE DID HE COME FROM? “He came from a truck team.? 

 

A TRUCK TEAM FROM ROUSH? “No.” YOU HAVE TWO GUYS INJURED AND OUT FOR A WHILE, SO THAT CHANGES THINGS, RIGHT? “Right. There’s no constant here. Even the tire changer that we just replaced as the front tire changer, but the guy that we got – this will be his first race with us – he’s not gonna change the fronts. They put him on the rears and put our rear tire change, who has been filling in for Kyle Lewis, who is injured, they put him on the front. So now there are two guys with two new jobs on our race car this week. That’s fine if they end up being good at those jobs and getting comfortable with them by the time the chase starts. The problem is if we can’t hit that stride and do well, we’re gonna be in deep trouble when the chase comes, so we’ve got to work hard at this.” 

 

YOU TRY NOT TO GET TOO INVOLVED, BUT YOU HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT. “Yeah. I went and spoke with Les Ebert and some of the trainers at the shop and they explained to me what they’re doing to fix it. I believe in them, but my job is to drive that race car and when I pull onto pit road, it’s in their hands and I can just hope that we get it fixed and we can have a strong crew that we can have for years to come because this has been something that’s hurt our performance. Nobody is pointing fingers, but it has hurt our performance for years now and we’ve got to fix it.” 

 

DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW THE NEW GUY’S NAME? “It’s Brandon, but I don’t know his last name. (Brandon Hopkins).” 

 

HOW MUCH DO THE CHANGES ON PIT ROAD AFFECT YOUR TEAM BECAUSE PEOPLE LOOK AT YOU AND SAY YOU HAVEN’T WON YET? “The fact is that we can all say woulda, shoulda, coulda or whatever, but there are like five to eight races over my career in Cup that I feel like we would have won if it weren’t for trouble that we had on pit road. That’s a lot of races. I can only imagine that guys just love it when we have yellow flags because they know they can pass me on pit road, so it’s just very frustrating. The crazy thing is I talk to Robbie Reiser about it and he’s doing everything he can. He threw up his hands and said, ‘Carl, I’ve never seen a situation like this where if it’s not one thing it’s another.’ If it’s not someone having a bad day, it’s an injury. It’s not like there’s just one thing we can say, ‘Alright, we’re gonna change this and now we’ll be great. It’s just one of those circumstances and I hope that we can get all of this out of the way and be good in the chase and be good in the future because this sport is becoming so competitive you have to have all parts of it working well.” 

 

HOW DO YOU BOND WITH YOUR GUYS SO THEY DON’T GET STRESSED OUT OVER IT? “All I can do is just do the best job that I can do. That’s it. Those guys have to do their job and I have to do my job. It doesn’t matter how much patting each other on the back we do or hanging out we do, when it comes down to crunch time and you’re leading the race and you come on pit road, everything’s got to go well. I have the same responsibility on restarts and qualifying and times when it’s time to really go. The reason I think we can work through it so well is they don’t yell at me when I make mistakes and I don’t yell at them when they make mistakes and I think through this have realized we’re all in this together and we just have to get better.” 

 

ARE YOU GUYS RUNNING LIKE YOU THOUGHT AS AN ORGANIZATION? “With Matt winning the first two races, and then I felt like at Las Vegas I had the fastest car. We had all that engine trouble. At Martinsville, I felt like I had the best car I’ve ever had. I drove past everybody to, I think, second or third and then we had our pit stop problem and then a flat tire. Obviously Texas was good and Bristol was terrible, but, other than Bristol, I think we’ve really performed pretty well. Matt, Greg or myself all could have won Texas, I think. I don’t know how to rank us right now. I’d say we’re not stellar, but we’re not any worse than we were last year, it’s just that things to this point haven’t fallen perfectly for us.” 

 

DO YOU FRET OVER IT? “All I can look at is where our position is in the points right now and how it compares to last season is fairly close. If we go win the next 10 races in a row, if we don’t make the chase, this season is a failure. So that’s the mission right now. It’s not to worry, just to focus and do the best we can. If we run ninth in the next 15 races and solidify our position in the chase, that’s just what we do and that will still be a success. So we’re measuring success in making the chase and winning the championship, not how we’re finishing right now.” 

 

JIMMIE JOHNSON SAID HE’S HAD TO GET MORE PHYSICAL ON THE WHEEL AT THIS TRACK. WHAT DOES HE MEAN? “Jimmie is probably just saying that to throw everybody else off. He’s awfully fast and he looks awfully smooth to me. If that’s physical, I don’t know. But what he’s saying is sometimes you have to manhandle the car a little bit here and there are times when that works really well. It’s really fun, too. At a big, fast, smooth race track, you can be very, very smooth and precise. Sometimes here you’ve got to go in there and bounce the thing off the apron, slide up and hit a patch on the pavement, turn it sideways and go and that’s really fun.”