NASCAR BGN: Tradition of excellence continues at Jani King 300 in Texas

Posted By Terry Callahan
Motorsports Editor, The Auto Channel

March 31, 2001

When the Busch Series takes the green flag on Saturday at Texas Motor Speedway, Ford Racing will attempt to continue its tradition of excellence at the 1.5-mile oval with some different faces. Ford has won three of the four races held at Texas, granted three of those races were won by Mark Martin, but this weekend there will be more Ford drivers than ever competing in the 43-car field. Jeff Burton will be back behind the wheel of the No. 9 Ford, his second start of the season, and rookie Ryan Newman will also be back in the mix looking to add to his sixth-place finish in last weekend's Cheez-It 250. Add that to that talent pool that includes 2000 Busch champion Jeff Green, 2000 Truck champion Greg Biffle, Jason Keller and Elton Sawyer, and Ford has an opportunity to keep its strong tradition of excellence at Texas alive. Jason Keller and Jeff Green, ppc Racing teammates, both finished in the top 11 last year, and Jeff Green has already posted Ford's first victory of the season and has four top-five finishes to his credit.

JASON KELLER-57-Albertsons Ford Taurus- YOU WERE STUCK ON THE BACKSTRETCH LAST WEEK AT BRISTOL BUT MANAGED TO STAY OUT OF TROUBLE IN THE RACE TO POST AN 11TH-PLACE FINISH. WAS THAT THE PLAN? "The plan going in was to run a whole lot better in qualifying, but we just seem to be falling a little bit short there. We had some luck go our way early in the race and missed a couple of big wrecks and that got us a little bit of track position. It could have been a whole lot worse, but we could have made it a whole lot better. We just need to go back and do a whole lot better at places like that, places we know we can run good, and we need to capitalize on places like that." JEFF GREEN SAID THAT HE FOUND SOME THINGS IN ATLANTA THAT HE COULD USE HERE. DO YOU FIND THAT TO BE TRUE? "I thought we did, too, but we fell a little short yesterday in qualifying and I'm not sure why. I don't know if it's me being a little too timid, you kind of get a trend as you start qualifying bad, you continue to qualify bad. We just need to break out of that and get the right mentality. I think the race cars are there, and yesterday right before qualifying a car blew an oil line off and oiled (Turns) 3 and 4 down a little bit. I don't want to make excuses by any means, but it may be a little lack of confidence on my part. I think the cars are there, we just need to make it happen." HAS THERE BEEN AN ADJUSTMENT PERIOD TO THE SWITCH TO FORD? "I don't know if it's driving the Ford, it has a little different balance, but more than anything, it's the new engine package for me. I don't have any Winston Cup experience and a lot of these guys have Truck or Winston Cup experience, and it's definitely a whole lot more horsepower, so that's been the biggest thng for me. I'm getting more and more used to it in race trim, I just have to figure this qualifying thing out." DOES A TRACK LIKE THIS MAKE IT EASIER TO GET USED TO THE NEW ENGINE PACKAGE AS OPPOSED TO A TRACK LIKE BRISTOL? "I think so. I felt comfortable all day long yesterday. Unfortunately, comfortable is usually not that fast and we showed that yesterday, but I felt the car was good and balanced and a race track like this is real smooth and nice. We just have a lot of work to do there. I don't think there's anything wrong with the engine package that we've got, we've just got to work hard with it and get the balance." YOU ALWAYS RUN CONSISTENT AND SEEM TO STAY OUT OF TROUBLE. YOU HAD JUST ONE DNF AND ONE WIN LAST YEAR. DOES THAT PROVE THAT CONSISTENCY WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS AND NOT VICTORIES? "Well, I hope so. My goal coming into this year was to be really consistent at the beginning of the year and not dig ourselves a big hole like we did last year. We were 500 points behind Jeff (Green) by mid-season, and we ended up 600 points behind him and we didn't lose a whole lot of points at the end of year. We just want to stay in this thing all year long. The summer months, for me, are my strongest as far as race tracks that we go to, but we can't give up any now, we need to be right in the thick of this thing going into my strong suit and hopefully we'll be OK."

WERE YOU PUT AT EASE SEEING JEFF WIN AT DARLINGTON, KNOWING THAT WITH ALL THE CHANGES IN THE OFF-SEASON THAT YOU STILL HAD WINNING EQUIPMENT? "I know that we have the package to win races, and I feel like if we qualified better at Darlington, we would have been right on his heels to be in Victory Lane; I know we drove all the way up to third. I know the package is there to win races, there's no question or doubt in my mind, we just have to put it all together and his (Jeff Green) qualifying has been a little better than mine, so he's putting himself in a position to win races. Right now, we're not putting ourselves in a position to win races and we have to do that. We're putting ourselves in a position to be consistent, but we also want to find Victory Lane." MARK MARTIN ISN'T HERE THIS WEEKEND. "To me, he is another competitor, but he has risen the bar in the Series because sometimes you only run as fast as you need to and when that guy's around you have to run as fast as you can. We've got other guys that have replaced him being just as fast. Mark to me, I think he was very good for the Series. A lot of people criticized him for being in the Series, but I think for the notoriety of the Series and in the long-term, it was good for the Series." WHAT'S GOING TO BE THE KEY TO WINNING TOMORROW? "It's going to be similar to Bristol. Everybody's car is going to be on the bottom of the race track, so you're going to have to really, really get your car turning good up off the corners and really use a lot of throttle. Goodyear has such a good tire now, a lot of people are getting their cars so balanced, and it's hard to drive by people any more. You have to be smarter than them, maybe use some pit strategy, but you're going to have to be on the mat all day long." WHAT ARE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT SOME OF THE TEAMS THAT ARE GETTING INTO THE RACES, BUT ARE NOT QUITE UP TO SPEED? "It can pose a problem, but hopefully they will use their heads enough. It's hard, I know that when I started, I would give anything to make a race, to get laps. I don't want to criticize them because I've been in their shoes and as long as they are smart enough to stay out of the way, I don't have a problem with it."

JEFF GREEN-10-Nestle Nesquik Ford Taurus- YOU HAD SOME TOUGH LUCK LAST WEEK AT BRISTOL. HOW DO YOU BOUNCE BACK AFTER THAT? "We'll just do our normal deal. We feel like that won us the championship last year, and it's the winning formula for this year. Bristol was just Bristol; we have to put it behind us. It's a short race track and the way tires were, they were so darn good, the speeds weren't slowing down any, and at that track you need to be on the gas some much that if something happens in front of you, it's going to be hard to miss it and that's basically what happened. It was just a bad luck deal, it's nothing that we could control and that's the way you look at it and keep digging. We have 26 more races, so we have plenty of time to make up what we lost and even gain on it more. We feel like we have a car that can win this race in Texas and that's the best way to make up points - to win." WHAT ARE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT SOME OF THE TEAMS THAT ARE GETTING INTO THE RACES, BUT ARE NOT QUITE UP TO SPEED? "It was only a problem because it was Bristol. Bristol is probably the world's worst track that we go to if you don't have some experience because you can't get out of the way quick enough. At a place like Texas, or even Richmond, you have plenty of room to get out of the way. That's just the only problem that I see with having short fields, you'll have four or five that wouldn't have been in there anyway and that makes life tough for us at a track like Bristol. The good thing about those guys is that they are getting experience that they wouldn't have gotten if we had plenty of cars and some of the guys were going home. They probably would have been some of the guys going home and they wouldn't have gotten the experience. It's good for them to get experience, but it's kinda costing us, too."

WHAT'S GOING TO BE THE KEY TO RUNNING UP FRONT TOMORROW? "Just staying up front. Staying with the lead group like you need to. It's not going to be real easy to pass here unless it does something different than it has in the past. In the past it's been a one-groove race track, so staying up front and getting all of your pit strategy down, you don't want to run out of gas or do anything like that. This is a track that you can go the whole distance on a gas run, and you don't want anything like that to happen because it can put you behind. More than likely, we'll be pitting under green, hopefully we will. Hopefully we don't have any cautions and we'll just have to get our pit strategy right and just be there right at the end and capitalize on that." DID YOUR EARLY-SEASON WIN TAKE A LOAD OFF YOUR SHOULDERS KNOWING THAT WITH ALL THE CHANGES THAT YOU MADE THAT YOU'RE STILL COMPETITIVE? "I don't know. Winning at Darlington was pretty awesome, whether it was at the beginning of the year or the end of the year. It just happened top be early in the year for us, it definitely helped our momentum a little bit and got us going a little bit more and told us that we can do it with the Ford Taurus. We're still learning about it, I think we'll be learning about it all year. We'll just keep getting better and better. We're right there at being at the point, I think, of being the best in the Series and if we keep learning, we're going to get in front of those guys and that's what we want to do."

WHAT BEEN THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE WITH THE FORD? "The setups are a little bit different, what you have to put in the car for springs and shocks and weight. It's been a lot different than what we had in the past, and we've had to learn that and we've tried to parallel that to what we had the past two years, and it doesn't really work. Some of it does and some of it doesn't, we've just had to decipher what does and what doesn't, and, in fact, we're getting pretty close on that now." YOU'VE BEEN A LITTLE BETTER IN QUALIFYING THIS YEAR THAN JASON KELLER. DOES YOUR WINSTON CUP EXPERIENCE AND THE NEW ENGINE PACKAGE HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THAT? "I think it helps me a little bit. Jason (Keller) is a great race car driver, but if it's not exactly right, he can be a little timid with it. I think that my experience, period, will let me drive through that, and if the car's not exactly right, you need to drive through it and we can work on it later and get it better. I think the 12:1 motor rule and my Cup experience has really helped me a lot."

IF SEEMS LIKE SOME OF THE WINSTON CUP GUYS THAT WERE ON TOP LAST YEAR ARE STRUGGLING WITH THE NEW TIRE, BUT WE HAVEN'T SEEN THAT TREND IN THE BUSCH SERIES. "I think some of it is bad luck on the Winston Cup side. I know Bobby (Labonte) has had some bad luck and some of the guys are having a little bit of a tougher time, but maybe that's the wheelbase. I don't know if the shorter wheelbase that we have in these cars makes the cars drive easier with the new tires. I think it's mainly bad luck and those guys aren't getting the right situations. Also, a lot of those guys are catching up, like Sterling (Marlin) and those guys. They have really caught up a lot over the winter, and not that Bobby and Dale Jarrett and those guys have fallen back, it's just that some of those other guys have caught up with them a little bit." WILL TEXAS BECOME A TWO-GROOVE TRACK TOMORROW WITH THE NEW RULES PACKAGE? "I hope so. It hasn't been in the past, but in the past at Atlanta hadn't been that way, but we saw a great race there and we used the whole race track there, so hopefully it will be that way here at Texas."

DID YOU FIND THINGS AT ATLANTA THAT YOU CAN USE THIS WEEKEND? "Yeah, but this is Texas and not Atlanta. To get a sky shot of this track and lay it over Atlanta, it would probably look pretty close, but driving them is totally different. The banking is different, so hopefully we can get at least two grooves where we can ride side-by-side."

WE SAW THE ROOKIES QUALIFY A LOT BETTER AT ATLANTA THAN HERE AT TEXAS. "That's just the track. Atlanta is a little more comfortable to run, it has a little more banking so it holds the car better. I think that a rookie needs a little more comfort, so that just gave them a little more comfort to run wide open, and this track doesn't have the banking and it doesn't give you the comfort to go into there and push it on the mat and not let off. I think that the experience came to the top yesterday."

Text provided by Campbell Company

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