Kenseth Wins at Homestead
FORD RACING NOTES AND QUOTES Ford 300 (Busch) November 18, 2006 Homestead-Miami Speedway
· Mark Kenseth took the checkered flag for the 21st time in his NASCAR Busch Series career with tonight's victory. Kenseth started fifth and went to victory lane for the first time in nine Busch races at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
* In 21 Busch Series races this season, Kenseth has driven to victory lane three times, and extended Roush Racing's all-time series win mark to 84, the most in series history.
· Ford has now won 145 NASCAR Busch Series races all time, and eight in 2006 with three different drivers (Edwards, Biffle, Kenseth).
* Ford's win today is its fourth Busch Series victory at Homestead-Miami Speedway (D. Jarrett-1, J. Burton-1, Kahne-1, Kenseth-1). *
MATT KENSETH-17-Pennzoil Ford Fusion (Finished 1st) - DISCUSS THE ISSUE YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD WITH THE MOTOR LATE IN THE RACE? "Well, if you ask my dad or Katie, or Robbie for that matter, they'll probably tell you I always have demons when we're running good. But, it just skipped a couple of times getting into one and it didn't run right for about two or three laps and then it just cleared up and ran again. I don't know if it was my imagination or a plug wire or what it was. We had a great car all night. It was really, really awesome on long runs. I was very concerned about having 25 till the end, but I had a super-good restart and got by them guys and had a lot of fun racing Carl." TALK ABOUT THE PASS ON EDWARDS. "I got under Carl and we were side by side, and I saw the 11 coming and starting to catch us, so I was starting to get a little nervous about that. Carl had to drive into three and I got slid in front of him. It was a lot of fun." DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING FOR TOMORROW? "I know I had a lot of fun. I'd be sitting in the bus watching it, so I had a lot of fun. I don't know if I learned anything, but it was a whole lot of fun."
JACK ROUSH, Owner, Roush Racing - WHAT WAS THE ISSUE THAT MATT THOUGHT HE HAD WITH THE MOTOR? "Well, we've had a little problem with spark plug wires failing and we thought that's what happened. It turned out that it was either that or something else, but whatever it was was fleeting and it never came back."
CARL EDWARDS-60-Ameriquest Mortgage Ford Fusion (Finished 2nd) - "that was cool to be racing Matt like that; he's a great race car driver. Paul Menard did a great job. I've just got to thank Ameriquest and my crew and everybody. I hope the fans enjoyed that race. That was a lot of fun for me, and we'll be back tomorrow to try to get one." DID YOU THINK HAD A CHANCE WHEN KENSETH GOT SHUFFLED BACK ON THE LAST ROUND OF PIT STOPS? "That's all I had. That was it. Matt did a good job. I think he had the fastest car all night, and he ended up winning. It would have been kind of sad for him if that pit stop would have cost him the win. He was fast enough and he got it. I could rest on that race for a while. That will get me all the way through thanksgiving, at least. That was fun. That's what it's all about. I get to do what I love, I've got great sponsors in Ameriquest and Ford and a great teammate in Matt. I couldn't be happier for him and I had fun."
GREG BIFFLE-16-Ameriquest Mortgage Ford Fusion (Finished 38th) - WHAT PUT YOU BEHIND THAT WALL? "It's unfortunate, our Ameriquest Fusion was running really good tonight. We finally had a good run and I was really excited about the last race of the season. I thought I had a chance to get up there with my teammates, but I must have broke a gearbox on the restart there. When I went to third, there was just no third gear. It's unfortunate for us. We broke a transmission, I guess."
TODD KLUEVER - No. 06 3M Ford Fusion (Finished 9th) - "I was a little disappointed in our last bit there. I drove up to fifth and then it was just really free on that last set of tires. We even tried to tighten the car up a little bit because it had been free early on all night and I didn't want to be too free with only 25 or 30 laps to go or whatever, but, for whatever reason, that set of tires was either just a little bit too loose or I don't know. It was a good night for us. I sure would have like to have gotten the guys a top five that they deserved tonight, but it was a real solid effort. This was the car we left sitting in the shop all summer like we didn't know what we were doing with it and, I don't know, it's a great piece. I wish we would have taken it everywhere. More so than that, I'm really proud of my guys. We've had a horrible year and the last six weeks I think we've shown more improvement than we have all season. I'm really proud of them for that. It would have been a good time for them to just pack up and quit on the season and just throw in the towel and they didn't. They worked hard and we went out on a positive note and I can't be more prouder of them over the last six or eight weeks on the schedule when it could have been so much different." YOU MADE THE RAYBESTOS ROOKIE CHASE VERY CLOSE. "I was trying. I figured my only shot that I had at it was if we won. Like I said, I told these guys over the radio after the race I said, 'I wish we could just start over at Daytona right now.' Just give us another season all together and things would be so much different. Mike is so much smarter and I'm so much starter and Seth is so much smarter and Mike's an awesome guy. Like I said, these last six to eight weeks not only has this team grown, but me and Mike have really grown together as very good friends and Seth too. It's just a shame that it all came together so late in the season and it's a shame that we'll probably all be on different teams next year and we won't get to enjoy the good part of it."
DANNY O'QUINN ROOKIE-OF-THE-YEAR PRESS CONFERENCE
"It feels awesome. I was just sitting back at the trailer there and we were all kind of nervous and shaking there. We didn't know what was going to happen, but this is just an awesome program. I've got to thank Raybestos and everybody for putting this on for us. It's been a fun year. We've had a lot of ups and downs. I wanted to be running a little better at the beginning of the year, but we picked up a lot the second half of the year. It was a rookie team and I was a rookie driver, and we were coming to a lot of these places for the first time. We stayed out of trouble when we weren't having the best runs at the first of the year, and we worked really hard. My team never let a down a bit, even when we weren't having such a good day. I really owe this to them guys. They give us great cars each and every week. Roush Racing is an unbelievable team to be driving for, and tonight's the first mechanical failure that we've had all year long. I think that's pretty impressive in a 35-race season to have only one mechanical failure, and it just says a lot for our team. I've got to thanks everybody, Stonebridge Life Insurance, World Financial Group, Barr-Nunn Transposition and Transamerica. Those guys came on board and took a big chance on a rookie this year, and fortunately we are able to deliver this rookie-of-the-year to them."
WHEN YOU ENTERED THE SEASON, DID YOU THINK YOU'D BE COMPETING FOR THIS AWARD AGAINST A 10-YEAR VETERAN? "No, I didn't. You think of rookie and you think of racing against guys like me and Todd and Burnie. Racing with John, it definitely brought a little extra competition to it with him being to a lot of these tracks. He helped us a lot, though. He helped all of us rookies a lot when we went to the rookie meetings and things, he would come out and tell us things about the track, so he aided to our rookie meetings a lot. It was a lot of fun racing with him all year long."
A LOT OF NASCAR NOTABLES HAVE WON THIS HONOR. "It's unbelievable for me to look at the names like you just mentioned. There are only a few people that can say that they've won the rookie-of-the-year and I'm honored to be one of them. There's a lot of great drivers that came from that and hopefully I can just add to that list."
JACK ROUSH PRESS CONFERENCE
"Danny has been really a treat to work with this year. He'll bend your heart. He's a big teddy bear, but he's also a fast race car driver. We had Danny in our Discovery Channel Driver X competition last fall and he was very, very good. The metrics that we used to decide - to put the points up one driver against the other - were almost arbitrary, and Danny and David Ragan and Erik Darnell were at a virtual tie, so we just had to try to find something for all three of them. The difficulty was, as we put all these new team together, we kept going further and further down the human resource pool. We were halfway through the year before Danny got a car that was built for Danny, and I'm sure that some of them weren't too comfortable and didn't have as much room in them as he needed. It just took a long time to get this program going because it was the third one in line and they were all new. Danny made a good accounting of himself and he's had a number of great races. One of the telling stories on Danny, we were at Memphis and he was racing against someone that I was not familiar with, and the spotter and crew chief got real nervous because this person kept putting his nose in. Danny was more familiar with that track and the people around the track than probably anybody that was with him, and after a little while Danny said, 'Don't worry about it. He's raced with me before and he understands. It will be OK.' So, Danny has that dimension that breaks ties when they get close. We sure enjoy having Danny being part of the program. We don't have sponsorship for it next year, and this Raybestos rookie championship will sure help him a lot."
"The Driver X program was great. Jack sets that up a lot different than most teams do. You actually have an opportunity to go out there and compete against other drivers in equal equipment. I think that definitely comes out and gives you a fair advantage. Just because you're out there maybe getting beat at a local track or something, there a lot of teams out there in different touring series that are well funded and me working on my own cars out of my own shop, sometimes I didn't have the best knowledge or best equipment. Jack is an awesome guy. He's a racer and he understands what it's like. He put together a great program and he's been doing it for a ling time and it's obviously worked well for him all through the years. I was just fortunate enough to be able to go through that and finish in the top three and for him putting together a great opportunity this year, I just can't thank them enough - Jack and Geoff and everybody there. They've given me an unbelievable opportunity to come over here. This time last year, if you told me that we were going to be rookie of the year, much less even run a Busch race this year, I would have been thrilled to death; I wouldn't know what to think. I've got to thank these guys. It's awesome working with Matt and Mark and all of these guys over here. They've helped me a lot. I'm just fortunate enough to be in this situation."
"We've struggled up and down this year, and like I said, we're fortunate enough to get this. I've learned a lot this year and I can apply that to future seasons. I'm really fortunate, and I can't thank Raybestos and everybody enough for putting this together."
IS IT WEIRD BEING CROWNED ROOKIE OF THE YEAR AND NOT HAVING A FULL-TIME RIDE NEXT YEAR? "Well, it's definitely antsy. Hopefully this will help us find a sponsor and things for next year. I definitely want to be over here driving for Jack next year, but we all know that it's sponsor dollars that make these things go. We've got to attract a good sponsor to put me in a program somewhere over here, but hopefully this will help us with that. I'm definitely on the edge of my seat right now, and I'm sure everyone who's in this situation understands that, so we'll have to ask Jack about that."
CARL EDWARDS PRESS CONFERENCE - "It was just a blast all night. It was fun, those long green runs. We had one really long one and that was a lot of fun. My team did a great job. The only reason we really had a chance to win that race was that we got off pit road first on that pit stop and Matt got shuffled back. He had the fastest car all night. I told PK (Pierre Kuettel), 'Whatever they're doing, we need to go copy it because that thing is awesome,' but it was fun to race him for the win. I don't know. Those few laps when we were kind of battling, that was a blast." WHAT WAS IT THAT HARVICK DID THAT WAS SO MUCH BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE? "His season speaks for itself. I don't know how many top fives he has, it's something like 19 or something - nine wins. I don't know if he had a DNF or not. He's just had an unbelievable season. Their team has done a great job. To me, I haven't been around this sport for very long, but it seemed like he had one of those years. Hopefully it's rare for him (laughing), but it was like they had the fastest cars and they had the best luck. If he would have had a little worse cars, he still would have won it. If he'd have had worse luck, he still would have won it. They just ran us in the ground. I was proud to stay within 1000 points of him." DO YOU SEE FORD TURNING THE TIDE IN BUSCH AND CUP NEXT YEAR? "I sure hope so. The people at Ford Motor Company have been very good to me. They seem like a great group of people. Everyone I've met there seems like they're doing the best they can for the company as a whole and definitely do the best they can for Roush Racing and the motorsports initiative. I really hope that in general Ford Motor Company is turning the page and I really hope that they're doing it on the race track as well. It's nice that the last two nights Fords have won and the last two weeks in the Busch Series and that's cool." WHAT ARE YOU DOING NEXT YEAR BUSCH AND CUP? "We're gonna run the Office Depot Cup car again full-time. I don't know if we've announced the sponsor for the Busch car yet, but I'm pretty excited about the sponsorship stuff going on in the Busch Series, but I'm gonna run it full-time. We're not gonna have Ameriquest on the car because they're going to Biffle's car, but they've been great this year. Henkel's has been great. I've had a good time this year, so I'm gonna do it again. The mission for me is to win both championships in one year and I think that would be the ultimate in American motorsports for me."
HOW LONG CAN YOU DO BOTH SERIES FULL TIME? "For me personally, I think I have better physical and mental health than I did the beginning of the season, so I feel I made up ground this season. I think it's just how you approach it and I feel like I have good teams. I remember reading magazines and watching Kevin Harvick do what he did that season and being just so jealous because he got to race so much. I though it was unbelievable that a guy races 25,000 miles or so a year. I don't know, I always thought that would be the ultimate, so when Jack gave me the opportunity I'm just gonna keep doing it until I don't really want to do it. Right now I'm really excited to do it again next year and if I don't feel like that, I won't do it the year after that, but I'll probably keep doing it." HOW MUCH WAS LAST WEEK BEING BACK WITH BOB OSBORNE IN THE CUP CAR? "Honestly, I think that it's pretty seamless, the transition there. He didn't bring anything that day on Sunday. I don't mean that in a bad way, but like he didn't bring anything that Wally didn't bring. They're very comparable in their abilities, I believe. They have completely different personalities, which they're both fun, but I think what you saw in Phoenix was a lot of Wally, but I don't expect anything less from Bob so we should be good." WHAT DOES THANKSGIVING MEAN TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY? "Where do we go, mom? Do we go to like Golden Corral or Denny's? (laughter) My dad was always working at the shop and my mom was always working, trying to make money for us and keep everything in order. Sometimes we'd go visit some family or something, but mostly it was just a day off where we would goof around at the house and ride motorcycles or maybe we'd go to Denny's. I don't know. To me, I don't look at the holidays, I look at a Monday or a Tuesday or any day I can spend with my family as being really important, but I guess now it's different though. I do get to spend more time just during the holidays, so they mean more to me now I guess than they used to is what I'm saying." IS THERE ANYTHING TRADITIONAL AS FAR AS FOOD? "You'd cook every once in a while (looking at his mom). Didn't you cook one time and it got messed up and then we had to go out to dinner or something. I don't mean to throw you under the bus. My mom's the greatest. There's a lot more to being a mom than cooking and she did all of them really well." YOU'VE BEEN SO CLOSE ALL YEAR TO WINNING. WERE YOU THINKING ABOUT BEING SNAKEBITTEN LATE IN THE RACE WHEN YOU WERE LEADING? "Yeah, I actually did think about that a little bit. I don't know, all of those races were fun anyway. Racing is racing. I'm truly learning to love this sport even more than I used to. I used to be so upset if I didn't win that it was probably detrimental to me and now I'm just really able to enjoy it and if we win, we win and if I do my best and we don't, I'm all right with it. We've won our fair share and we'll win some more hopefully." YOU MAY BE THE FAVORITE IN THE BUSCH SERIES NEXT YEAR. YOUR THOUGHTS. "How many races is he running? Do you know?" PROBABLY 20-25. "He'll be tough to beat still I guess. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. I just talked to PK. I pulled him aside. He's a great guy and I think we're gonna try to keep most of our team intact. Harry McMullen moved over there to manage that shop from the Cup side and I know he's on a mission to win championships in the Truck Series and the Busch Series, so I'm pumped about it. I think it'll be a blast. I'm excited to go testing in Vegas and get rolling. It's gonna be good." OF THE BUSCH REGULARS NOT IN CUP, WHO STOOD OUT? "There are guys that are always fast. Kenny Wallace is a great race car driver and he does a great job. Paul Menard, I think, is a guy that everybody knows came out and did his job really well. Gilliland. He's gonna run full-time, I think, so he'll be good. The guy, honestly, I'm gonna predict this since I've got the chance, but I think Shane Huffman driving that 88 is gonna be spectacular next year. I think he's gonna be very tough."
IS THERE A WAY TO MAKE IT MORE FAIR FOR THE REGULAR BUSCH GUYS? "It would be kind of fun if they awarded points for qualifying and then inverted the field or something like that. That would be fun. That would make it more exciting. I'd be all for that. It's a slippery slope. What if Shane Huffman goes out there and he wins 15 races next year and dominates. Everybody's gonna go, 'What are we gonna do to slow him down?" It's racing. I don't know what to say about it. I'm just glad they let me race because I like it. I had a fun time to night. I don't know if there's a way to make it better or more fair. I don't know." BUT DON'T YOU THINK GILLILAND GOT A CUP RIDE BECAUSE HE BEAT YOU CUP REGULARS? "Yeah, the problem is I'm a person and I just get to drive the car. I'm a Cup driver and I don't know, I'm sure if someone were sitting up here that owns a single-car Busch team he might have some light to shed on it, but I'm not certain about it." CAN BUSCH GUYS STILL BE DISCOVERED THERE? "I don't know. Obviously it happened this year. Mike McLaughlin told me this a long time ago and I believe it's true. If you stick with it long enough and you have the talent, you'll be recognized and you'll get your opportunities. You look at Jack Roush's program and all the young drivers he's brought up. At the same time Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle and myself and Mark Martin running Busch programs, but he's giving opportunities to guys straight off of short track late model racing to run in the Busch Series. I don't know if he can do that if he didn't have teams like our 60 team and stuff like that. I don't know how well that would work. There are guys like Eric Almorola and Danny O'Quinn and Todd Kluever and David Ragan and all them are getting opportunities and Shane Huffman. I don't know. If they changed the rules, I'll gladly race under any rules. That's fine. I just like to race." DO YOU THINK THE POINT SYSTEM SHOULD CHANGE TO THE CHASE? "I don't know. Everybody grew up racing with the old point system. Every race track around the country, I don't know if they do it anymore, but it seems like everybody grew up racing with the standard point system, where the guy who accumulates the most for the season wins. I like a point system like that. I like the chase. I think it's really good for the fans, but, personally, I think it's really fun to race all season for points too. I think that's kind of neat. Both of them have their benefits, but I think for the fans the chase format is more exciting." DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL MEMORY OF MARK? "Mark Martin is a heck of a guy. Everybody knows that. I don't know. I guess my whole relationship with Mark has taught me a lot. We started out, he took me under his wing. We were best buddies. He helped me out a lot and then I can't remember what I did that made him mad. We were at Bristol one time and I was in front of him and he needed to get by me and he just almost wrecked me. He got me out of the way and moved me and I remember thinking, 'Wow, that's not Mark.' I had done something like that to him recently, so I called him the next Monday and he gave me a pretty good reaming and explained to me why he did that and if that's how I want to race, that's how we'd race. He taught me a little bit about give and take and stuff like that, so that's probably the thing I remember most is sitting on the phone with him that one time. That was pretty educational and I really appreciate him taking the time and giving me chances to kind of earn his respect and stuff. That's the kind of guy he is. You can tell when he talks to you because he looks you straight in the eye and takes time out for you. That's cool."
MATT KENSETH PRESS CONFERENCE
"We had a great car really all night. It wasn't the fastest car on the short run, it took about 20 laps for it to get rolling. Lap 20 to whenever we had to pit because we were close to out of gas, it would really run everywhere on the track. It was a lot of fun. My car took some different things to make it run right. I actually had to run higher early in the run because I was so loose, and then I found a place it would like to run in the middle of the run and a place it would like to run at the end of the run. The track is so good when your car is handling right, there's a lot of room to move around and your car will handle a lot different in the different lanes, so that made it a lot of fun because my car handled so good that I could anywhere I would want. That was a fun car to drive."
JACK ROUSH PRESS CONFERENCE
"We wish we had this going for us in the Cup car right now, although I think we have a good Nextel Cup car for tomorrow's competition. I've got the best feeling for the car that we have tomorrow than I've had certainly in the last five races. Matt and Jimmy Fennig have done a great job with Chip Bolin's help and with Robbie Reiser standing behind him and offering his advice. They've just had a great run in the Busch Series this year. I've got to work on my pit crew a little bit. We almost gave it away tonight. One of the things about Matt Kenseth is that he wont beat himself and he'll do the best to cover up and make up for your deficiencies if you're behind pit wall. He came in leading and we put him back out fourth in line, I think. He said, 'Well, I'll do for you what I can, but it's going to be hard.' Of course, in two or three laps he fixed the problem for the team. But, I'm going to try to do better for you next year, Matt, so that we don't have as many as these problems where we have to fight back from a deficit when it shouldn't be there. The Ford Fusion did a great job. Ford has helped us with technology, like Chevrolet has helped the Chevrolet teams, and Dodge, of course, helps theirs. We've gotten good help from Ford this year, and the engines coming out of our engine shop - the same Roush-Yates engine people build the Busch engines that build the Cup engines - and, of course, we had a great truck engine last night that Mark drove to success. Matt did a nice job tonight. We had a little transmission trouble on Biffle's car and we have to go back and look at that. It's always something. This glass, for me, never gets quite half full. When we go into a race with five teams, I've always got some agony over a part that broke or a some missed opportunity and it's salient we're able to have a situation like tonight where Matt was able to prevail and Matt was able to run second." (
KENSETH CONTINUED)
IS THERE ANY SATISFACTION IN STEALING SOME OF HARVICK'S THUNDER THE LAST TWO WEEKS AFTER THE SEASON HE HAS HAD? "I don't know about putting it that way. It's always satisfying to win, and the Busch Series today is probably tougher than it has ever been with all of the Cup presence - not just drivers, but organizations' and team. It's tough and you're racing against a lot of the guys that you're racing against on Sunday, and everybody wants to win. It's always satisfying whenever you can win a Busch race or a Nextel Cup race. And, it's a lot of fun to drive cars that drive like that. Jimmy has done a spectacular job since he got over there to help all of the Busch teams. He's spent a lot of time at the wind tunnel and he built me a new short-track car that we ran last week that was real fast and redid the bodies on the cars and got them better. That helped the speed of cars a lot and I think it helped the whole program a lot having him over there for three-quarters of the year."
"It's always a confidence builder to win. It was maybe a little bit more of a confidence builder here just because I don't have a lot of experience on this track. I've had some accidents here and some failures here, and I think we've only finished one or two races on the Cup side. It feels good to get some time on the track and have some success on it and learn the personality of the track and some different grooves. Of course, tomorrow the conditions will be totally different out in the sun. it was fun. I feel like we learned a little bit about what the car needs to feel like at the beginning of the run to be fast at the end of the run, and vice-versa. All of that stuff doesn't hurt."
TALK ABOUT THE PASS ON CARL. "The plan was when I caught him was to make the move as soon as I could and try to get away. When I finally got by him, I got alongside him - and it's kind of how my car was - he ran away for a little bit and then we'd start inching forward. Once we did catch them guys at about 20, it would run quite a bit faster than them guys for a while. I just couldn't quite get him cleared and I saw 11 coming, and he was right on us, so then I knew it was time to drive it in there and hope that Carl lifted. That's what I finally had to do and he gave me enough room to get up in front of him and we were able to get away. It was fun racing Carl. One thing about Carl, he's not shy about racing you hard. He'll race you hard very lap of every race. It doesn't matter where you are in points or what you're doing or whatever position it is - he'll run you hard. He'll run you fair, but he'll run you hard, so I knew that I was going to have my work cut out for me getting by him."