Biffle's season hasn't exactly been the pits so far
LAS VEGAS – Greg Biffle is happy – or as happy as he could be after a 15th-place finish at Auto Club Speedway last week.
The Roush Fenway Racing driver is ninth in the Sprint Cup standings as he looks to make the Chase For The Sprint Cup after missing the championship battle the last two years following the 2005 season where he placed second in points.
“I feel like we’re clicking fairly well,” Biffle said Friday morning at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, site of this weekend's UAW-Dodge 400. “We had some issues last week. I certainly won’t mask that, but we did have some issues last week in the pits with pit stops. It was a comedy of errors last week, and we ended up with a 15th-place finish, which is good. But we’ve got a bunch of new guys, so we know we’re going to have a few growing pains as we go.”
During one pit stop at California, the team mixed up the tire pressures.
“When things like that happen you go, ‘OK, where do we go now?’” Biffle said. “Now we’ve got to put that mistake back, but did the change we made along with that mistake was it better or worse? Now all of a sudden you’re upside-down. You only have five or six pit stops to get the car right, and when you have to take two or three to figure out where you’re at, meanwhile you’re losing track position and it’s difficult and frustrating.
“But, anyway, long story short is we ended up with a 15th-place run. That’s not what our car deserved and our team deserved, but it was still fairly respectable. We come here with a lot of high hopes that we’ve got some of those issues worked out and we’re going to be right on our game.”
Biffle is optimistic about the how much the team has learned about the new race car. His team rolled the car off the truck during the preseason test at Vegas, and it was good from the get-go.
He’s also learning the line he needs to take with the new car. He prefers the bottom groove but admits the top groove, once some rubber is on the track, is often the fastest. He could never get his car to work on the upper groove as teammate Carl Edwards did on Monday to win at California.
Biffle credits new general manager Robbie Reiser for the team getting better.
He says now that the challenge for Reiser will be trying to keep some of Roush Fenway’s best talent.
“What we have to quit doing is bringing in good people and then three months later they go to work for another team,” Biffle said. “That’s been our biggest knife in the rib cage is we’ve had some key people leave our organization – mechanics and other guys that go to Hendrick, go to Gibbs, go other places.
"So you start to get an edge, and if you give that edge to somebody else, that makes it very difficult to try and keep up, let alone surpass them.”
