Implementation of Ford's FR9 engine remains on schedule for this summer
DOVER, Del. – Ford’s FR9 engine, run sparingly since its debut last season, will likely be in use by all Roush Fenway Racing and Richard Petty Motorsports teams by midsummer, according to Roush Fenway Racing team co-owner Jack Roush.
“We’re going to run the engines in all the cars at Charlotte for the All-Star weekend,” Roush said Saturday at Dover International Speedway. “By Michigan, I don’t know that we will have the engine in all the Ford cars from that point forward, but we will at least have half a dozen engines in the 10 or so Fords that we build engines for.
“From that point on, depending on the durability and depending on the confidence, depending on the supply of parts, we’ll have that available to us.”
Teams began phasing in the new engine late last season as a replacement for the 452 model. An abundance of the existing engines and lack of new pieces for the FR9, as well as durability questions, kept Ford teams from making the switch en masse.
“We had 200 existing engines and all the inventory to support those and we didn’t have any inventory to support the new engine,” Roush said. “As we made the submission, [NASCAR] said, ‘Yes, it’s OK,’ well, right then you start ordering parts and start validating the parts that come from high production runs. We had validated the performance and we had validated the ultimate strength and, in some cases, the durability of the prototype parts, but we didn’t have a run of, say, 20 crankshafts. We had three to start with that came off a prototype process.
“So we need a production run of 20 crankshafts, a production run of 100 connecting rods, a production run of 20 camshafts to get those first 20 engines going. That’s taken some time.”
And, as is often the case, Roush said there “have been some missteps, there have been some vendor problems, some manufacturing problems with vendor parts that were not unexpected but that were unfortunate and have slowed the thing down.”
Such problems were not “a surprise,” he said. “It’s what you would expect.”
Roush Fenway drivers Matt Kenseth and David Ragan were among the first to compete with the new engine last season. Kenseth, Elliott Sadler (Richard Petty Motorsports) and Bill Elliott (Wood Brothers Racing) ran the piece in this year’s Daytona 500, just three days after Kasey Kahne (RPM) won his Gatorade Duel qualifying race at Daytona using the new FR9.
It wasn’t until this year’s Talladega race that all four Roush Fenway teams and four RPM teams used the FR9 in a points race.
“It’s been Doug Yates’ determination, and my determination and all the people that are under his management, that we didn’t want to introduce the engine as long as there was a known problem and until there were enough parts to make a satisfactory representation,” Roush said.
Yates heads up Roush Yates Engines, which supplies the Ford power.
In addition to the lack of new inventory, Roush said the fact that teams were pleased with the performance of the 452 allowed more time for development of the FR9.
“I don’t think there is a suspicion in the minds of the drivers,” he said, “that the [452] engine has not been very competitive.”
Roush said NASCAR officials haven’t taken engines from teams back to the sanctioning body’s research and development center for testing since after last fall’s Cup race in Atlanta, and at that time, “the Ford engine was as good if not better in power output than any other engines that were compared at that time,” he said.
So why change?
“There is … hope that the new engine will have a little different torque characteristic, an improved water system function allowing us to run more tape on the front of the car, and to have more downforce that results from that,” he said.
“There is an expectation that it will be helpful.”
