Roush Fenway Racing's Matt Kenseth can't put finger on recent struggles
Roush Fenway Racing's Matt Kenseth is 10th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series after 17 races this season. // Lee Holmes, NASCAR Scene
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The last time Roush Fenway Racing driver Matt Kenseth left Daytona International Speedway, he left a happy man.
Well, not the last time, but the time before that.
“The last time I was here, I wasn’t, because I got beat in the media go-kart race,” Kenseth jokingly said, referring to an appearance at Daytona last month.
In February, however, Kenseth won the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s biggest race. He returns to the famed 2.5-mile oval with mixed emotions for the Sprint Cup Series Coke Zero 400 on Saturday night.
“Obviously, winning the 500 was huge for us and really kicked the year off, and we were lucky enough to follow that up at [Auto Club Speedway in] California,” Kenseth said. “Anyway, it’s been really up and down since then. We’ve had some good runs, some bad runs and some not-very- consistent finishes, so I’m glad to be back here and hopefully we can get our car to handle and be up front and have a shot at it again.”
Kenseth hasn’t been up front much since winning the opening two races of the season. He didn’t have another top-five after California until Texas five races later.
Things then seemed to turn around, as Kenseth and crew chief Drew Blickensderfer posted three straight top-10s – but Kenseth hasn’t finished higher than 16th in the last four events.
What’s missing?
“For us as a group, I’m not sure,” Kenseth said. “For us as an organization, I think we’ve been off on the short tracks and the flat tracks, places like last weekend [New Hampshire], places like Richmond and Phoenix. Tracks like that I think we’ve been off at a little bit performance-wise.
“As far as us as the 17 [team], if I just look at our team, we obviously started off real good, and after that it really hasn’t been one thing. We broke the first lap at Vegas; we broke a part, which is really strange. There’s been some races like Talladega where we were second with four laps to go, had ourselves in great position and then got a flat tire from a fender rub. Then we had a loose wheel at Charlotte.”
So it hasn’t been one area where Kenseth’s team is off.
“Now, we haven’t really been contenders to win races – there have been a couple of races where we ran pretty good – but we haven’t been contenders to win races,” Kenseth said. “I think we’ve been a top-10 car more times than not, but it seems like we keep turning top-10 or top-12 runs into 20th- and 30th-place finishes, from having problems, all kinds of different problems.”
Kenseth remains in contention for the Chase For The Sprint Cup, sitting 10th in the point standings. But he says he doesn’t look at the standings that much.
“I don’t really pay much attention to that,” Kenseth said. “Yeah, I’m kind of aware of where we’re at. I look at the standings every few weeks or something or somebody will say where you’re at. But if you run good and you finish good, you’ll get the points to make it to the Chase.
“Certainly, it’s a real big deal to make the Chase, and if you make it, you want to have a legitimate shot at a championship every year."
But Kenseth wants to be more than just a Chase contender.
“We’ve got to get running better to start with, but we’ve certainly got to get [to] finishing better,” Kenseth said. “Like last week, we ran 12th all week, which was nothing to be too excited about, and finished 22nd. We’ve been doing that a lot. Pocono, [we ran] in third all day and finished 18th or something. We’ve got to figure out how to get that to stop. There’s no way we’re going to make it doing that.”
