Roush Fenway sees progress at California, but still has 'work to do'
Matt Kenseth takes on service along pit road at Auto Club Speedway. Kenseth led Roush Fenway Racing with a seventh-place finish at California.
// LaDon George, NASCAR Illustrated
Roush Fenway Racing entered the Auto Club 500 looking at the race as a major test to see how much progress the organization has made since last season.
The results?
“We’ve got some work to do,” Matt Kenseth said after his seventh-place finish.
Coming off a disappointing 2009 season that produced just three victories, Roush Fenway Racing entered Auto Club Speedway on the heels of a strong performance at Daytona.
It ran well at California, but not as good as drivers Greg Biffle and Carl Edwards, both Chase participants last year, expected.
Kenseth finished seventh while Biffle wound up 10th and Edwards 13th. David Ragan finished 23rd.
Biffle ran in the top five but none of the Roush cars led the race, which was dominated by Hendrick Motorsports’ Jimmie Johnson and Richard Childress Racing’s Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton.
Biffle says he ran better than he finished, but wound up a victim of a late caution flag that caught him and two other drivers on pit road. One was Johnson, who beat the leader off pit road to stay on the lead lap and, ultimately, inherit the lead.
Biffle wasn’t so lucky.
“We had a really good car,” Biffle said. “We got a tough break on that last caution, which figures. It seems like we’re always on the wrong side of it, but we had a good car.
“It was obvious I could run with the 48 [of Johnson] and the other guys up front, but it’s just unfortunate there at the end with that deal on pit road.”
Kenseth actually ran about the way he expected, but was pleased with the result, especially after a tough 2009 in which he missed the Chase for the first time in his career.
“It was up and down. We didn’t really run great,” Kenseth said. “We actually ran about how I expected to run, honestly, which was pretty good.
“It was a lot better than we did here at California last time, and I feel like we made some improvement on our cars over the winter and got everything a little closer.”
Kenseth, who is working with veteran crew chief Todd Parrott, who took over his team last week, is pleased with his start to the season. It pales in comparison to last year’s start – he won the first two races of last season – but it’s better than he ran much of the season.
He is seventh in points after two races while Biffle, who nearly won the Daytona 500, is third.
“I’m feeling great as far as the two finishes that we’ve had,” Kenseth said. “It sounds dumb me saying that since we won the first two last year, but to get out of Daytona with all the troubles we had and finish eighth, and then to come here in Todd’s first weekend and finish seventh is pretty good.
“We ran a little worse than some of our teammates at times and a little better at times, and it seemed like we ran as good as most of the Fords did.”
Parrott, who worked in Roush’s R&D department before taking over Kenseth’s team, liked what he saw.
“I was very, very happy,” he said. “I would have liked to have gotten the car closer for Matt, but we just tweaked on it all day long. It wasn’t too bad.
“We’ve got some work to do. Those guys up front, obviously, have some really fast race cars, but I think we made some huge gains from where we were over the winter, so I think we’re heading in the right direction.”
Though the Roush organization, which won the Sprint Cup championship in 2003 and 2004 and challenged in three of the next four years, appears to be lagging behind Hendrick and possibly RCR, both Biffle and Kenseth believe they have made progress.
“I still think we’ve got some work to do to get all of our cars better as a group, but I thought overall that our team did a good job,” Kenseth said.
“Oh, yeah,” Biffle said. “I think we’ve got a ways to go, but we’re getting closer.”
