SEASON PREVIEW: Roush Fenway Racing's Greg Biffle looks to challenge for wins on a weekly basis in 2010
Greg Biffle and Roush Fenway Racing co-owner Jack Roush talk shop at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
// LaDon George, NASCAR Illustrated
Greg Biffle had a decent run in 2009, but it wasn’t a great season. It’s never great for a driver who has 14 career victories and two top-three finishes in the standings unless that driver is winning races and has a shot to win the championship.
Biffle didn’t win in 2009, and although he made the Chase For The Sprint Cup, he was a non-factor as he finished seventh in the standings. He did have 10 top-five finishes but he had no poles and he considered the performance of the team inconsistent as far as competing for wins.
“We really had an average year,” Biffle said when talking about last season. “We came close to winning several times. … [But] we were spotty on being good enough to win, and we’ve got to be better than that. It was a satisfactory year. Making the Chase is important. We want to win races and we want to compete for the title.”
Biffle said the key will be getting the cars better, especially from a weight standpoint.
“We’ve been working on everything from the weight – making the cars lighter, better, faster, lower center of gravity – [to] just all of the small little things that the guys can do to the cars to make them better,” Biffle said. “We’ve been doing all of it. … It’s going to take just getting better. We’re going to have to get our cars faster, continue to work on getting better every week. That’s what we’ve got to do.”
Neither Biffle nor Carl Edwards – the two Roush Fenway Racing drivers to make the Chase – won a race last year while Matt Kenseth won the first two events and former RFR Jamie McMurray won at Talladega.
Team owner Jack Roush said he believes his teams will be better.
“We had several missed opportunities,” Roush said about his organization. “We will win more races given the same amount of opportunities next year that we won last year, but, in the meantime, we’re going to try to get ourselves ready and think that we’re going to be ready to go take a bunch of them hands-down.”
Just like catching and then trying to pass another driver on the race track, trying to catch the competition can be one thing and beating it another when attempting to make your cars faster.
“It’s like trying to catch up with somebody in age,” Biffle said about the challenge. “As they’re learning new things, you’re learning what they’ve already learned. It’s hard to leapfrog somebody in technology when you’re behind because you have to not only catch up, you have to keep up with what they’re doing currently. You have to do double or triple to even maintain or catch up.”
THE BIFFLE FILE
- Career wins: 14
- Career top-10s: 94
- Laps led: 3,913
- Best track: Kansas (9.0 avg. fin.)
- Worst track: Watkins Glen (25.3 avg. fin.)
- Did You Know: Biffle is one of only two drivers to win both the Nationwide and Truck series titles. Johnny Benson is the other.
Coming Friday: Juan Pablo Montoya
