Kenseth and Roush Press Box Interviews
Written by John Davison · May 24, 2004
Matt Kenseth and Jack Roush, after celebrating in Victory Circle at Lowe’s Motor Speedway and then spending a few minutes in the infield Media Center, made their way up to the Press Box where they had the following conversation with the reporters present.
FORD RACING NOTES AND QUOTES NASCAR NEXTEL Challenge, Page 9 May 22, 2004 Lowe’s Motor Speedway The following is transcript of the press box Matt Kenseth and Jack Roush conducted following their win in Saturday night’s NASCAR NEXTEL All-Star Challenge.
MATT KENSETH PRESS BOX PRESS CONFERENCE
HOW IS IT YOU WIN A RACE WHERE ALL THE CRAZY PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO WIN IT? “Well, my owner is crazy (laughing). It is extra-special for us to be able to win this race, I think, because of all the crap we’ve heard over and over and over. This is a wide-open race. You run wide-open the whole race and race as hard as you can. We had the fastest pit stops and we had a really fast car and everybody just did a great job. It was fun to drive and it was really fun to win this kind of race because it’s usually not our cup of tea - a 20-lap run where you run as hard as you can to try to beat those guys. Usually we seem to be better on a long run when we can kind of pace ourselves and feel the track out, so it’s pretty cool to be able to win it.”
WHAT DID RYAN SAY IN VICTORY LANE? “He just congratulated me. It was just funny. I said down in the media center already that my heart was beating so fast and that’s the first time I remember being nervous in a car since we won our first race here and we were leading at the end with Bobby behind me. He just came down and he was still shaking his Gatorade. He just told me it was a good race and it was as hard as he ever had to drive, he said.”
JACK ROUSH - WERE YOU SHAKING? “Yeah, I sure was. I was waiting for something else to happen (laughing). Track position means so much these days. The cars are so close. The Goodyear tire is great with a lot of grip, but track position means so much. When they got Matt out a second behind Ryan with Matt having four tires, I was glad he had four tires because I knew he was gonna be awful hard to pass. The engine ran good. The car ran good. The strategy was good. The overall setup, they had been in and out - had some rubbers in and out of the car and a couple of things they were changing. I think Matt would say if the question was asked that he wasn’t as good as he’d liked to have been earlier. He wasn’t able to take full advantage of the grip he had in the tires because he was off just a little bit on setup and that made it hard to pass.”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED - IS IT GRATIFYING TO HAVE THE YEAR UNFOLDING LIKE THIS? “Yeah, it’s cool. When I said it this winter and Jack said it this winter - we actually went to dinner in New York one night - Jack and Robbie and I - and we were talking about this year was our opportunity year we felt like for Roush Racing and ourselves. We kept our whole team together. We’ve got better equipment. We’ve got a new body this year. We’ve got more people working on the engine program to try to make them better. We’ve got a lot of exciting things going on that coming off a strong year last year that it just felt like this could be a year where we could do things like this - we could win exciting races and we could lead more laps and run more competitively each and every week. So we felt like we had that opportunity coming into the year. We came out of the box like that and lately I feel like we fell off just a little bit. We’ve run good, but we haven’t been as good as we were the first few weeks, so it feels good to come out here and run this strong.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED - WHAT WILL YOU SAY TO YOUR OTHER DRIVERS ON TUESDAY? “I hope I’ll be able to congratulate them on getting their problem solved. I am card-carrying crazy. For anybody that would put a half-dozen of these - in fact we’ve got actually 10 race programs this year with, I think, seven drivers - and to put that many people together that are competitive and very aggressive and their personal natures whose careers are developing and unfolding - to have them share space and have everybody be happy about that all the time is probably too much to ask. When I first started my two-car operation in the early nineties with Wally Dallenbach and with Mark, they weren’t the happiest with one another, but the performance of the 16 car at that time wasn’t what the 6 car was. Even though they weren’t real happy with one another sharing space, they didn’t have the prospect of being faced with running over one another. It was unfortunate tonight that the cars were in proximity of one another and they ran into one another and now we’ve got to go sort that out.”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED - DO YOU HAVE TO DRIVE DIFFERENTLY WITH THIS NEW EQUIPMENT? “Yes and no. We didn’t have bad equipment last year by any stretch of the imagination, but we got a little update on the body so we knew that was gonna be a little thing. The cars are so close that a little thing means a lot and we were behind aerodynamically last year, and anytime you put two heads together it’s better than one. With Jack and Robert and Doug and everybody combining all their stuff, it had to be better because Jack had to have ideas that maybe they didn’t have and they had to have ideas that maybe we didn’t have. Whenever you get two heads together, you’re gonna make the stuff better. So we felt like the motors were gonna be better. Ford gave us a new cylinder head which we knew was gonna be a little bit better and get us along the lines of the General Motors cars as far as the gears we can run and all that stuff. We knew aerodynamically we were gonna be a little better. We already had a good fleet of cars. We were happy with our chassis program and we didn’t lose any people, so, really, all of that pointed in a direction that we should have a better opportunity than we ever had. Our group is more experienced than they’ve ever been and we felt like our equipment is better than it ever has been.”
ON THE DIFFERENCES FROM LAST YEAR — “The better your stuff is, the faster you can go and the easier it is to drive your cars for sure. So having better stuff and having more downforce and having a little more power, all of that stuff makes my job easier, it makes Robbie’s job easier. You don’t have to be exactly perfect right on. You can miss it by a little bit and still hang in there and when you hit it right, you look like we did at Vegas. The better stuff you have, the easier it is. It’s not huge amounts. It’s little bits, but it’s so competitive these days that those little bits mean a lot.”
YOU’VE WON SO MUCH MONEY ALREADY DOES THIS MILLION JADE YOU? “No, that’s awesome. You look at most races and I don’t understand how it all works out, but you look at a lot of races - you go to the Daytona 500 and it’s a million-and-a-quarter, and then you go back for the 400 and it’s $200,000 or something. Most races are $200,000 to $300,000. The owners need the big portion of that to help pay for all this for all the employees that we have. I still do get a nice chunk of it, but by the time you pay taxes and do all that stuff, it’s a big difference. I guess what I’m trying to say is a million dollars is a lot of money. That helps the team out tremendously. It’s a great bonus for myself, a great bonus for the team, and it’s a great bonus for all the guys that work on the cars. The better we do and the more we win, the more it helps them out financially and rewards them for all their hard work. Whenever you keep something rolling like this it keeps the guys enthused and energized and happy to be a part of our group.”
HOW MUCH CREDIT SHOULD RYAN GET FOR HOLDING THE LEAD AS LONG AS HE DID ON OLD TIRES? “Ryan is used to being in front. He qualifies up front all the time. They do their strategy in such a way where they’re always up front, whether they have new tires or gas or old tires or what, they’re always up front. He’s very good at figuring out his setups so he can run really fast in clean air. You see that on Fridays for qualifying. I didn’t think he was gonna be as tough as he was with those old tires and I was kind of waiting to pick my spot, but about 10 laps into that last run I knew he was gonna be tougher than what I thought to get around. Ryan does a great job every week and he did a great job of holding us off on those old tires for as long as he did. That was pretty amazing. I didn’t think he was gonna run that good. I thought we were gonna get around him and drive away having four new tires because more times than not four tires prevails here at Charlotte.”
DID YOU THINK TIME WAS GOING TO RUN OUT AND YOU WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO PASS? “You never know for sure. My car was turning real good, but I was too loose up off the corner. I could get a run on him, but if I only got alongside of him I couldn’t complete the pass because the position I would be in with him on the outside, it would make my car too aerodynamically loose and I couldn’t hold the groove that I wanted to groove. I needed to happen what happened. I needed him to slip enough where he had to roll out of the gas pedal, where I could carry momentum and be in front of him. I knew if my car was in front of his car going into the next corner and he couldn’t get to my rear bumper, I was gonna drive away. But as long as he could hang on my right-rear, the cars get real loose with somebody outside of them and it was gonna be tough to get around him.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED - HOW MUCH ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT IS THERE WITH THIS NEW ENGINE? “The cylinder head is just one of the pieces that the Ford engine is disadvantaged and dated with. There was a valve angle disparity. There was a valve diameter disparity and there was a port height disparity and, in addition to that, there is a combustion chamber disparity and a valve location disparity. We’ve fixed the port height. We’ve fixed the valve size. We didn’t fix the valve location and we didn’t fix some cooling system aspects of the cylinder head, so it’s just a piece of it. If you’d say, ‘How close does it get you to having a competitive engine with regard to the geometry of the other engines,’ it’s about 25 percent of the shortfall. It’s enough that it’ll be worthwhile, it will make a difference. NASCAR has said that they’re gonna define the box that Toyota is now in and that Dodge is in and that the current Chevrolet engine is in, they’re gonna publish that and they’re gonna allow us to make a submission — probably in two or three years it will take us to get ready to make the submission of a new engine that will get us up to speed - but, in the meantime, I’m hopeful that with working as hard as we’re used to working and with having as many good people on the program as we have and all the good support from Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, that we’ll be able to maintain a competitive posture with the engine until we can really get on the same level playing field.”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED - HOW FRUSTRATING IS IT TO BE BEHIND RYAN AND NOT BE ABLE TO GET AROUND HIM WHEN YOU HAVE SUCH GOOD EQUIPMENT? “It’s not frustrating now that we won (laughing). When you catch somebody you just have to be able to understand some of what the air does because in the short track days, you got alongside somebody and would drive it in harder and you’d slide into him a little bit and rub a little bit and you’d pass him. But you’re going so fast and aerodynamics mean so much that when you have somebody outside of you, you have to be careful because if they get you in a compromising position, you could lose control of your car and wipe us both out. I didn’t want to slide into him. If it would have been the last lap and we were side-by-side, it might have been a little more exciting, but the two times I did get there, I couldn’t make the pass without running into him and I didn’t want to put either one of us in that position yet. It’s kind of frustrating, but I thought we were still gonna have a shot at it because I could hang with him and he couldn’t get away and his tires were getting older and we definitely had better rubber than he had.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED - HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO HAVE A DRIVER THAT THINKS THROUGH THINGS LIKE THAT? “It’s very important. I’ll make some observations about Matt, not to pump his head up any bigger than it should be or than it maybe already is, but the Wood Brothers have always been my heroes. The drivers in their heyday have been my heroes as well and when I look back and remember what I have been told about David Pearson and what I saw about David Pearson actually on the last couple of years I was around him when he was driving for the Wood Brothers, Matt reminds me more of David Pearson than anybody that I’ve worked with. He’s calculating. He doesn’t test worth a damn. You have no idea how fast your car is until it’s time for the checkered flag to really drop, but when the green flag drops you start to see what you have to work with. A good indication of the kind of race you’re gonna have is if Matt gets himself halfway through happy hour and he tells Robbie and the guys, ‘You know, I’m out of ideas. If you guys have something you want to try, let’s try it. I’m pretty happy.’ That’s gonna be a real bad day for the competitors as seen by me. On the other hand, and he’s done this a couple times, he says halfway through that, ‘I want to park the car. We’re done. I’ve got no interest in trying anything else,’ they can cancel Christmas because it’s pretty much over. So he steps up to the plate and does his job and does it in such a way to protect and preserve the car and to have as much life in the car and the tires and everything else as can be conserved when it’s time to go. When things go bad with Robbie and Matt, you don’t hear a lot of whining. There’s not a lot of wincing and complaining and poor me’s, it’s how they can recover and make the best save for a situation that was not what they planned for and that bodes well for the championship they won last year and it makes me very confident of the prospects of being successful in the years to come.”
YOU LOST THREE CARS TONIGHT. WILL YOU BREAK EVEN ON THIS DEAL? “You know, I was asking myself. I said, ‘I wonder what second place pays. I’m sure my part of second place is not gonna pay for all the carnage we had, not to mention the hurt feelings (laughing).”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED - CAN YOU WIN NEXT WEEKEND AS WELL? “I don’t know. Everything has got to go right to win a 600-mile race, but I feel real confident. Robbie was so excited about this car. I guess I said this down there, but in his sleep this week his wife told me he was talking about numbers in the wind tunnel and was mumbling, ‘If Matt can’t win with this, there’s nothing he can win with.’ So he was mumbling in his sleep. Tracy came in and she was asking me what all these numbers meant and I was like, ‘I don’t know why. What did he say after and then I said, Oh, those are the downforce numbers in the car at the wind tunnel.’ He was real proud of this car. It’s the oldest chassis we have that we still run besides speedway cars. It’s a car we built, I think, in our second year and he put a new body on it and just got it done and did some stuff here for Charlotte to try it and he did everything right on it. So I feel real confident going into next week, but a 600-mile race is a long race. It’s my favorite event of the year by far. I love that race. That’s right on the top of my list every year. The one I’d want to win if I could win one race a year it would be the 600, so I have a lot of confidence coming in with how our stuff ran tonight, but we’ll have to bring it back and try to do it again for 600 miles.”
WHAT MAKES THIS YOUR FAVORITE? “It’s just difficult and I enjoy long races. I like how you start during the day and the track is real snotty and mean and nasty and slippery, and as you go on at night your car takes such a dramatic change and you just have to stay on top of it. I mean, you make a million pit stops and you get to adjust on your car all night long and it’s just a really fun event for me to try to figure out what the track is gonna be like in the beginning and what you have to give up in the beginning of the race to be good at the end of the race. It’s fun to figure that out and try to wrestle the car and get frustrated with it, but then be happy with it at the end because the track changed for you. Just to try to figure that out and go through a unique race like that where the conditions change so much to me is a lot of fun.”
DO YOU DRIVE HARDER IN THIS RACE OR IS IT THE HYPE AND ANTICIPATION OF THIS RACE? “It’s a little bit of everything. You race as hard at the end of the race as you would any race that you want to win. You race just as hard. It’s just a little different because in the middle of the race you need every position you can get. For 600 miles it might be a little more relaxing in the beginning and you maybe wouldn’t take that chance if your car felt like you might lose control. You might slow it down and keep it underneath you a little bit more and maybe make some smarter decisions, where here you just kind of go all out and see cars slide into each other and run into each other a little bit more than what you would if it was the 600. It’s a tough race and everybody is racing as hard as they can. All of the money is up top. Everybody wants to win and everybody wants the trophy and everybody wants the check. It’s a big race for the fans and if you drop out, there’s no point standing consequences or anything like that. You just come here to lay it all out for a Saturday night shootout.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED - WILL YOU ALL SIT DOWN AND TALK THINGS OUT ABOUT HOW TO GET BETTER - SHARE SECRETS? “There is certain to be a meeting on Tuesday. Tuesday is my favorite day. Typically, we have most of our races on Sunday. I’m wrought with frustration and with sometimes anger for the things that have gone wrong and I want to let that rest for at least 24 hours and give myself a chance to put it all in perspective from the point of the big picture. I want to let a little space go between now and then, but, in the meantime, I will certainly have a conversation on the telephone if I can reach Kurt. I’ll have a conversation with Greg on the telephone if I can reach him. I’ll talk to Geoff Smith, our president. I’ll talk to Harry McMullen, our general manager. I’ll make every effort to have conciliatory discussions underway that will soothe the feelings and get us back on the right track before I get down there on Tuesday. But if that doesn’t happen, I will make my best effort to effect an understanding that will put us all on the same page so we can come back here at the 600 and have this behind us.”
MATT KENSETH CONTINUED - “I’d like to add one thing to that. I don’t even know what happened. I didn’t see the accident with Kurt and Greg, but I will say that they are two of the best teammates you could ever have. I would bet our paycheck tonight that whatever happened was an accident because Kurt and Greg, they go out of their way so much to help me and help each other and help all their teammates that I’m sure whatever happened was an accident. I’m sure they’re mad about it because they didn’t finish, but I’m sure, knowing Kurt, he was probably trying to bump draft Greg to make him go faster. He does that to me all the time. That’s a hard place to do right there and sometimes it can backfire on you, but I guarantee you he was trying to help Greg and himself get going in that lane. There’s nothing there that’s gonna be too big of a conflict or anything intentional or anything like that.”
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