At the end of the Sprint Cup Series test session at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Biffle walked into the media center for his availability and made it clear that he didn’t want to talk about the day.
“I’m willing to talk about anything but today’s test, so any questions that you guys have I’d be more than happy to answer, but it was a pretty tough day for us,” he said in his opening statement.
Biffle ended up 27th on the speed charts and said that he honestly wish he knew why, but couldn’t come up with a solid reason.
Though as of late, this seems to be a theme with Roush-Fenway Racing as their program suffered last year on the intermediate tracks. On the 13 traditional cookie cutter intermediate tracks last year, Biffle only had five top 10s to go with his win at Michigan Internatonal Speedway.
“We talked over the winter or at the end of last season that our intermediate track program really suffered and that was the flagship of Roush Fenway,” Biffle commented. “And actually a pleasant surprise, our short-track program, which was always the toughest for us actually picked up and we made, what I’m going to consider with the 16 team, a fairly significant gain in our short-track program – Richmond, Loudon, Martinsville – a pretty good improvement. Phoenix, finished third in the fall, so that was kind of light at the end of the tunnel.”
Last weekend at Phoenix, though, Biffle didn’t have the day he was expecting as he finished 17th.
Coming into this weekend, Biffle hoped to get his season back on track and get RFR back strong on the intermediate tracks like they were before. The Charlotte test had gone decent for him and he said that he didn’t see any thing that stood out going into Las Vegas. However, now with this test in the bank, he knows that they have work to do.
Biffle added that there’s still time this weekend to improve as sometimes it’s just the smallest thing that could gain that half-second that they’re off by.
“I know one thing, two years ago I was at Michigan and I was horrible – like couldn’t make a lap horrible – and we looked at Matt’s setup and he had a little bit different rear spring combination and we said, ‘OK, tomorrow we’re gonna start with that,’” Biffle rcalled. “We were the fastest car both practices on Saturday and won the race with one spring change. So that gives us some insight.
“We’ve got to take that direction because we don’t have a guy that is very fast to take a look at and say, ‘Hey, what do they have.’ Now, we did recognize last week we weren’t very fast in race trim, went to q-trim and went to the top of the board and were sixth in both of the qualifying sessions and had a pretty fast car. The 21 car is third on the board in q-trim, so is there some formula between qualifying and race trim that is giving us a little fuss right now. Actually, we learned a little bit in qualifying trim last week and applied that to race trim, so maybe that’s the same thing that’s gonna happen here.”
This weekend at Las Vegas marks the second round of Knock-Out Qualifying, which should be interesting once again. Biffle says it’ll be interesting to watch how people time their runs to make sure that they have enough time to cool their cars in-between runs due to not being able to use the cool-down units.
“We were in a good position last week and we’ll have to wait and see tomorrow what that brings, but I feel pretty good that Trevor’s that fast in q-trim,” Biffle commented. “Obviously, I think only maybe 12-15 cars made q-runs today, so when everybody does it, then it might be a different story.”
