JACK ROUSH AND JIMMY FENNIG PRESS CONFERENCE
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – “It was a great night for Roush Fenway and for all the guys in the shop. They worked hard all winter and they got the result from it tonight that they deserved. It has been a very long winter for us. We made some changes and built some new cars over the winter and revised our strategies a little bit as far as the way we do our engineering and the way that manifests itself in what the race cars are and we’re still working with our process. This thing is becoming so sophisticated and expanding so much with so many people doing new things that hadn’t been done before it’s a little hard to get all the job descriptions worked out.”
JIMMY FENNIG, Crew Chief – It was a good win. We really needed that for as hard as everybody that’s been working this winter. It paid off. Carl did an excellent job driving at the end, just watching his tires, managing his tires. Goodyear did a good job with their tires here. Once the track got rubbered in we didn’t have no trouble at all, so pretty happy with the win.
Q. Jimmy, what made you decide to stay out there when it was 75-ish to go?
JIMMY FENNIG: Well, basically we only had like 17 laps on our tires, and looking at the 50-lap run, we were running on the end of 50 laps, we were running the same lap times we started the run with. And the wear at that time wasn’t a factor anymore once the track got rubbered in. It was pretty easy that we knew the speed was there and the wear was going to be good, so we just stayed out.
Q. Jack, one-two with Carl and Ricky, and Carl in victory lane talked about how far they came from Saturday, and then Ford had four cars in the top 5. If you could just talk about what a strong showing it was all around.
JACK ROUSH: Well, we’re real happy with the representation Ford was able to have tonight. There were a lot of good cars that got crashed, a lot of good cars that got caught up in things that weren’t their own fault. You’ve got to stand in line and just wait for the racing gods to smile on you or to frown on you to see what you’ve got, but tonight we did have good fortune. We had nobody that got caught up in a wreck and we didn’t break a part and we didn’t get involved in somebody else’s wreck, so that helped a lot.
Ford has deserved this kind of result for their effort. They’ve committed a lot of engineering resources to us. They give us a lot of support with cars and trucks and support vehicles and things, and we have not been able to do as much for them as we needed to in the last six months, and I was glad we could get Carl into the Chase tonight. Looking forward to getting Ricky qualified for the last 10 races and Greg, as well.
Q. Ricky was in here earlier and said there was no doubt he would have put the bumper to Carl had he been able to catch him on the last lap. As the car owner of both, how do you feel about that?
JACK ROUSH: When it comes time to really charge for the checkered flag, the guys, there’s no team owners, there’s no rules. I expect them to race one another as they expect to be raced not only with one another but with everybody in the garage. I expect Ricky is as fierce a competitor as there is out there, and if his car has got the speed and he can get to the car in front of him, particularly on a short track, you’d bump and run and take the prize if you could get it. I’d be surprised if he didn’t have that in his mind.
Q. How would you have felt, Jimmy?
JIMMY FENNIG: It would have been vice versa, too, Carl would have put the bumper to him.
No, it’s good racing. You know, short tracks, at the end there, especially with the new format we’ve got with the Chase like this, it’s about winning nowadays.
Q. Jimmy, how does this change the rest of the year for you now that you’ve got this one in your pocket? Does it make you go for more wins or make you kind of settle in comfortably or how do you approach it?
JIMMY FENNIG: Well, it’s about winning. That’s the way we build around Roush Fenway Racing. We go out to win. That’s what we’re striving for. We’re going to go to California. I think our mile-and-a-half track, we’re still working on that to get the performance better, so when we go out to California we’re going to go shooting after that win. Nothing is going to change our philosophy.
Q. Jimmy, what did you think of that last caution?
JIMMY FENNIG: Yeah, I don’t even know. I guess it had a short or I don’t know.
Q. Did you think that’s what it was?
JIMMY FENNIG: Well, I seen the lights come on and I didn’t see the flagman didn’t even know the lights come on. I knew something was wrong. It just wasn’t right what happened. From what I understand, something just shorted out, it came on or a couple came on. But at the end the rain came out and NASCAR made a great decision, yellow and checker and that was it.
Q. Both Jack and Jimmy, were you worried when that caution came out that this one was going to slip by, or did you have confidence that he had been the best car for the last section of the race and he’d be okay on the restart?
JACK ROUSH: Well, track position is really important here, and if you’re up front with a lap or two to go at Bristol and you don’t get involved in a wreck and you don’t spin your tires too hard, it should be okay. I had a picture in my mind’s eye of three or four of those Fords ended up in a hair ball and letting one of the Toyotas or Chevrolets behind come through for the wind. So I had that bit of horror, but that was just anxiety, an old man’s anxiety.
Q. Jack, can you just talk, you mentioned earlier, about some of the changes or things you guys have done to try to reformulate things, and how do you feel like that’s gone so far this season?
JACK ROUSH: Well, you know, every winter we’ve got to look at the jobs that we’ve been doing technically and think about how we can do better and of course look around at our contemporaries and see how they’re doing their programs, as well. We decided we needed to add a couple more people to do some research and engineering things. We decided to reassign and redefine the job descriptions of some of the people we had on staff. We took an evaluation, took stock of who we had, the talent and the experience and all, and decided that we had people with the right stuff that were motivated and committed, so we stayed the course with the folks that we had even though we didn’t win a championship last year. We stayed the course, we augmented or added to the staffing level, and we were able to do some things that I wouldn’t care to talk about that we weren’t able to do last year based on the added resources that we’ve applied.
Ford has given us more resources, as well. They’ve expanded their engineering involvement one more notch and given us some more. Of course the thing that it comes down to is it always has with people in stock car racing is you can have talented people but if you don’t work on the right things you won’t get the results you’re looking for from their effort. We’ve had to think not only about the people and the programs we had going on, but whether we were missing something by not focusing on some of the other things.
And of course NASCAR with their changing the ride height rules and inspection process opened it up to a lot of additional considerations for things you could do with the car that you couldn’t do last year where they had to go back to inspection ride heights after the race.
