No. 17 DeWalt Taurus Press Conference
JACK ROUSH
, Car Owner
"Robbie brought a great car here. Normally with
Matt, when he finishes a practice session and says he really doesn't know
what he needs to do, he asks them if they want to use the remaining time
for something that Robbie or Chip wants to try - the engineer - they get
it going pretty good. But, anyway, to start from the pole. This is only
Matt's second pole since we've been Cup racing together was pretty
amazing. I had a feeling that if he could stay up front, if he didn't
get snookered by staying out when he shouldn't or coming in when he
shouldn't - that if he could maintain track position he was gonna be
really good tonight and that was all Robbie Reiser determining when they
came in. The holding and folding and the gambling part or the raising
gambling part, that was Robbie. Robbie and I don't see eye to eye every
once in a while on pit road, but tonight he was at his best and I stayed
out of it so it worked out OK."
ROBBIE REISER
, Crew Chief
WERE YOU CONFIDENT TONIGHT? "I'm never
confident. I mean, this has just been a struggle. A lot of times we
start races I think we've got a good car and we don't, so most of the
time the first 20 laps I sit back and watch what's going on and,
hopefully, we've got a decent car and tonight we seemed to have one."
JACK ROUSH:
IS THE 17 TEAM PEAKING AT THE RIGHT TIME? "As far
as peaking at the right time, that's exactly what I've been telling the
guys that fortunately we hadn't peaked and we had our peak in front of
us. If it was high enough and it came soon enough we might have a
chance. I'd all but written off our chances to get in three races ago,
but Robbie and the guys didn't lose the faith and they've kept it going.
I was building toward next year all the way, but they've got it turned
around now. It's gonna be a horse race when they go to Richmond."
ROBBIE REISER:
HAS THIS TEAM BEEN BETTER ALL ALONG? "I think
in the first part of the year Jack was ready to fire me. It was probably
the best team I've ever had and that's a lot to say considering we won a
championship in 2003, but this group of people that we've got right now
they don't get down, they keep working. Obviously, this was a good
testament of it tonight. This team hasn't run that well this year, but
the last couple of weeks it's been really coming around and these guys
have stuck into it and I don't have one guy that has spent the season
complaining. They've pretty much just gone to work. The month of May
was really tough on this team. We got way behind with some of the car
setup and some of the things we had going on, but we were able to turn it
around. The last two months have been real strong for this team and
these guys are behind it 100 percent. I think when everybody had us
written out of the chase that was more of a challenge than anything else
and they wanted to step up to the challenge and turn this thing around.
There are a lot of guys on the 17 that have been there a long time and
those guys have a lot of pride and they aren't gonna go down without a
fight."
MATT SAID HE HAD WRITTEN THINGS OFF TOO. "That's fine. I'm
fine with everybody writing us off, but that's what makes us tick. The
guys that work on the team that's what makes you tick. When people tell
you you can't do something, then you want to do it."
JACK ROUSH:
"I'd like to comment on what happened to us at
Michigan. We really didn't get beat. I don't consider we got beat on
fuel mileage at Michigan. The thing that we needed to do to prove what
mileage we had and be able to do what we might have done was to give up
all of our track position late in the race - give up the track position
and assume there would be no further cautions on the next-to-the-last
caution, and we decided not to do that. That's not the way we race.
Three times out of four you'll get bit doing that. We didn't want to win
that race the way it had to be won. All five of our cars led the race
and we didn't break a part. I stepped away from Michigan as satisfied as
I could be. Normally when we win a race, even like tonight, we've got
Carl Edwards that didn't do what he might have based on the fact that he
had two collisions up front and lost the water out of his radiator late
in the race. I've got to sleep with that tonight or not sleep with it,
but after Michigan I had absolutely nothing to be sad about. We were
very happy about that race. We ran well and we'll win a lot of races
with the kind of strategy we had there and with the fuel mileage we
had."
IS MATT THAT CALM BEHIND THE SCENES? "He's as cold-blooded as any
driver I've ever worked with. A lot of times when you try to sit down,
I'm constantly mulling things over and trying to figure out where is
there a weakness, what do we need to do to change things. Many times
when things aren't going well as they were this year we didn't make any
major changes, but I had my finger on the trigger all the time. I'm
ready to make a change if I can understand that there's a consensus that
says we've got a weakness in an area, but Matt stuck with all of his guys
and he stuck with the strategy that we had. He's got the maturity to
know that this is a cyclical business with ups and downs and he was not
gonna give up on the good thing he thought he had going when it was down
and he was gonna wait for it to turn and it has. He's been right."
DO
YOU SEE MATT AND JEFF GORDON BUILDING MOMENTUM TO MAKE THE CHASE? "I
haven't paid near as much attention to Jeff Gordon as I have at Matt and
I think probably what their prospects are in either case is the stuff of
editorials and more your business than mine. But it is important that we
peak right. It is important to carry momentum into the chase. If we
manage to get in there with the 17 car, I'd be happy to be in 10th place
if we can do that. We'll only be 50 points behind and having done that,
I would certainly think that we'd have a very good possibility of being
successful with Robbie's confidence in his guys and with the maturity
that Matt has. In 2003 when he won that championship, it was not our
best year for our engines in terms of we didn't have our new D3 cylinder
head and I hadn't made my arrangement with Robert Yates yet to get our
engines where they are today. We had a Taurus that hadn't been changed
since '97. Except for every year from '97 to 2003, NASCAR gave us a new
set of templates that made it less car than it was before, so our engine
wasn't great and our car wasn't great and the guys overcame that with
great pit strategy and great judgments on Matt's part for the things he'd
do in the car. This year we've got a great Taurus and a great engine and
if we can just get a shot at this thing, it would be awesome."
ROBBIE REISER:
HAVE THE CREW GUYS BEEN POSITIVE ALL YEAR? "I
think that's the beauty of this team right now, yeah. I think those guys
were behind it 100 percent. Sure, it wasn't going right, but they're all
racers that are on the 17 and those guys realize that there are peaks and
valleys and they all realize that we were gonna have to work at this
thing to get it turned around. Last year when the different setups came
in and we were pretty conventional in our aero package and there were
some guys running in our company that were running better we had to look
at what they were doing and it kind of sent us down a different path and
one that was kind of the wrong direction for what we were doing with the
17 car, so it took a little bit to turn that back around and get it
straightened out. Matt has been really patient with us during that
time. I don't know if Jack has been pretty patient, but Matt has been
pretty patient and believing what we're doing and the things we've got to
do. Matt has always believed that we as a race team is as good as we're
gonna be together and not apart. It's a strength of his that he
understands that."
ROBBIE REISER:
WAS THERE ANY FINGER POINTING? "I don't think
there's ever been any finger pointing. A finger gets pointed at me, but
rightfully so, I'm responsible for the way the team runs and the way the
team performs. If it doesn't perform well, it's my responsibility.
Thank God we started to turn it around here because I'd probably be on
the outside looking in, but it's all about the race team."
JACK ROUSH:
YOU'RE 11 POINTS AWAY FROM HAVING HALF THE CHASE FIELD. "Once they realized what they were doing, I called Mike Helton
when they came out with this strategy for this chase last year and I
said, 'Mike, right now there has been a lot of criticism on multi-team
programs and it's growing and getting stronger and it's gonna continue to
do that.' I predicted last year that we'd put all five. We should have
put all five of them in the top 10 and people are gonna say I'm
predatory, but we missed a great opportunity to get them all in last year
with the brand new Taurus that we didn't capitalize on. Robbie hit on
it. We did not have the latest strategies for springs and aero
utilization of the angle of attack of the car. We weren't doing that the
way some teams were doing that last year. We were a little confused with
what the new Taurus had to offer, but over the winter when we looked at
the data of things gone right and things gone wrong, it became real clear
what we needed to build and we built a lot of cars. Robbie and Matt sat
down and got busy with their springs and shocks and got on the same page
as the competition and the best of the Roush cars and we've got a really
nice group of cars that can go do pretty much on any given day what
anybody can do in the business. If we don't put them in the top 10, it's
gonna be because I've done something to screw them up and I sure don't
want to face that."
MATT KENSETH
, Driver
AFTER POCONO WHAT HAPPENED TO TURN IT AROUND? "First of
all, we haven't made it yet. I thought before Daytona, when we got out
of Sears Point and went to Daytona, I said all along I thought we could
make it, we just couldn't have any big problems. But there are a couple
of hurdles there why I was saying the last few weeks I thought we were
out of it. We messed up both Poconos real bad and did so terrible. We
were in the late thirties and we were 200-and-some points out and not
just 200-and-some points out, but we had six cars in between us and
10th. That's hard to do. To gain points and have a great day, that can
happen with the equipment that we have and all the stuff that we have,
but to have five or six people have trouble and have a great day for
several weeks in a row is a difficult task. We've been a lot more
competitive, I think, since around June. There have certainly been some
races that we haven't been competitive and we messed things up, but on
average we've been much more competitive. I felt like, in a way, we won
Michigan on performance last week. A couple of guys made it on gas, but
we beat all the cars that were out there on performance and I felt great
about that. At Chicago it was the same thing and this weekend we just
had an awesome car. They looked at what we did in the spring here and
figured out what they did wrong with the car and put it all back and got
everything pointed in the right direction and working right and it
showed. You could make changes and it would change the car. We just
have awesome engines and we have great cars and if we can do the right
things to them and not mess them up, they can run like that."
I DON'T
THINK YOU GOT PASSED ON THE TRACK TONIGHT. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU
HAD A CAR LIKE THAT? "We had a car like that at Pikes Peak. That first
Busch race we ran at Pikes Peak we had an awfully good car. We had a car
this good, and I can't say it was better, but at least as good at Chicago
and ended up getting behind on track position and didn't win it, but we
had car that was that dominant. It was just awesome. This car was
pretty much the same thing. If we would have had 150-lap run, I think we
would have been not as dominant as we looked. I think we would have been
a little slower at the end of the run, but this car was really, really
fast for a 70 or 80-lap run. We were all over them for 20 or 30 or 40
laps. It was a lot of fun to drive it like that."
MATT KENSETH:
DID YOU GET PASSED? "Not that I know of. Not
that I'm aware of. I think the farthest back we were all day was sixth
place when some guys stayed out and we worked our way back to the lead.
We had a great car, especially on fresh tires. Robbie did a great job
calling the race and all of the cautions kind of fell in the right place
for that. There were some 10-lap cautions. We'd run 10 laps and have a
caution, so we knew we were gonna stay out and then we'd run 30 or 40
laps and with us being the leader - a few guys that did stay out just got
killed. They didn't get tires - so everybody knew they needed tires if
you ran 30 or 40 laps and everybody came down with us and that made all
of our jobs down there a little bit easier. Usually at this place you'll
have 15 cars stay out and you'll have 15 cars pit and you get yourself
way behind, but everybody knew that they needed tires tonight and that
made it a little bit easier."
HOW BIG WAS YOUR SPOTTER TONIGHT AND WHAT
ABOUT YOUR CHANCES THE NEXT TWO RACES. "The spotters are probably most
important at Daytona and Talladega and then at Bristol they're important
too to watch for accidents. Things happen in a big hurry here. There's
only so much they can do, but they're definitely important. When you're
in the front, that's the easiest job they'll ever have. When you're out
front and you're catching people from behind and passing them that's an
easier job for them. I never like to get overly confident about
anything, but I think unless something goes wrong, which it certainly
could easy enough, I think that we'll be very competitive at California.
We have a car that we ran at Chicago and Michigan and it performed good
enough to win both of those races and I think it will perform the same at
California. Now that doesn't mean you can't have a flat tire or a bad
pit stop or a broken part or eye bracket or something like that, but I do
think that we'll go there and be competitive enough to run up front and,
hopefully, challenge for a win. I just believe that car is a really,
really, really good car. It's been really great at both of those tracks
and if we put the right stuff into that, I think it will run up front."
Continued in part 2
