MATT KENSETH — No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion — VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW — “We had a great handling car. The DeWalt Ford Fusion was awesome and we had a great pit crew with these guys behind me. This one is for Johnny Reiser. Without him we wouldn’t be racing here. It’s hard not to think of him everytime we’re at the race track, but these guys did a great job. I just have to thank my sponsors. Carhartt, USG, R&L Trucking, DeWalt and all of our great partners.”

WHY ARE THE ROUSH CARS SO GOOD HERE? “We’ve got great people here. We’ve got a lot of loyal people. We’ve got people that want to work hard and want to win. I’ve been very blessed to have such a great team that works so hard at it. I feel bad for Greg because he had the best car today, but I thought we had the second or third-best car.”

MATT KENSETH PRESS CONFERENCE
“We had a pretty decent, really, all weekend except for qualifying. We started the race pretty good. I think we drove up to 15th or something like that and then the track started tightening up, which isn’t usually normal for us at this place. So we just had to keep adjusting on it all day and we had some great pit stops. Of course with Greg’s problem and a great pit stop the last time down pit road kind of opened the door for us to have a shot at the win. Those guys on pit road are so awesome with a 12-second pit stop or whatever it was at the end. Those couple of positions made all the difference for us at the end of the race.”

YOU FLEW THROUGH THE INFIELD LAST WEEK AND IT WASN’T WHAT YOU WANTED. HOW GRATIFYING TO WIN TODAY? “I got to fly through the infield again, but it was after the race this week (laughter). Sometimes it feels like there is justice in the world, so that feels good because I felt last week we had a car that could have won. Usually I go away from the plate stuff and don’t feel like I’m very good at it and usually aren’t in position to win and we had a real fast car and felt like we did all the right things last week and I thought we were gonna be in position to win, so it was disappointing although we still got a good finish — better than it could have been. We could have finished last and somebody could have hit me. Last week was last week. Our Vegas test went good. Everybody has worked really hard on these cars this winter. Robbie has done a great job on the body stuff and our engineers have been working hard on making this stuff better and everybody has been working really well together. Our pit stop stuff has been going good, so it just feels incredibly good to come to the track and have everything kind of go right and all the stars align for us and to be here in Victory Lane. We haven’t won a ton of races the last three years — one or two a year — and whenever you can win it feels good. Hopefully this will carry some momentum and we’ll be able to get to Victory Lane a few more times this year.”

THE 48 LAID BACK ON THE RESTART. WERE YOU WORRIED? “That’s always real concerning. NASCAR, you can’t blame the guy in second for doing it, but they try to make a rule on you’re not supposed to lay back more than a car length, but it’s real inviting to do so. If you can get a run on the leader. If he would have gotten up along side me he very well could have beat me. It’s hard to get anything done in two laps, so I saw him holding back and I saw him getting a run on me and I actually waited until I was 10 or 15 feet past the restart point until he slowed his momentum up before I got in the gas. I just tried to watch him to make sure we sort of took off at the same time. If I would have taken off right at the point he had a run on me, he was probably already going three or four or five miles an hour faster than me and that would have put him up alongside of me getting into one. That certainly is something you’ve got to watch and also all day we’ve been restarting on new tires, so restarting on used tires it’s easy to spin the tires and we did spin the tires just a little bit. So that’s the most nerve-wracking part. If you can get through one and two and you’re still a full car ahead, you feel a little bit better about it.”

WHEN THE 16 AND 20 WERE AS STRONG AS THEY WERE AND YOU’RE AROUND 11TH, DO YOU REMIND YOURSELF THAT ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN? “Yeah. In the middle of this race we kind of got running anywhere from third to sixth and that’s about what we had. Then we made the right adjustments to get it better, but, yeah, we’ve had those days and it feels good to pop out and win this one when we maybe didn’t have the most dominant car. When we came here our rookie year we had the dominant car and led almost all day and at the end got beat on two tires, so we’ve had those days where we’ve dominated. Chicago last year we ran good and got beat at the end, so you never know. Anything can happen. There can be that caution at any time where maybe you get beat on a restart or pit strategy or whatever it could be. You’ll have more days where you don’t have the outcome that you want than you do the ones that pop up and surprise you and you have it. So when you have a chance to win at the end it definitely feels good no matter how it comes.”

WILL YOU HAVE A PEP TALK WITH GREG? HE’S 38TH NOW. “I think Greg’s smart enough to know that. Greg was a threat to win more times than not last year. I think he won five or six races and probably could have won 10. I today have no doubt that Greg’s gonna make the chase. There is a lot of racing to do. He dominated the race today and just had something break. That’s just part of it. If he had a 300-point lead two months from now and broke, nobody would think anything of it. Every race pays the same amount of points and there is a lot of racing to go and he’s gonna be just fine. He’s gonna be one of the guys to beat all year again.”

ANY COMMENT ON QUALIFYING LIKE POINTS FOR WINNING THE POLE? “Heck no. Are you crazy? (laughing). No points for poles. I loved the impound thing. I thought that was a great thing, even though in the big scheme of things it probably didn’t save a lot of money, but it still probably had to save a little bit of money in tires and whatever. I like coming to the race track and working on race setup. I think today is the day that pays all the money. They’re 500-mile races and if you have the best car, you should be able to start anywhere in the field and get to the front in 500 miles. If you can’t, then there either have been no cautions or you’ve probably done something wrong. I don’t like to handicap us and qualify that bad, and our qualifying has been a lot better except for Friday, but we just totally missed it. We worked on our race setup most of the time and tried to do a bunch of stuff to qualify and I gave them the wrong feedback and loosened the car up way too much and couldn’t go anywhere. But even on the non-impounds last year our qualifying has been a little bit better with this rules package and we certainly try hard to qualify, but with the new testing policy and stuff we try harder to race. When we go to the race track every week, we’re gonna go to the race track every week in race trim and make the car drive good for Sunday before we worry about our starting position.”

YOU’RE OFF TO A FAST START. “Yeah, it feels good to get off to a good start. Last year we didn’t, but a couple of years before that we did and it certainly helped us both seasons. I think we won early in ‘03 and ‘04, so hopefully we can keep it up all the way through the year — keep the same level of energy and excitement and work on the cars and doing all the stuff that we are right now, and the level of performance all the way through the year. It’s definitely a big confidence builder as a driver to get in cars. Things change every year. You keep developing different stuff and it always feels good to start off the year having your car balanced right and driving the way it’s supposed to and doing all those things. It gives you a lot of confidence going into the year that what you did over the winter and what Robbie did over the winter and everybody was right and they build you the right cars and they build you stuff that’s gonna run fast and run up front, so I think it’s a big plus to start off strong especially performance-wise and not necessarily finish-wise. In my opinion, even Greg has started off strong. He led all those races. He knows he has fast cars and if you’ve got cars that will run up front, you’re gonna get your share of good finishes and hopefully win.”

DID YOU THINK YOU COULD HAVE HELD BIFFLE OFF IF NOT FOR THE ENGINE ISSUE? “I was sort of planning on running second, really. Greg was the class of the field all day. We were pretty good on a short run, usually, and then we would get too tight and we would fade. We made some adjustments on that last pit stop and the car was a lot looser than what we started most of the day and that gave me confidence for the long run, but I don’t know. Greg was pretty quick on a longer run and I never really had the opportunity to race with him during the day or to keep up with him at all. When he was back there I fully assumed he was gonna run us down on a long run and pass us, but I did try to get by Gordon as quick as I could and try to get in between us to try and get some distance in case there wasn’t a caution. I don’t know what would have happened, but Greg had a pretty strong car today.

“I think that on Greg’s pit stop that he didn’t really have a problem. He had been coming out first all day, but we had an exceptional pit stop. It was really, really fast and I came down pit road right on Greg’s bumper so we only beat him by a car length out of the pits and a car length is only a couple of tenths of a second on a pit stop, so I think we just had an exceptional pit stop and then Gordon beat us both out because he got two tires, so I think he probably had a pretty solid pit stop.”

WHAT DID YOU AND TONY SAY TO EACH OTHER YESTERDAY AND WILL HE SHOW UP AT YOUR DAD’ S TRACK IN MADISON LATER THIS YEAR? “I hope so for my dad’s sake (laughing). I don’t really want to get into too much of what happened last week, but we did have a talk yesterday and I think we understand each other better after we talked. Everything is gonna be fine on the track. As you saw today we passed each other two or three times and gave each other room and did everything just like we did every other race before last week. It’s water under the bridge and this was a much better week for us.”

WHAT DID YOU THINK WHEN TONY’S ENGINE WENT AND CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE EMPTY SEATS? “I don’t think I should touch that one. I really loved Rockingham, so you’re asking the wrong person about that. I love coming to California, but when we went to Rockingham it’s just an awesome race track. You could really race there like we used to race — spinning the tires and short track type racing. It was like a week off after being in Daytona for two weeks. I love this place, but I loved going there too. I have no idea on the rest of it.”

ON THE ENGINES: “The stuff runs awesome and the reliability has been really good, so I wasn’t worried. There are a lot of moving parts in those things and to have one little thing go wrong or a part you get from a manufacturer go bad or whatever the case may be, you’re gonna have it now and then and I certainly didn’t think it was a problem with all the teams or you would have seen more than that a lot earlier.”

ANY CONCERN WHEN YOU SAW BIFFLE’S ENGINE GO THAT YOURS MIGHT BE NEXT? “No, not for me at all. I might be wrong on this, but I think when we blew up at Daytona last year was that our only engine failure all year throughout the whole Roush-Yates thing?”

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE OFF WEEK? “I don’t know what I’m gonna do this weekend. I have something to do a week from Monday and this week for the off week I’ve been trying to do some flight training and learn how to fly, so I’m gonna go to school to get my multi-engine rating — hopefully get it — so I’m going to school Tuesday through Friday and that’s basically my plan for the off week. My training is gonna be in a Piper Seminole to get my multi-engine rating.”

ROBBIE REISER, Crew Chief — No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion — “We had a really good run last week and I was pretty excited with the way we ran at Daytona. The outcome wasn’t what I expected, but we ran really well there for the time we had a chance to run. For us to come back and have momentum coming into this race, the guys have worked really hard. After last year’s struggle for the first half of the season and the things that we went through to get ourselves in the chase and to come out of the box this year and run real well at Daytona and come back and win today, I can’t say enough for all the guys that work on our cars and work on our team and put all the effort towards it.”

HOW GOOD IS THIS TEAM? “It’s very good. Obviously watching today and the car they brought here and the way they operated on pit road, they’re here to race and they’re here to win races and the championship this year. I think they’re determined to do that with what they showed up with at Daytona and what they had here today is championship caliber. Hopefully we can keep that momentum and keep doing what we’re doing.”

IS THIS THE GREATEST DEPTH OF INFORMATION AND TALENT YOU’VE WORKED WITH AT ROUSH? “I think we build every year. I think that the knowledge that we had last season to where we are this season becomes greater. We’re always adding to the resources that we have. We’re adding to the people we have. We’re beefing up the engineering staff. We’re working on the car, so, yeah, the pool gets bigger and bigger and bigger the more we build on it.”

JACK ROUSH, Car Owner — No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion — “I thought you’ve got to be careful when you go to these celebrations one time after another. It’s just awful hard to keep in your mind who really has it in for you and today it all just came together. First I got it from Robbie and then I got it a little later from Matt. It’s just such a pleasure to come to California. The idea of being able to win all three of these races with three different drivers has just been fantastic. I’m gonna put some of this in the bank. I’m not gonna use all of this equity up tonight and celebrate with it, hopefully help us keep going whenever we have more broken engines. We did break one engine today. I’m sure it was some part that couldn’t be avoided, but Daytona was such a hard race for us. We had such great expectations. They had worked so hard. There was nothing we could do to get better or more ready than we were at Daytona and it just turned to junk, but today the stars lined up and here we are.”

A SWEEP MUST MAKE YOU SMILE INSIDE. “I can’t remember when we’ve had a sweep like this before. My people told me yesterday when I looked toward the prospect that maybe we could win on Sunday — as improbable as that was — and they said ‘we’ve done that before,’ but they’re going to have to remind me when because I don’t remember. This is really a great weekend to be able to have three of our different drivers win all three races, especially that truck race on Friday night. That’s the one that we couldn’t get close to last year based on where our truck was, but Ford gave us a new F-150 package and Mark Martin is leading the charge on that deal.”

HOW SURPRISING IS IT THAT YOU’RE STILL THE TEAM TO BEAT ON THESE AERO TRACKS? “When NASCAR changed the rules last year and cut an inch off the spoiler, they played right into Matt Kenseth’s hands and Mark Martin’s and Carl Edwards’ and Kurt Busch at the time and Greg Biffle’s. They all like to drive real loose race cars. They’re not intimidated by it. They’ve got enough experience on enough different race tracks and race cars getting here that it’s not uneasy for them. From what I see, a lot of the drivers just don’t like to drive the cars as loose as they have to be and that’s really made it good for us. On the matter of the race track size, we decided a long time ago that we really need to be good on mile-and-a-half and two-mile race tracks. That’s where the heart of the schedule is. That’s where if you’re not good at those race tracks you’re just really not going to have much of a chance to do all of your business on real short track or on the restricted tracks. We’ve seen teams that were dominant at Martinsville and Richmond and Bristol and couldn’t really get out of their own way on mile-and-a-half tracks, but the engineering and the focus that we put on testing and the things that we try to remember and focus mostly on our cars is to make them good for these big wide-open race tracks. The other thing is you go to Martinsville and you’ve got one level of mania that comes on and the drivers basically, a lot of times, can’t do anything about the situation that he finds himself in. Certainly at Daytona and Talladega it’s that way, but big wide race tracks — Michigan and Fontana being the absolute best — you can run three-wide and if a driver winds up in the fence — and I don’t think any of them got in the fence today — it’s probably their own fault. It’s not the fact that they got caught in somebody else’s problem. To be able to go to a race track and, like Robbie says, you’ve worked hard on your cars and you’ve got them right and Matt feels like he’s got himself ready to go do his business and then to be able to hold it in your own hand and control the outcome is a really wonderful thing and we like racing those tracks.”

ON GREG BIFFLE — “Greg is a real pro. Like Matt, Matt and Greg have in common the fact that they were both 28 years old when they got started here with Roush, but Matt had already been with Robbie and he’d been back east racing these stock cars. For Greg, he was 28 when he got a chance to start, so he’s been really impatient to get caught up on his income, to get caught up on success and recognition and all the rest of it. This will be a setback for him, but the big picture is that our engines have been reliable and our cars have been good. Everything we pull out of the truck runs really good and he’ll have a chance to recover from that. I’ve got to go back to the shop and be sure that this risk reward or risk opportunity thing that we stay on the conservative side of it for him. We just can’t take a chance on breaking another part for doing some risk, so we’ll put some margin back in his program — a little less ignition timing, maybe a little richer on the carburetor, maybe less rocker arm or something in order to be able to make certain that his is not the next one that breaks if there is some part in there that we don’t know about. I’m sure the thing that broke was just some vendored part the was a manufacturing variability thing that wouldn’t break in the next 10 that we’d run just like it.”

HOW DOES THIS TRACK COMPARE TO THE VEGAS TRACK? “It’s obviously a half-mile shorter at Vegas. It’s very similar in terms of the car that they would use. I think that Greg has made the decision to take his same car. They’ve got two weeks to turn it around. I think they’ll take his same car. The Busch cars we ran last night, we’re gonna take a number of those cars back again to the next race. Las Vegas is very similar. We didn’t test as well as I’d hope to based on the way we ran last year here and there. I hoped to go out to Las Vegas and be dominant with the cars and we weren’t. We were just competitive. It didn’t look like we gained any on our competition. In fact, it looked like they gained on us, but when the green flag drops it may look a little better. We think we’ll be really competitive, but I’m not as optimistic about Las Vegas as I am about the prospect of coming back here in the fall.”

IS THIS WEEKEND A TESTAMENT THAT YOUR ORGANIZATION HAS NEVER BEEN STRONGER? “We finished last year the strongest we’ve ever been. Ford gave us a new Fusion and a new F-150. Looking at all three races the new F-150 configuration on the nose for 2006, the hardware has never been better. We by and large got our crews intact. We’ve had some personnel turnover, but it’s been in situations where there was probably a time for a change, where people were ready for a new challenge. As big as we are, we didn’t have exactly the opportunity they were looking for, so some people left and had they stayed I think they wouldn’t have been as challenged as the people that have now got their spot. But we’re a big, deep, broad organization that has got a lot of resources and the managers. I look to Robbie as being senior among all the crew chiefs. He leads cadence on them and helps with the staffing of not only the 17 team but of all the teams and then the general managers and finance people are all lined up too. We’re organized to be a form follows function company. The things that happen on the race track are what determines what all of our strategies are and everybody gets it from the bottom to the top. I wouldn’t predict that we’d put all five cars in the top 10 by the end of 26 races this year, but certainly our chances of doing that are better than they were a year ago.”

WHAT HAPPENED FOR GREG TO COME OUT THIRD ON HIS LAST STOP? “I wasn’t in Greg’s pit so I couldn’t say. I wasn’t down there so I really don’t know. I assume they just had a little problem with one of the tires, but I’m not sure.”

HE FADED AFTER THAT. WAS THAT WHEN THE ENGINE PROBLEM HAPPENED? “Yeah, I’d be amazed if the engine problem was associated with the pit stop. It could have been that he got it in the wrong gear, but they’ll look at the rpm trace and see what it shows. I feel like there was a part that had 490 race miles in it and we had a 500-mile race.”

ON RACING AT CALIFORNIA — “Los Angeles is a huge, huge market. It’s important to NASCAR. It’s important to all of our sponsors. We’ve got a reason to want to be here. We need to be here twice a year, but we are building the event. There are people that came for the second event last year that hadn’t reconciled themselves to buy tickets for the spring event or winter event here, but we have the kind of racing that we’re having and gets the coverage that I’m sure that it will receive over a period of time and we’ll be able to fill the stands and then in short order they’ll be building more stands. That’s NASCAR’s way. If you look at Bristol or Michigan or any of these race tracks that have been around for a while, they just keep building stands in consideration for the ticket sales opportunity they have. This is a big race track. It’s a two-mile race track and they’ve already got a lot of stands up and they’ll continue to build it here and it’ll be just fine.”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED — “With NASCAR’s gear rule in particular, I was not a fan of the gear rule, but it has stopped us from pushing the envelope. There was a time when you’d have the latest new valve spring or the latest cam shaft and you’d be trying to go for a little more rpm and that’s when Rick got his problem and, of course, we had our problem where we’ve had three or four fail in a given race. But that’s always when you’re pushing the envelope, but the envelope has tightened up enough now that we’re really in a comfort zone that we expect the engines to finish.”

Daytona articles

n Daytona 500 results
n Matt Kenseth post-race quotes
n Stewart’s, NASCAR’s actions don’t match safety rhetoric
n Kenseth: Stewart’s hit ‘an intentional cheap shot’
n Stewart urges caution, clobbers Kenseth and gets flagged by NASCAR
n Staying power
n Kenseth, Reiser eye better start in 2006
n Kenseth above the flow of traffic (about his flying)

IROC Win articles

n IROC Race Results & Points
n IROC Race Day photos
n IROC photo gallery
n Kenseth wins wild IROC race at Daytona
n Kenseth leaves field behind
n Kenseth is a winner
n Kenseth comes out of shell, wins wild IROC race
n Kenseth victorious in IROC