BIFFLE TAKES CHECKERED FLAG AT TEXAS

Greg Biffle won for the second time this season and third time in the last eight NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series events with today’s triumph in the Samsung RadioShack 500.  Biffle won the season-ending Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway and then captured the Auto Club 500 at California earlier this year. Biffle now owns five NNC wins (Daytona, Michigan, Homestead-Miami, California, Texas).

Yesterday’s win was the third of the season for Ford (Biffle at California; Carl Edwards at Atlanta).

Taurus has now won 87 points races and 94 overall when taking into account victories in the Budweiser Shootout and All-Star race.  Ford has 557 all-time NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series triumphs.

Yesterday's win marked the 6th all-time win for Ford at TMS, which is the most of any manufacturer at the speedway.  Chevrolet has two wins and Dodge one in nine NNC events.

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard/Post-It Taurus – “I tell you what, this Post-It/National Guard car was awesome.  I mean, our guys in the pits – look at our pit stops – look at the guys putting this race car together off the truck.  We crashed in practice and blew a right-front tire and I thought there might be a tire problem, and sure enough there was a tire problem.  I must have run over something, but we lost our good car and had to pull the backup out.  I tell you what, it’s just all the hard work of these guys.  I really appreciate the hard work from the Viagra team and the 99 team and the Charter car – all of those guys came over and we had six different uniforms working on this race car yesterday and that means a lot to me that anybody would jump in there and dig in deep for anybody.”  IT WAS A DIFFERENT TRACK FROM YESTERDAY.  “It really was.  I wasn’t as good as some guys up there that were doing a good job at the top, but my car was just unbelievable on the bottom and I just couldn’t come off the bottom because it was so good down there.  I just had to remind myself not to use too much brakes and take care of that right-front.  I was nervous the whole day, but, really, there was nothing to be worried about.”  THIS HAS TO MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE IT COULD BE YOUR YEAR TO WIN A TITLE.  “Yeah, it really does.  It’s working that way right now.  The racing Gods are looking on us and everybody else.  This team, we’re really blessed to have these kind of race cars and these guys working on them.  I couldn’t be happier right now.  It was an awesome day.”

MARK MARTIN – No. 6 Viagra Taurus (Finished 20th) – “I messed up there at the end.  I was getting a little frustrated.  We had an awful good car and we got ourselves back in the pack and I got caught over-driving just a little bit and got up in the wall.  That cost us about eight or 10 spots and I hate that for my team.  They were so on it all day, but we had a couple of problems there late in the race and got behind.  I tried to make it up too much, too fast.”

ELLIOTT SADLER – No. 38 M&M’s Taurus (Finished 29th) – WHAT HAPPENED?  “I have no Earthly idea.  I don’t know, but it’s somewhere in the drive train.  I’d like to comment on it more, but I just don’t know what happened.  We were gonna have a top 15.  We had about a 40th-place car at the beginning of the race and then Todd and the guys kept adjusting on it and made it better.  We had a top 15 car and that’s about where we finished, but it just wasn’t meant to be.”

KURT BUSCH – No. 97 IRWIN/Sharpie Taurus (Finished 7th) – “It was a good finish to our day.  It was great to run up front because it kept me in the car and kept me more focused and just having a good handling car was better.  It was a tough day.  I’m somewhat dizzy right now, but for us to finish in the top 10 and get good points – we were running in the top 5 all day and had just one bad pit stop, but the guys gave me another good one to get back in there.  We were just a little bit short on track position, but I’m a little sore and dizzy.”  HAPPY?  “Yeah, I’m just real sore – everything about me.  I just want to get home and go get a breather before Phoenix.”

RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus (Finished 8th) – TWO GOOD ONES IN A ROW.  “We just need to finish to find out what we’ve got.  We know we’ve had good cars, we just don’t know how good and now it’s starting to take shape.  We’re just finding out now what we do have, but we’re six races behind on these tracks.  We know we’re pretty good, but we’ve got some tweaking to do.  We’ve got a solid team, but we can’t do nothing about buying bad luck.  We’ve had our share of it and now it’s swinging the other way.  The team has been there and the crew has been there, but we’re just now starting to see what we’ve got.”  DO YOU HAVE MOMENTUM?  “I think so.  It’s a huge difference from last year.  Last year we were back in the points, but we ran bad so we deserved to be back there.  This year we’ve got a good team.  We’ve got a good, solid team and we’re just finding out how good it is.”

DALE JARRETT – No. 88 UPS Taurus (Finished 14th) – YOU TOOK ADVANTAGE OF GETTING YOUR LAP BACK AND PICKED UP SEVEN OR EIGHT SPOTS.  “You hate to rely on that, but a lot of people do it.  You have to take what’s given you.  We were never that close to getting lapped and then we tried freeing the car up and got so loose I couldn’t go on new tires.  That’s when I got lapped.  We just fight a situation that we’ve got some work to do.  We were aero-tight and we tried to free the chassis up, but then I was loose.  We were right in that same area.  We stayed about 10th in points, so that part of it is good, but we have to improve our on-track performance.”

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Scotts Taurus (Finished 19th) – “The team did a good job of fighting back from the incident at the start.  We just had a little bit of body damage, but we worked really hard all day.  The car was just never really right, fight – especially on a short run.  Then at the end I gave up seven or eight spots by smacking the wall racing those guys too hard.  I was just trying really hard to pick up some positions.  I saw an opportunity and I got to the high side and just got real tight.  I scrubbed the fence enough to where it slowed us down.”  WAS IT HARD TO TELL HOW MUCH THAT DAMAGE AT THE START HURT YOUR CAR?  “Yeah, it’s hard to tell how much damage it does.  You can’t really put your finger on that, but it doesn’t help at all.  I don’t think that was the end of the world.  I think our car was actually fast enough to run up front, we just needed to have it dialed in perfectly and we couldn’t get it just right.”

GREG BIFFLE MEDIA CENTER PRESS CONFERENCE – “I tell you, it shows the depth of this race team this year – how hard they’ve worked.  I’ve got to thank all the guys from the other teams first.  I was thinking about that when I was over there watching them get the car ready.  There were probably five or six different colored uniforms working on pulling the fuel cell out of my backup car, taking the shocks and springs and putting them in the new car.  I noticed the Viagra team, the Charter team, the 99 guys.  I mean, they were all just in there digging and that really makes me feel proud to know I’ve got supporters like that in our organization that’ll just jump right on and help us.  That was pretty neat.  I was nervous when I went out in the second practice session.  I tell you what, it hurts when you hit the wall here when you blow a right-front tire.  It had me a little intimated in the second practice session – how hard to run the car.  I was not really wanting to have another problem and we were showing high rim side right-front tire temp, but we didn’t have too much camber.  I don’t know what transpired with that race car.  Obviously, we ran something over on the race track – punctured the tire and hit the fence.  From there we went to the backup car and Doug and I talked about it until probably 10 o’clock last night – things we ran at California, things that we had in the other car.  This is the car I won with at California and we like to keep it for a flatter race track.  It doesn’t have as much clearance underneath it for this kind of a banked race track.  That’s why I brought the Atlanta car, so it’s just a fantastic day.  Pit stops were unbelievable.  I just couldn’t have asked for a better race car and people working on it.  It was phenomenal.”

JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – No. 16 National Guard/Post-It Taurus – “I’m gonna use a Carl Edwards quote – you know a 26-year-old giving me advice all the time on things I ought to be thinking and doing sometimes.  When he had some of his early success he said he felt like he was just an average person surrounded with better-than-average and dedicated people.  That certainly fits me.  I’ve been graced with great drivers and with great crew chiefs and with great technology from Ford Motor Company that they’ve afforded us.  Everytime I come to Texas I think, ‘Man, we’re gonna give back some of the good luck.  It’s gonna average out and we’re gonna come up dry.’  Of course I went with Ford in my GTO and GTX cars to Daytona for the 24 Hours 10 times and we won 10 times.  I guess from the time we won the second time I was sure that was the last time we’d ever win, but it’s great to be here with Ford.  It’s great to be here with Greg and Geoff Smith and all the folks that do the marketing.  We’ve got a real top flight full service racing business that takes care of every aspect of all the thing we need to do to put our cars out there and present them and it’s just an honor to be riding with them.”  ARE YOU GOING TO WEAR THE COWBOY HAT YOU GOT IN VICTORY LANE?  (Laughing)  “My head is pretty large sometimes, but I’m gonna see if I can trade mine down a little bit.  Mine was a little large for me.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – ARE YOU GOING TO WEAR THE COWBOY HAT?  “Absolutely.  It was pretty early in the race when we were in ninth position.  I was being a little aggressive and I told the guys on the radio how bad I wanted those cowboy boots, so I was just kind of making a wisecrack, but I didn’t know it was gonna come true like that.  I’m thinking about buying a farm back in North Carolina right now, so maybe this was meant to be.”  CAN YOU TALK ABOUT PATIENCE TODAY?  “I tell you what, the race cars have been much easier to drive.  There was a lot of pressure today.  I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I stayed pretty calm inside the race car – probably calmer than I’ve been up until this point.  I was relaxed, but I was tense.  I knew what I needed to do.  I knew I needed to hit my marks and be easy on the right-front tire.  I was conscious of how much brake pedal I was using all day.  I managed how free I kept the race car because I knew I needed to take care of the right-front tire.  Doug kind of scared me a little bit when he told me the right-rear was the worst looking tire on the car when he pulled it off.  I was not hard on the right-rear, but I was using it so I backed up a little bit on that and just ran the rest of the day.  The car drove itself almost.  When I could back up a little bit and run a tenth or two slower, it was just a piece of cake.  But when Casey Mears was putting pressure on me and I was having to ask for 95 percent of my race car it was difficult.  I had to buckle down.  He made me drive the hardest today out of anybody.  I was glad to see him when he took two tires.  I wasn’t glad he was in front of me, but I wasn’t sure he was gonna be a factor and then the 42 car was there.  I thought, ‘Shoot, he might be better than the 41,’ so I got lucky and we had great equipment.”

JACK ROUSH – WHAT ABOUT THE SUCCESS GREG HAS HAD THIS YEAR?  “It takes three things to make these teams work.  It takes a driver that can do it.  It takes technology that is competitive and it takes a team that can.  As much as I hate to admit it, it took me three years to get the team where it was able to do for Greg what we’ve been able to do with Mark and for Matt and for Kurt.  It just takes awhile to get people assembled that really work together and have the right chemistry and we’ve got that now.  Doug has done a great job.  He did a great job from the time he took the crew chief position, but it’s finally come together.  I’m sure Greg has the same confidence in their judgments that we do.  I watched them yesterday make their decision for going to this car.  Of course, if I had been making the decision – being a nail straightener – I would have fixed the other car.  Neither snout was broke.  It was bent even though there was some damage and a lot of sheetmetal damage, but they had the confidence in what they knew about the other car and in themselves that we can make this other car better – better than we can repair the car and we’ll still have 45 minutes for practice and that was great strategy.  They had confidence in themselves and they pulled it off.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – DOES THIS SHORT SPOILER SEPARATE THE MEN FROM THE BOYS?  “I don’t know what to say about it.  I don’t want to brag, but it makes the race car harder to drive.  That’s my take on it.  Everybody else’s take may be different.  My take is the race car is harder to drive.  If there was an in-car camera that could have watched me saw on that wheel for 500 laps, I worked my butt off today.  There wasn’t one time where I could relax inside that race car because you’ve got to keep digging all day and that’s what I did.  To me, the race cars are harder to drive.  The Busch cars are relatively easy to drive.  In fact, I said yesterday in an interview that I had more fun yesterday than I have had all season driving a race car.  I wanted to win.  I finished second, but I had a lot of fun.  The thing was fun to drive.  It was fun to pass.  It was fun to drive up on the top.  These race cars are all about business.” 

ANY CONCERNS THE LAST FEW LAPS THAT THIS COULD GET AWAY?  “Oh yeah. Scenarios were going through my head with thirtysome laps to go I thought that might be it or 38 when we decided to come for four (tires).  I thought, ‘There are gonna be some guys stay out.  There are gonna be guys take two.  Now I’m gonna be back in traffic and who knows what’s gonna happen.  Am I gonna be able to pass those guys?’  I wasn’t as good in traffic as some of the other race cars were, I’ll admit that, I wasn’t.  I was nervous about that.  Once I saw that we came out second off pit road I didn’t believe that there was gonna be anything else because I didn’t think we’d stop again – even if we got a caution with 15 to go I don’t think we could have came and I don’t know the guys behind us would have, so I was relieved to see that.  I was nervous with 60 laps to go.  I was shaking in my boots that the caution was gonna come out again and it’s gonna be a crapshoot.  Who comes, who doesn’t, who takes two – and lucky enough it was early, quick enough, that everybody came for four again. 

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW YOU GET ON THE GAS AND WERE YOU NOT AS ALL OUT AS BEFORE YESTERDAY’S ACCIDENT?  “You can’t think about crashing when you’re inside the race car or you’ll never be a good driver.  I rely on the safety equipment that NASCAR has provided us with and I know I’ve got safe race cars.  You’re right, I was driving the wheels off the thing.  It would get down in the corner and it would bottom out, the thing would jump sideways a little bit and the throttle was on the floor.  I was sawing on the front wheel trying to keep the back of the car and managed how much steering input I had in it coming off the corner.  I knew that’s what it was gonna take.  Whatever I have to do to stay in front of my competition I’m gonna do.  It doesn’t matter how hard I have to work.  I’m willing to work harder than anybody else to win these races and that’s what I do every week.  I just work as hard as I can and if I’ve got the race car that can do it, I’ll get it done.” 

WHAT DO YOU ATTRIBUTE YOUR START TO THIS YEAR?  “There are so many factors that we probably don’t have enough time to talk about all of them.  Like Jack mentioned, it’s difficult for a start-up race team to achieve the level of performance that all of the other race teams are at and, really, our turnaround was the middle of last season.  Doug and I started understanding our race cars a little bit better.  We started understanding the aerodynamics a little bit better.  We got onto some shocks when we won the Michigan race that gave us better grip.  We use those shocks about everywhere.  I don’t know if we had them on today, but I think we did.  So it won here, Miami, California with the same set of shocks, so we found a bunch of small things that have made our race cars turn the corner.  Ninety percent of it is the team’s focus and hard work, and Doug.  If I can keep him in the shop and focused on working on these race cars and going to the wind tunnel and spending all of his time that he’s awake giving me better race cars.  He called me the other week and said, ‘I have a better car than you won California with.  We just got back from the wind tunnel and it’s a better piece.’  It makes me excited when he tells me things like that – that those guys in the shop are working that hard.  It’s the whole organization.  Our engine program has gotten a ton better.  It’s not any one thing.  It’s so many small things that make a race team.  Like the DEI cars have struggled until they ran better at Martinsville and today they ran good.  It’s not one thing that they’ve fixed, it’s a lot of things.” 

WHO MADE THE FINAL CALL ON WHAT CAR TO RUN TODAY?  “As soon as I caught my breath after I hit the fence over there I told the guys that I was OK and to get the backup out and they started unloading it.  I mean, it was a hard hit.  We may find some more things wrong with that race car, but it was a hard hit.  We still had practice left.  I didn’t think the car was repairable.  I figured motor mounts were probably bent and headers and everything else.  I mean, it was a hard lick.  As soon as I caught my breath, I told them I was OK and to get the backup car out.  They did look at it in the garage and think about maybe fixing it, I don’t know.” 

DOUG RICHERT, Crew Chief – DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE THE CAR TO BEAT AT INTERMEDIATE TRACKS NOW?  “I don’t think you can ever take that for granted that, yes, you have the car to beat until you get out there and do everything right.  Just because we won here doesn’t mean we’re gonna win at the next intermediate track.  Everywhere we’ve run real good it’s been totally different setups.  The shocks seem to compare somewhat sometimes, but it just depends on the banking, how rough the track is and how fast we’re going.  Today we were fortunate enough to put one out that we knew something about, but all of our cars are the same.  I’ve run five different cars this year and we were capable of winning before here four of the five races, so we have good confidence in our build right now.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – “We could win Martinsville and be capable of it if we could get somebody that could drive there (laughing).”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT GREG AS A PERSON?  “Greg got a phone call, and I’ll say it was 1997, and he said – it wasn’t from me – but somebody said Jack Roush is interested in having you driving your car, but you need to come to Charlotte.  Before he and I had conversation, he’d locked his shops up in Vancouver – he had a restaurant and he had a race car shop – and he locked them up and came in and camped with us until we made a deal.  He wasn’t gonna leave until his deal was done.  That really showed a lot of commitment on his part to be able to tear up his roots and to come in and say, ‘I want to be a part of this and I’ll make it work.’  I think if we weren’t able to move as fast as he wanted to move right away, he was gonna drag us into another zip code.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – DO YOU SEE YOURSELF STAYING AT ROUSH LONG-TERM?  “Yes, absolutely.  There isn’t a question about it and there hasn’t been this year.  We’re working on just finalizing some things.  It’s kind of funny.  We say, ‘Oh, this being the last year, well let’s wait until the off season and we’ll do it.’  Then the banquet comes and then Christmas parties come and then you’re testing January and you’re in Las Vegas and California, and then we’re running the 24-hour race.  The time just goes by so fast and we just haven’t had the time.  If we take two weeks off, we could probably sit down and get it all finalized and fixed up, but I’m not worried about it.  It’s not a concern of mine.  I know we’re gonna get it worked out and if it was a concern of mine, then I would sit down tomorrow morning and hammer it out until it was completely done.  It’s not that urgent of a deal for me.  The whole thing that’s on the internet, it’s kind of funny because I don’t see any of that stuff.  I don’t look at that deal and they’re calling me, ‘Do you want to make a comment on it,’ and I don’t know what people are saying or what’s going on.  Because I’m on a list to drive somebody else’s car doesn’t mean that they’ve talked to me.  I mean, they may sit down in a conference room and say, ‘We want Dale Earnhardt, Jr. or we want Kurt Busch.’  That doesn’t mean he’s gonna go drive that car.”  HOW LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO REGAIN CONFIDENCE IN THE CAR AND YOURSELF AFTER THE ACCIDENT?  “I was thinking about it.  I’ve been thinking about it since I’ve crashed, let’s put it that way.  It’s been in the back of my head.  I thought about it all day today and all day yesterday because I was lucky that I crashed in the spot that I did when the tire went flat.  There is a worse area on the race track for it to go flat and you could get in the wall harder than that, so it’s been in the back of my head thinking about it but it hasn’t slowed me down.  Obviously, it’s not the tires.  I’m 100 percent confident.  Goodyear looked at our tires today, they looked at our tires yesterday and they’re completely fine.  Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and I were talking this morning at driver intros and kind of chuckling about it.  He said, ‘You probably ran over something that fell off my car because my car was dragging the ground and the left-front skirt was dragging and there were sparks coming out from under it.’  I was three car lengths behind him when the tire went flat and I hit the fence, so something may have come off his car and cut the tire.  But I’ve been thinking about it.  Shoot, I was sore when I went to bed and I was sore when I woke up this morning and I still am.” 

IF CARS ARE LOOSER, HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THAT HERE?  ISN’T THAT ASKING FOR TROUBLE?  “Yes and no.  I don’t believe it’s asking for trouble, no.  You can tighten the car up chassis-wise or aero-wise or whatever you want to do.  You can lower the trackbar, you can put spring in the front of it.  You can do a lot of stuff to tighten the car up, it just depends on how fast you want to run.  You can make a car easier to drive, but it’s not gonna be as fast and that really holds true whether we really have spoiler or don’t have spoiler.  The Busch car is the same way.  The looser you get it, typically the better it turns and the faster you can get it to go within reason.  That’s some of it, but I don’t think you can say it’s unsafe because certainly NASCAR is not making us drive the car with 1800-pound right-rear spring.  We’re electing to do that on our own.” 

DOUG RICHERT CONTINUED – SHOULD THEY JUST STOP QUALIFYING AND PICK NUMBERS OUT OF HAT?  “No, we need to continue to qualify because Greg is a really good qualifier.  That dictates a lot of our pit selection, which we want our openings leaving.  You don’t ever know when that might be an advantage or a disadvantage.  You always try to get your advantage there.  That means a lot.  I’m not gonna sit here and say that yeah, you can start at the back of any race track and go to the front because it only takes one wreck to knock you out.  The odds of getting wrecked are a lot better for yourself if you’re up in front dictating what you do and the people are racing a lot harder behind you, so we always continue to qualify hard.  We’ll always go for track position and stay up front as long as you can get there.”

GREG BIFFLE CONTINUED – “I had a few close calls today, too, coming from the back.  I was probably two inches from the 5 and the wall at the same time he was avoiding a wreck.  That’s the product of being in the back or mid-pack or wherever, so we’re happy to qualify fifth.  Look at Carl Edwards.  That’s how cruel our sport is.  He spins out qualifying at Bristol and is crashed in the second or first lap of the race because he was in the back.  It’s big.”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – HOW HAVE YOU SEEN THE FORMULA OF SUCCESS CHANGE FOR MULTI-CAR TEAMS.  “I watched when I came in 1988 and I looked around and took the measure of who was there and what they were doing.  Of course, Hendrick had a test team.  Initially, he had Gary Nelson running a test team and as we started running, I’d run multiple road race cars and multiple drag race cars.  It was clear to me that I wanted to run multiple cars, but I didn’t want to use one team as an experiment for the others.  I wanted to have dual efforts and collect the data off similar cars and use that to make better decisions in a more time efficient manner going forward.  It took a while to get the drivers and to get the crews and to get the media and everybody that will approve or disprove what you’re trying to do to believe in a process.  But right now we’ve come of age.  I’m surrounded by a group of drivers that are mutually respectful and approve of one another.