Backstretch Motorsports

JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – Roush Fenway Racing –HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO HAVE YATES RACING AND THE WOOD BROTHERS UNDER THE FORD BANNER? “As far as Ford is concerned, I would look at it from the team’s aspect and also from Ford, Ford needs to have a certain amount of mass to be able to generate as much good news as they need to excite their potential customers and to keep their management interested. I’m concerned about not being able to have Ford cars lead enough laps and not have Ford cars win enough and occasionally win a championship, and if we don’t have a certain amount of mass, we can’t do that, so the Wood Brothers are important to that and the Yates organization is important to that. Past that, there’s a proud history of the Wood Brothers Racing team.

Certainly, I looked up to Leonard and Glen as being buddies and really guys that were making a contribution and I was just a kid in stock-car racing. As I got involved, Leonard was there for me and Glen was there for me. They provided help and assistance and we enjoy building engines for them and helping them where we can today. So I’m very much interested in the survival of the Wood Brothers just for all the history and for all the personalities involved and for all the help that they’ve given me through the years. As far as Yates is concerned, of course Robert and I were adversaries for more than 20 years I was involved in the sport. We competed for turf as it relates to sponsors and the attention of Ford and various other things that we had to do that we were competing with to get the sport where we needed, so a handful of years ago when we put the engine program together, that was really the first time we really started to work together. But based on the fact Robert brought Doug and that I’ve got the relationship that I’ve got with Doug today – and Robert brought in all of his engine ideas and his history, as well as I brought mine, he was as unselfish about that as I was. We share the engines and share that business and that gives us a strong feeling. Before I put the engine program together, if somebody would have asked me the question, ‘What do you think about the survival of Robert Yates Racing?’ I probably wouldn’t have said very much in a positive way about it, except for the fact that it was good for Ford. But as it stands today, I’m committed to keep Doug out there and to keep Max out there and to keep that program viable, we build cars and we provide engineering services to lighten the task of making them competitive today.”

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW YOU SEE CARL EDWARDS GROWING INTO A CONTENDER? “Carl has great enthusiasm. His father, Carl Sr., was a stock-car racer at hometown tracks. He’s a competitive guy. He’s a very proud guy. He’s bright and he’s ambitious and those are dangerous traits if you’re another race-car driver trying to compete against him for space on the race track.”

WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE TO STOP THE 48 FROM WINNING A FOURTH TITLE? “Well, if you look at last year in the chase, we had the wreck at Talladega and we had ignition problems at Charlotte, both of which were unpredictable and therefore unavoidable. If one of those would have occurred and not both, he would have got more points in the final 10 races than the 48 car did, so we don’t need to close the gap on technology. We don’t need to correct some oversight of judgment. We don’t need to make our manufacturing or our cars faster in terms of the speed they’ve got in them, all we have to do is miss the wreck and not have the bad luck of having infant mortality with a component around the engine and we’ll be just fine. My deal for 2009 is to try to make sure that if NASCAR lessens their control, their inspection process, if a vendor comes out with a new technology or a new part that winds up being better, that Roush Fenway is one of the first programs to avail itself of it. We finished 2008 in championship form and I’ve just got to work to try and maintain that going forward.”

HOW MUCH OF AN ADVANTAGE IS IT HAVING FIVE CARS VERSUS THREE OR FOUR? “It’s an advantage in terms of being able to spread the engineering costs. It doesn’t cost me more – maybe one or two people – but it doesn’t cost me more in terms of engineering to do five teams than it does to four, so that gives me a reduction in the cost of my engineering and my car construction. I build cars for the Yates organization as well as my own and now Hall of Fame as well, so being able to spread the manufacturing costs over more programs is good. We’re in a position with five teams to have a slightly better break even point in terms of the sponsorship and the prize money we generate than we would if we had four and that’s all there is.”

HOW CAN YOU GET ALL FIVE TEAMS IN THE CHASE? “I’ve got to be very, very, very, very lucky as I was in 2005 and then we’ve got to maintain the speed that we’ve had and we’ve got to have other teams have bad luck. That was the case in 2005. It wasn’t a matter that we outran all the teams that would have displaced one of our five, but teams that otherwise would have been competitive with us had those infant mortality component problems, they had the wrecks on the race track, they had the tires that ran over something and went flat. So we’ve got to have that kind of luck and have the bad luck we had last year, to some level, have it move someplace else.”

CAN NASCAR PLAY A ROLE IN HELPING THE AUTO INDUSTRY BECOME MORE EFFICIENT? “The thing that NASCAR can do is encourage the teams to have generating panels for the roofs – their race teams really can – to generate as much electricity to go back into the system as they can. One of the things NASCAR can do is organize a schedule – and you can’t do that in a single year – so you don’t have as many trips the trucks have to make across the country. So maybe when you go to the west coast you do three races, instead of two and have the races concentrated so that you don’t have to move around as much. To be able to have two-day races instead of three- and four-day races – that’s helpful. And shortening the races is a possibility. What the sponsors require and what TV requires and what the fans require in terms of the length of the races is a question. We went from having a bunch of 500-mile races – virtually nearly everything but short-track races in NASCAR were 500-mile races and now we’ve got half of them 400 miles. It’s my guess that the 600-mile race could be 500 miles and the 500 miles could be 400 and some of the 400 miles could be 300 and still have the quality of the racing and have the excitement be what it needs to be to generate the interest and keep everybody going. But they need to do some analysis on that and figure out what works for their advertisers.”

BRUTON SMITH SUGGESTED A BLACKOUT IN AREAS THE RACE DOESN’T SELL OUT. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT? “I’m sure that would result in a lot more ticket sales, but would you wind up turning off fans to where they decided they would go fishing or flying or play golf, rather than sit home and watch TV and be impacted by the sponsors is not clear. I think that certainly there would be an impact on the TV dollars and the value that the sponsors got for their TV ads, if they had a blackout. I don’t think that’s the answer.”

FANS KEEP WRITING ABOUT HOW THEY DON’T LIKE THE COT. IS THERE ANY WAY TO EVER GO BACK ON THIS CAR? “Our race team probably spent $5 million for that conversion to the car of tomorrow from the car of today. The cars of today are not out there in sufficient numbers to be able to be a choice to go back to, so you would have yet another cost realized by the race teams to make that change. I’ve not received the letters nor have I had a lot of complaints that the fans have come to me about in regards to that, nor maybe should I being that I have a different role in the sport. It would be my suggestion that for any change there would be some resistance. Certainly I was resistant to the change myself early on, primarily for what it was going to cost rather than anything else. But it’s not going to be the case that a change in the car is really going to dramatically change the make-up of who wins the races and which manufacturers are dominant and other things. I think the cream will rise to the top regardless. I suspect that a lot of the resistance that you’re seeing is because the mix of who is winning the races is not to some of the fans liking and they’re complaining about it.”

THEY CLAIM THEY’VE LOST THEIR BRAND IDENTITY AND IT’S NOT REALLY A FORD OR A CHEVROLET? “And some of that has happened, but at 200 miles an hour and a quarter-mile away, how much can you really tell about the quarter-panel or the way the headlights work? The thing that NASCAR has done, that I think is good, is they have stopped the succession of manufacturers that would come out with a new car, with a new shape, and obsolete everybody else’s car until NASCAR had a chance to get their arms around it. The fans for a while wanted the racing to be close. They did not want the Fords to be the dominant car. They did not want the Chryslers to be the dominant car or the Chevrolets to be the dominant car, depending on who had the latest thing and how they were able to politic it through the sanctioning body. They’ve got that now and the result is that the team’s performance is more of a factor and the driver’s abilities are more important. One of the things that has happened with the car of tomorrow is they don’t have as much front downforce, they don’t have as much downforce overall and the aero-balance has changed. Some of the guys – some of the very popular drivers – have not adapted to that aero-balance as well as some of the rookies have and some of the other people have, and that’s meant that different people are winning the races than maybe might have been anticipated based on the fan support. I don’t know how to correct all that. I’ll say this that from an investment point of view I wake up and I go to bed not as concerned as I was in the past about Chrysler coming out with a new car or Toyota coming out with a new car or Chevrolet coming out with a new car and obsoleting my cars and making the investment I’ve made and my sponsors are making not as good as it would have been. I’m more confident with the car of tomorrow than I was – and one of the other things that shouldn’t be overlooked is we came back in 2007 and I’ll pick a number and say I spent $10 million on aero work and in 2008 I spent about $5. In 2009, I expect to spend about $3, so there has been an efficiency realized to the teams and a value proposition for the sponsors by having the cars not organized so there is so much room that every time you have a whim that the crew chief wants to cut the body off the car. The car has to conform to NASCAR’s template and once you’ve done that, then you can stop wasting money.”