Jack Roush, Doug Yates and Ford Racing's Brian Wolfe look on as the 2009 Ford NASCAR Sprint Cup engine the FR9 is unveiled (CIA Stock Photo)
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – Roush Fenway Racing (CONTINUED)
SO, THEORETICALLY, THERE’S NO GOING BACK, EVEN IF NASCAR COULD SCIENTIFICALLY SHOW THIS CAR IS KILLING ITS FAN BASE? “If you’ve got 40 teams that are out there and it’s $5 million a team to obsolete the cars – that’s close to half-a-billion dollars for that change – I don’t know where the money would come from. I would suspect that as you went through that, you would have different people unhappy but you’d have as much unhappiness as you have today. I think a lot of the unhappiness you have today has to do with the change, and that would be any change, and the rest of that has to do with the fact some of the very popular drivers have been frustrated with the aero-balance of the car, and, by the way, there is an opportunity to fix that with the car of today – with tweaks in the size of the spoiler and with tweaks in the shape of the flat fender.”
SO YOU COULD GET AWAY FROM THE REAL LOOSE IN TO ROTATE THROUGH THE CORNERS? “They can get away with that from aerodynamically changing the front and back of the car. I don’t know that they want to. If you come back and say, ‘You make this car so that you can drive it wide-open in places where otherwise you can’t,’ I don’t know if that makes more exciting racing or if it just makes for more spectacular wrecks.”
DO YOU THINK JEFF GORDON’S WINLESS SEASON HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH A MENTAL BLOCK OR HIGH FRUSTRATION LEVEL WITH THIS CAR? “I know a little bit about Jeff Gordon in terms of the feedback that I’ve gotten from Mark Martin and from the other people that have been around him and he doesn’t like a loose race car. This car has got to be pretty darn loose to be able to have the speed in it, so if the first thing you do is tighten the car up and you say, ‘Now we’re going to try and make it fast,’ you’ve probably created a scenario for yourself where the car won’t have the speed. I’m not being critical of Jeff, but I think that’s what’s going on. In my field of drivers, I’ve got drivers that have got a preference for a car that’s looser than other drivers. The drivers that have a preference for the looser cars are the ones that have stood supreme, and the ones that have an aversion to that have struggled.”
DO YOU EXPECT NASCAR TO RE-VISIT THE TEAM OWNER RULE OF FOUR CARS? “I don’t know. I’d say that the jury is out on that. If they struggle this year to have full 43-car fields for the Sprint Cup Series, and if it appears that by my going back to four teams rather than five that a sponsor would leave the series rather than accept an assignment to another team – either to one of the Wood Brothers team or the Yates team or one of the Hall of Fame brand teams now, if it looks like the sponsor would leave the series, that is certainly something for them to think about. But I’ve gotten no encouragement at all that the issue is open. As far as I know it’s a closed issue and in 2010 I’ll be back to four.”
SHOULD THEY RE-VISIT IT CONSIDERING THE CIRCUMSTANCES? “I’m not going to start that debate. That debate has been engaged and I lost it several years ago and I’m good with it either way. I can make my program work with four teams or five teams. It was discriminatory when they came down with it since I was the only program that had five teams and they decided to tax me for that, and if that tax winds up being bad for the sport overall, they’ll have to think about that and think about whether changing their mind and losing face is offset by the fact that a sponsor might otherwise stay and we might have one more team in the series.”
DO YOU SEE THE POTENTIAL FOR ALL FIVE OF YOUR TEAMS TO MAKE THE CHASE THIS YEAR? “Absolutely.” HOW CLOSE DO YOU FEEL DAVID AND JAMIE ARE TO REACHING THAT GOAL? “David was very close. If it hadn’t been for the wreck – I’m a Clint Bowyer fan – but the fact is that David let himself at Richmond get three-wide on the outside with Clint being on the inside and Clint trying to trip the light fantastic around the bottom with not enough traction for his action with the car that was in the middle and took David into the wall, and from that point on Clint’s position in the chase was secure and David was pretty much eliminated from it.”
DAVID HAS MADE A LOT OF PROGRESS IN TWO YEARS. HOW GOOD CAN HE BE? “David Ragan will be as good as anybody has been in this business. He’s the real deal. He’s got great enthusiasm. He comes from a proud family that has instilled pride and a code of honor in him that will let him survive and be very successful here. He’s got great enthusiasm, good hand-eye coordination, he’s a real racer and he’ll be successful.”
HE SAID HE AND HIS TEAM WOULD BE DEVASTATED IF THEY DIDN’T WIN THIS YEAR. “Devastation is a hard thing. It’s hard for me to put a metric on that, but certainly I’ll be disappointed and they’ll be the victim of unbelievable bad luck or mismanagement on my part if we let that happen. I’m determined not to mismanage him and hopefully the luck will work out for us.”
WHERE WILL YOU FEEL THE IMPACT ON GOING DOWN TO FOUR THE MOST? “It will make the value proposition for our sponsors not quite as good as we go back and renegotiate for our continuation or talk about new sponsors. We are in a position of being a little more efficient. The number of people that work on the race teams individually and the number of testing sessions that you do and the number of false starts or misdirections that you have all affect your costs and our cost situation improved by the fact that we have five programs rather than four, but it’s a rather small thing. We won’t run any different with four than we will with five, and my guess is and my determination is we’ll be able to sell the sponsors at a price point that lets us be viable at four versus five.”
DO YOU KNOW HOW NASCAR WILL OVERSEE YOUR MOVE WITH THE FIFTH CAR? “I’m not sure about that. I wouldn’t anticipate selling the sponsorship or selling the number. That certainly is not a consideration and that’s not my priority to do that and I wouldn’t try that, but I would like to see all of our existing sponsors have a happy and solid relationship with Roush Fenway. If it stays in a Ford, we’d be determined to build their cars for it and provide engineering for it, so the full faith and trust of Roush Fenway would follow one of our drivers and one of our sponsors if we could find a happy circumstance where the sponsor would be willing to go.”
WHAT IS THE TIMING ON PHASING IN THE NEW ENGINE? “The timing on it is really going to be determined by how much we can afford and how competitive the engine proves to be. The old engine is doing a really good job. That is the engine of the future. The obsolescence of the existing engine, depending on the timing of it, will result in very little additional cost to the teams in terms of the obsolescence, or it could be in the millions of dollars for a team. So I’m anxious, given the economic circumstance and the competitiveness of the engine, I’m going to have the brakes on its introduction, so we don’t obsolete a current engine that has value in it, that’s got service life left in it, and we certainly don’t take a risk by trying to do something sooner than we’ve got enough testing to verify that it’s gonna be a solid move without risk.”
HOW WOULD YOU DETERMINE WHO GETS IT FIRST? “All five of mine and hopefully all three of Yates’ teams will be running for a championship trying to get in the chase and we certainly wouldn’t make any decision that would involve any risk we were able to anticipate. We may wind up and place it in an ARCA program initially. Certainly some of the short tracks that are not known to be hard on engines will be an option. I’m certain that we’ll go tire testing with it with some of the Goodyear tire tests coming up – that’s a good way to generate a lot of miles. We haven’t spent a lot of times on it, but we’ll certainly look at not carrying any amount of risk. I know when GM came out with their latest engine they had all of these mechanical fuel pumps that packed it in. The Hendrick guys and the Gibbs guys both had engine failures and maybe Childress did as well, as a result of the fuel pump function – the cable-driven fuel pump. Now I’m told that system is developed so that’s not the case and it’s not a problem, but I very much don’t want to come back and make a change that will carry with it a component that’s not known and carry a risk to our program.”
