RacingNation.com
Home / NASCAR / Lessons Learned As RFR Aims For Championship Season

Lessons Learned As RFR Aims For Championship Season

Concord, NC – Roush Fenway Racing learned a big lesson last year – in NASCAR, every point matters.

After the checkers flew in the final race of the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Season, both Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards had tallied 2403 points. The tie breaker was most wins on the season and Stewart captured the championship with five wins, all in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, compared to Edwards one win at Las Vegas earlier in the season.

What almost became a double championship weekend, after Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. sealed the Nationwide Series championship the day before, turned into heartbreak.

“We spent the days after Homestead lamenting the fact that Tony went on a surreal run, winning five out of ten,” said Roush Fenway Racing president Steve Newmark during the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Charlotte Motor Speedway. “And we also lamented the fact that Brian Vickers tangled with Matt Kenseth, ending his championship chances. You get over that and you move forward. Our focus is on 2012. We know what our goal is and it’s pretty simple, we want to win a championship in both series.”

“The incredible part of last season is that after 10 races, one pass anywhere, Carl sat on the pole at Kansas and didn’t lead a lap – if you go back to all those things, it just shows you how important it is to get every point that you possibly can because you don’t know what’s going to happen in that last race,” explained Robbie Reiser, GM of Roush Fenway Racing. “We have to come out this year and know where our weaknesses are and put our strengths out there and challenge for the championship again.”

At the end of last season, sponsorship dried up on the #6 car driven by David Ragan. RFR decided to not run the car full-time in the 2012 season and let Ragan go to find another opportunity. Ragan since has signed with Front Row Motorsports. Ricky Stenhouse will drive the #6 in the Daytona 500, so far the only Sprint Cup Series race scheduled for the Nationwide Series champ.

With the contraction of one of the three teams, RFR decided to reorganize personnel between the remaining teams. The biggest change was to the #16 3M Ford Fusion driven by Greg Biffle. In the middle of the 2011 season the crew chief was replaced and changes to the travel-group as well as the over-the-wall-group were made in the off-season.

“They started out the year with Greg Erwin as the crew chief,” said Reiser. “They had run well the season before but some of the chemistry had worn out. By the middle of the season we decided that the crew chief situation would not work, so we made a change to Matt Puccia. We kept the rest of the team together at that point. At the end of the season we decided to downsize and that allowed us to pick personnel and change that team dramatically. The 3M team, over the last three years, has been a competitive team but not a championship driven team. We built the team around Matt Puccia and Greg Biffle.”

With changes made the three Ford Fusions of Edwards, Kenseth and Biffle are ready for the 2012 season.

“Whenever you go in a new direction, hopefully you come back and say this is what we needed to do,” said Reiser. “Time will tell. I will tell you that I’m not afraid to change. If we don’t have what we need on the 17 or the 99 or the 16, we are going to make some changes. That’s the nature of this sport. We need to be aggressive with that if we don’t have what we need.”

“I think it’s going to be good, I really do,” Biffle said about changes to his team. “I watched them work at Daytona [during the test days] and they were quick, thorough and the car was ready all the time. They didn’t look like they were in a mad dash, everything was properly executed so I think it’s going to be a good season.”

As Reiser said, time will tell and one point can change everything.

Watch for more reports from the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Charlotte Motor Speedway this week as NASCAR gets ready to kick off the 2012 season with the Daytona 500. Thanks to Sprint, NASCAR and the Charlotte Motor Speedway staff for their organization and sponsorship of the Media Tour.

Share Button