Roush clicks with new car

Carl Edwards gave Roush
Fenway Racing its first victory of the season.

By MIKE HARRIS

AP AUTO RACING WRITER

Jack Roush is a no-excuses kind of guy.

When his team lagged behind early last year on its development of the Car of Tomorrow, Roush quickly sized up the situation and decided it was time to catch up.

Roush, who took on Red Sox owner John Henry and his Fenway Sports Group as partners in his team last year, was surprised to find that rival NASCAR Sprint Cup teams like Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing and Richard Childress Racing had taken it upon themselves at the start of the 2007 season to test the new car, rather than waiting for official NASCAR tests.

Because of restrictions in place last year, the teams had to test at tracks where Cup didn’t race and had to find tires other than the Goodyear brand that is used exclusively in NASCAR’s top professional series.

“I’ve really got to screw it up bad to mess it up for the guys, and I tried last year,” Roush said earlier this week after Carl Edwards gave Roush Fenway Racing its first victory of the 2008 season in the rain-delayed race at Fontana, Calif.

“Getting behind on the testing thing early on, when we went to Bristol [for the first CoT race last March] and we were 2,000 miles behind the other cars in terms of what they’d been doing ... and it was all my fault.”

Roush, whose team fields five Cup entries with Edwards, Matt Kenseth, Greg Biffle, Jamie McMurray and David Ragan, quickly got everyone on his team pointed in the right direction in the new car.

“From the first of May, when we suited up, [we] went on the market to find some tires other than Goodyear tires, went to the racetracks that weren’t on NASCAR’s schedule, we made a Herculean effort,” Roush noted. “The guys ... went off and carried the load and caught up.”

The 16-race CoT schedule that NASCAR ran in 2007 to prepare for the full slate this year included two road races, one superspeedway and 13 ovals measuring 1.3 miles or less.

Roush said his team went after the road courses first.

“By the time we went to Sears Point [in June], we had a pretty good race car out of the Car of Tomorrow,” said Roush, who got a fifth-place finish from Biffle at the Sonoma, Calif., track. “That was the first effort, to make sure we didn’t get beat up there as bad as we might. From that point on, it just got better and better.”

Edwards gave Roush Fenway its first CoT win later in the year at Bristol. He and Biffle followed that victory a few weeks later with a 1-2 finish at Dover and Biffle and Kenseth were 2-3 at Phoenix in the penultimate race of the season.

“The thing that got it done was that we have a good, deep, strong organization,” Roush said. “The guys were highly motivated, didn’t quit on me, didn’t have a bad attitude about it. We all just suited up and did what we could.”

None of the Roush Fenway cars had much luck in the Daytona 500, but to win the first CoT event at Auto Club Speedway — the former California Speedway — Edwards had to pass and then hold off Johnson and Gordon.

“We’ll just have to see how the year unfolds, see who is going to be where,” Johnson said. “I think we all knew the Roush cars were coming. They were getting real strong [at] the end of last year.”

Meanwhile, Roush said he is just happy that his team and all the rest can concentrate on one kind of car this season instead of having to build and race old-style cars and the CoTs in the same time.

And Roush is just fine with racing the new car, if that’s what everybody else has.

“For my part, I’ll race a three-legged dog if that’s what the rules required,” he said.