Kenseth hopes for better season

The back slapping in victory lane after last year’s Daytona 500 nearly drown out the fireworks. It certainly lasted longer and as well it should: Owner Jack Roush was posing with the Harley J. Earl Trophy for the first time.

Matt Kenseth did the trick for Roush — who had been eyeing but not clutching the 500 trophy since 1988. And he did it in a way that made it seem as though the stars were lining up nicely for the team — Kenseth passed Elliott Sadler seven laps before the race was red-flagged for good by a cloudburst.

A week later, Kenseth would win again, and the Daytona-birthed momentum made it appear 2009 was going to be a biggie for Roush Fenway Racing and the No. 17 team.

But three weeks ago, Roush sat in front of the media in Charlotte and launched into a lengthy monologue not about how big last season was, but how small it wound up being — Kenseth didn’t win again and missed the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup for the first time … and Roush won only one more race.

That monologue ended with a semi-promise: Roush Fenway will not suffer a similar fate in 2010.

“We will win more races given the same amount of opportunities next year that we won last year, but in the meantime,” Roush said, “we’re going to try to get ourselves ready … to go take a bunch of them hands-down.”

Kenseth took the microphone shortly after Roush that day and continued on with the same theme.

“I think we’ve got a lot of exciting things going,” said Kenseth, the 2003 Sprint Cup champion. “I think we’ve made a lot of upgrades on our cars from last year, but the bottom line is we’ve got to do it on the racetrack. We’ve got to have better results than we had last year. We’ve got to get back into championship form, so that’s my goal — to get our team back in form to contend for a championship.”

The climb back to championship contention begins at the same place it did last year — at Daytona International Speedway, with the running of Sunday’s Daytona 500.

It will start with a significantly different look as the familiar DeWalt yellow-and-black paint scheme has been replaced by the purple and black of new sponsor Crown Royal. It also will start with strengthened relationships between Kenseth and his crew chief and his engineer.

“I feel we’ve hopefully gotten smarter,” Kenseth said. “And this being our second year with Drew [Blickensderfer, his crew chief] and Chip [Bolin, his engineer] and me working together — all three of us — we’ll improve on a lot of that stuff and come out of the box stronger and make better decisions and get better finishes.”

And the hope is, it will start almost exactly the way it started a year ago.

“Speedweeks last year was really weird because it was really frustrating for me all week, and then, obviously, it was the best it could have possibly been in the 500,” Kenseth said. “It took three cars and every single different thing we could think of setup-wise. I mean, the cars just didn’t drive how I wanted them to in the Shootout and the [Gatorade Duel] 150, and all week in practice we just really struggled, but finally got it right for the 500. I hope it’s not that hard this year, but I hope we have the same result.”

And the ultimate hope is, 2010 will not end the same way as 2009.

“Last year was really frustrating,” Kenseth said. “Even though we started off so good, it was really just a weird year because we were just brimming with confidence after California [where he won his second race in a row], obviously, and then about two or three months in we just couldn’t get anything to go right. It was just really frustrating for a lot of different reasons and at a lot of different levels, so I’m hoping that this year is not a repeat of that for sure.”