So far this season has been going great for Greg Biffle and the No. 16 3M team as he leads the point standings, nine points over Kevin Harvick.
“The team is really excited about how the season started out,” he says. “We have gone from a superspeedway to a one mile track to a mile-and-a-half which is a Roush Fenway flagship kind of race track. We have run very respectable at all those places.”
Biffle admitted even with the success, they do have some work to do to be as quick as Stewart and Johnson on the one-and-a-half miles. Following the race at Las Vegas, Biffle wanted an openbook policy to be able to see Stewart’s data as he couldn’t believe the restarts he was getting. Stewart said that wasn’t happening as he wanted secrets to be kept.
“I would embrace the idea of some of the data,” Biffle emphasizes last week at Bristol. “Meaning maybe they let us see the throttle trace and the breaking or something like that. As far as letting all the teams have an open notebook on all the engine data that is probably going a little too far in my opinion. These guys spend hours and hours and lots and lots of time and effort, and that is part of competition, to get their mouse trap better than everybody else’s. When you make all that public then that work is in vain. You almost ask yourself what is the purpose in trying at that point if everybody else is going to get it, then we will just copy everybody else. There still needs to be competition. There needs to be competitiveness within the teams and maybe some of the drivers inputs we could see.”
Biffle says all he wants is the throttle and brake trace, which is evident to what he plans to use it for as it would show at what point Stewart was hitting the throttle compared to him.
The Roush-Fenway team will once again to get to test their equipment against Hendrick Motorsports and others this weekend as they head to Auto Club Speedway.
“I am really excited about Fontana,” Biffle says. “It is one of my favorite tracks to go to out west. We run normally extremely well there. We have a brand new car that has really good wind tunnel numbers and are really happy with the car. We feel its our best car in our fleet so far to date. I am really pumped up about going to California and seeing how this car drives. With the new fuel injection and all the data we will be able to keep a better eye on not burning our engine up, which is what we did there that one time.”
So far this year, Biffle has been consistent, which is something that Roush-Fenway has become known for when competiting for championships. In 2003, Kenseth won the Sprint Cup Championship with one victory on the season. Last year, Edwards only won a single race on his way to a runner-up finish behind Tony Stewart.
“We sit in those meetings on Monday morning and talk about how we can be better and win races,” Biffle says. “We don’t talk about how we can be more consistent or any of that. We talk about how we can qualify better, get a better starting spot and how we are going to win, versus running third. I think that we are doing everything we can to win as much as we can.”
Written by:
