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Suncom 200 - Greg Biffle Notes Greg Biffle has been on a hot streak as of late, knocking on the door of his first victory with two straight runner-up finishes on the NASCAR Busch Series. Biffle heads into this weekend's SunCom 200 at Darlington Raceway in second place in the point standings, and has the distinction of being the only driver to lead a lap in each of the series' first four races. Both Jack Roush and Greg Biffle spoke about the team's impressive start and role that Roush Racing's veteran drivers have played in getting the team up to speed. JACK ROUSH, Car Owner-60-Grainger Ford Taurus - GREG BIFFLE HAS BEEN FAST OUT OF THE BLOCKS THIS YEAR. IS HE BEATING ALL EXPECTATIONS? "I knew that Biffle was really talented and highly motivated. He had an extraordinary two years in the trucks, but I had no idea that he would be able to make the transition as quickly as he has. I credit, first of all, his extraordinary motivation and his ability, but you can't overlook the fact that he stepped into the 60 car, which is the car that Mark Martin had driven for so many years. There was an expectation of the guys that were on the team of success, and there was a good library of information on the race tracks, setups and processes; all that structure was in place. Beyond that, the involvement with Jeff Burton and what he has done, he has taken a slightly different path with the cars than Mark, so Jeff is there with his own bit of history. Also, Greg has all of Mark's information and what Jeff is doing today, and of course, Jeff has mentored him, tested with him and he's raced cars that Jeff raced last year, the exact same car a number of times this year. He's getting much more support than an average fella coming into the Busch Series in his first races. He's tested well and Randy Goss is doing a fantastic job, and Greg is extraordinarily motivated, and it's working well now." HAS THE NEW MOTOR RULE HELPED TO EASE THAT TRANSITION BETWEEN THE TWO SERIES FROM YEARS PAST? "That would be the obvious conclusion, but we don't have any data. This is the first time that we made that transition, I guess there are a couple of other people here that came from trucks, but it's closer in terms of the effect on the tires, spinning the tires and that sort of thing. Jeff Burton had just one race so far this season at Las Vegas, and we missed the setup a little bit, and we were off from what we expected to do. I think that wouldn't have occurred to Jeff if we were on the same engine program we were on last year." DOES THE 12:1 COMPRESSION MOTOR MAKE THE BUSCH SERIES A BETTER TRAINING GROUND FOR WINSTON CUP? "We'll have to wait and see. The real tight competition and similar cars is essential for a person to get ready for Winston Cup competition. Racing against some of the Cup drivers from time to time and racing at the same tracks is the biggest thing, but if I had my way, I would have the Busch cars and the Cup cars the same so that they could step from one to the other and it would wind up that the hardware could be moved back and forth. That would bring the costs down and the drivers would be exposed to exactly what they would see when they moved up. I guess there are some reasons why they wouldn't do that." BIFFLE SAID THAT HE WAS ABLE TO PUT MARK'S SETUP IN THE CAR AT A DARLINGTON TEST. WILL IT ALWAYS BE THAT EASY? "No, I think that's the exception more than the norm. Mark was a maniac when it came to running a car loose, and Greg can do that, but he's probably not well advised to do that until he gets more experience. But, Greg really likes to run his car looser than Jeff Burton does; it's fast, there are risks to it, and of course, it's where Mark's been in his program." GREG BIFFLE-60-Grainger Ford Taurus - YOU'VE BEEN FAST OUT OF THE BLOCKS THIS AND HAVEN'T HAD SOME OF THE GROWING PAINS YOU EXPERIENCED IN YOUR FIRST YEAR IN THE TRUCK SERIES. "I think that in the Busch Series, our Roush program is much more refined than our truck program was when I came to the truck program. That's not putting down the truck program. The truck program is one of our strongest suits that Roush now has, but when I came aboard, it was a fairly new series with fairly new technology, not a lot of Busch and Cup information transfer at that point because we were in Michigan, so we had to kinda carve our own way. I still learned so much in 2000, every year I raced I learned more than I ever expected to learn and we learned more about the trucks in the year 2000, the aerodynamic differences, changes and things about them. So really from when I started until I ended in the trucks, we brought the program a tremendously long way and we sort of had to blaze our own trail there. Here, how can I better Mark Martin or Jeff Burton's program? I went to Darlington last week and we rolled the car out of the trailer and ran 210 laps, three 70-laps runs, and never turned a wedge wrench, changed a spring or shock, track bar, air pressure, nothing, and the thing was blazing fast. I couldn't do that in the trucks. We weren't there yet. We got close at the end, but here it's kind of like the Kurt Busch program in the Truck Series. He came in 2000 and we were coming off of our nine-win season in '99, and we kind of had it figured out at that point and that's a similar thing that I'm going through here. Jeff Burton, Mark Martin and Matt Kenseth have laid the groundwork already, the groundwork is there. They can point me in the right direction and that's all we needed, some guidance. Nothing against Joe Ruttman, but he kinda had them going down the wrong road. They were heading down the dirt road instead of the paved road. Joe is a great driver and he's doing good, but he had a few quirky ideas that may have worked for him, but it wasn't a solid baseline. As the newcomer on the block I couldn't say, 'That's not right,' so it took a period of time and I didn't know what was right, but we slowly got it turned around." YOU SAID THAT YOU USED MARK MARTIN'S EXACT SETUP AT THE DARLINGTON TEST, BUT JACK FELT THAT WOULD BE THE EXCEPTION, NOT THE RULE. "Mark's and Jeff's (setups) were fairly close for Darlington, and I'm going to tell you that they're within a hundred or two on their springs, and this and that. We usually evaluate both of them and go somewhere in the middle and that gives me an adjustment in either direction. It's not that I'm using Mark's and not Jeff's, a lot of times, like Las Vegas, they are identical, they both drove the same setup. Maybe a couple more spring rubbers, but that will make a car from being tight to too loose to drive for a lot of people, so that being said, we're using both sets of information. If we had five guys that gave us information, we would evaluate all five sets of notes and go somewhere in the middle where we know we can't go wrong." YOU'VE PUT TOGETHER THE WHOLE PACKAGE THIS YEAR, QUALIFYING AND RACING. "What seems to happen, what my M.O. is, I'm getting schooled differently over here in the Busch and Winston Cup garage. Always when we show up at a race track, we work on race runs. We never show up in qualifying trim. The track is changing, the track is cold, nobody's been out on it, it's dusty, those are the things that I originally thought, versus just rolling out of the garage and holding it to the mat and going 200 mph. For me it takes a few times to get my rhythm going, I get more comfortable with the track, more aggressive and build confidence. It's hard to back it out of the garage and go out here pedal to metal. When we go test, that's what's helping me so much testing, we ran three 70-lap runs, 200 laps we ran at Darlington before we ever tried a qualifying run, and that's typically how we do that. You can't do that at a track like Atlanta. You have to push it out of the garage and work on qualifying. If I had to do that at place I hadn't been, I'd be in huge trouble. We won't do that, I bet. What we would do, we would do a 20-lap race run right out of the gate and then go immediately after qualifying, just to get a look at the race track." YOU HAVE 12 TEST DATES AS A ROOKIE ON THE BUSCH SERIES. ARE YOU MORE FAMILIAR WITH THE TRACKS WHEN YOU GET THERE THIS YEAR THAN YOU WERE IN THE TRUCKS? "We hardly ever tested in the trucks. I think we only tested five times a year, that's what they'd allow you, and it was one day before the race. It wasn't like you'd go there a week ahead of time, get a look at the track, drive it and then go back and sleep on it for a week and then come back and go, 'I'm ready to tackle this thing.' I find that things like that, although they sound kind of stupid, really help me. If I get in the car and run 50 laps, and afterwards, if I just get out of the car, walk around, look at the race track for a minute and then get back in, your train of thought is different than just sitting in that seat while they make all the changes. If I can get out and think about something else for a minute, I can refocus when I get back in there, but if you're just in there without a break, it never gives you a chance to absorb that information." WE SAW FIVE FORDS FINISH IN THE TOP 10 AT LAS VEGAS AND YOU'VE BEEN RUNNING FOR THE WIN EVERY WEEK. YOU DON'T SEE THAT ON THE WINSTON CUP SIDE. IS IT DRIVER, EQUIPMENT OR THE RULES PACKAGE? "It's probably a little bit of everything. I don't think we have much of an advantage aero-wise, especially at tracks like Atlanta. The problem is the Ford doesn't convert into a superspeedway car as good as the other two given the current rules. We've got a great short-track car, but our parameters aren't as flexile as the Pontiac or Chevy. They're able to get good downforce for Rockingham and Atlanta, and they can go to a superspeedway and get really good speed, where we have our piece and we can't change it a lot. So you've got that, but we can offset that disadvantage with the teams we've got. You've got Jeff Green and Jason Keller, Jeff Burton and myself, and that's a pretty strong talent pool for Ford. I think that that makes a difference. Now on the Winston Cup side, I can't comment. I know it's really tough over there. I know they took some things away form the Taurus when they first got the body, but from my point of view, I don't think they've ever been as good since then." YOU'VE BEEN WITH THE WINSTON CUP COMPETITORS EVERY WEEK SO FAR. HAS ANY INFORMATION FILTERED INTO THE BUSCH GARAGE? "Not really. We've been so flat out and so have they, that we haven't exchanged a lot of information back and forth. We've worked off the race track itself, our setup and focused on our team and using the notes that we have as our background. That's all that we've been doing, but that's been a chore." YOU, JEFF GREEN AND JASON KELLER ARE ALL RUNNING FORDS AND THE SAME ROUSH RACING ENGINE PACKAGE THIS YEAR. HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO USE THEM AS ANOTHER RESOURCE? "I talked to Jeff Green in Atlanta because we were both struggling a little bit. I was fifth or sixth in the first practice and he was 10th. We weren't at the top of the sheet by any means, so I went down and spoke with him. We exchanged ideas and where we were at, and it was kind of funny, because we were both really close to being the same. It's something that they were doing that we didn't know. We exchange information a lot of times, and I'm looking for ideas from them and they're looking for ideas from me. Sometimes we can come to a common ground." IS IT TOUGHER NOT HAVING A TEAMMATE AT THE TRACK WEEK IN AND WEEK OUT? "I think a little bit. Jeff, obviously, makes a great teammate, but that's when he's there. He helped us at Vegas and I look forward to working with him at Texas, but it is different not having a full-time teammate. It may be a little more difficult for us because of situations like this, we're not able to exchange information, 'How are you doing, how's the chassis and did the track tighten up?' I want to know if the track tightened up because I made an adjustment to my car to make it turn better and it was tighter. And I'm going, 'Was that the wrong change to make or is the track changing so much that I made a change and it wasn't enough to compensate for the car being tight or the track conditions changing?' So I have to go to some other people and ask, 'Hey, is the track tightening up to you?' And you hope they tell you the right thing. You survey four or five, and if you get a common answer, then hopefully you can use that to your advantage."
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