Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 USG/DeWalt Fusion, is second place in the points standings, just eight points behind the leader, heading into tomorrow’s USG Sheetrock 400. Kenseth leads the series with 10 top-fives and 11 top-10s through the season’s first 17 races. He finished second in this event last year.

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 Fusion – WHAT ARE SOME OF THE ELEMENTS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONSISTENCY OF A RACE TEAM? “Consistency is all about – first of all your car’s got to finish; to finish first, you must first finish. Your car’s got to run all day and you can’t have mechanical problems, you can’t have mistakes on pit road. You’ve got to not make many mistakes all around, from building the cars to pitting them to driving them, so that’s the main thing – to try to eliminate all of that stuff first. After that, it’s getting your cars to perform good, because consistently 15th or 20th is consistent, and that’s not going to cut it, so to be consistently in the front and be consistently in the top 10, you’ve got to have your cars running really well and have all the rest of the stuff go right, and not have bad luck and all that. It’s everything. You’ve got to have the cars running good. They’ve got to be reliable; you’ve got to be able to make it to the end. It’s everything.”

ON THE UPCOMING TEST AT INDIANAPOLIS. “It’s a mandatory test, everybody’s going to be there. We’ll either build a new car for Indy and then we’ll take one of the cars that we ran before and has been kind of a proven car. We’ll just go there and try some new stuff and see if we can get the new car to run a little better and the old car, just test. Try to get around the track as fast as we can.”

CAN YOU TAKE ANYTHING YOU LEARN AT INDY AND APPLY IT TO ANY OTHER TRACK? “I don’t think so, no. Some people say, ‘yeah,’ it compares to Pocono, this, that, but I’ve never found that. I’ve always found that Indy is all by itself.”

THERE SEEMS TO BE AN EVEN KEEL TO THIS TEAM THIS YEAR, NOT TOO MANY UPS AND DOWNS… “I think we’ve started this year stronger than any other year. We’ve been more competitive and have had more good finishes than any other season we’ve ever started, so that part feels good. But, we are only halfway through the year and there’s a lot of racing to do. You just can’t let up or sit here and feel good about it or be happy about what we did yesterday, I think we’ve got to more focus on what our job is tomorrow. That’s kind of the way I look at it.”

YOU DON’T LOOK AT THE POINTS? “No, I mean, you glance at it. But, really, halfway through the season second in the points, what does that buy you? It doesn’t really buy you anything, so you’ve got to keep working at it. The only thing that counts is getting into the Chase, and then at the end of the year. You’ve got to work all the way through the rest of the year to achieve that goal. So, it really doesn’t mean a lot right now. We’re in a pretty comfortable spot, but it doesn’t really mean anything as far as championship hopes right now.”

CHICAGOLAND IS AS CLOSE AS IT GETS TO A HOMETOWN TRACK FOR YOU… “It’s the closest I come to home to race at, and we get a lot of family down here, a lot of friends. I enjoy coming down here. It’s a good track and we had some success last year, so hopefully we can get that to happen again.”

THERE WERE SOME COMMENTS MADE RECENTLY BY BRIAN FRANCE ABOUT POSSIBLE CHANGES TO THE CHASE FORMAT. IF IT WERE UP TO YOU, AND YOU COULD ADD SOME FEEDBACK, WHAT CHANGES WOULD YOU MAKE? “I’m going to go with Jimmie Johnson on this, I listened to some of his comments on it. I think that the 400-point thing, if it was up to me and there still was going to be a Chase, I’d make it 400 points, whether that’s two cars or 15 cars, 400 points is the cutoff and that’s it. I’m sure they’re going to go the opposite way and make more people involved, I’m sure that’s what it’s going to be about. But, that’s the way I would do it, because I think that, myself included, if anybody’s farther behind than 400 points going into the last 10 races, and you want to crown a season-long champion, I don’t know, that’s a long way down, nobody’s ever done that before in the old system, and I just think you should have to run good all year, not just the last 10.”

IS THERE A TRACK THAT NEEDS TO BE IN THE CHASE THAT’S NOT THERE NOW? “It doesn’t matter. There’s a couple I wouldn’t mind trading out, if it was up to me, because there’s tracks that I run good at and tracks I probably struggle at, but there’s certainly a couple I would take out of there and replace with some of my best tracks. But, yet, not looking at it from my own standpoint, it’s a pretty good mixture of tracks.”