Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion, held his weekly Q&A session before NASCAR Busch Series practice on Friday at Lowe’s Motor Speedway and discussed last week’s Nextel All-Star Challenge and this weekend’s Coca-Cola 600.

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THAT SPEEDING PENALTY ALL WEEK? “Yeah, I was kind of over it until you had to ask about it (joking). Nobody knows what was gonna happen the last 20 laps. Everybody said Jeff Gordon was gonna win and he had a flat tire, so you don’t know what’s gonna happen, but certainly that took us out of a chance to win. It certainly cost us that and it was just that I made a mistake. It was a very unique situation where everybody had to pit but nobody was gonna get tires and nobody needed fuels, so everybody was doing stop-and-go’s. Pit road was really busy. There were a lot of cars around. You didn’t really have time to stop in your pit box and look in the mirror and see traffic and I just took off. The 11 car was trying to get in his stall and I was trying to make sure I didn’t break my momentum and I got going too fast.”

SO YOU WERE DEFINITELY SPEEDING? “Yeah, obviously. It’s electronic. I don’t think anybody is making anything up. I don’t think there’s any conspiracy. I was going too fast on pit road. It’s pretty black and white.”

WHEN IS IT TOO SOON TO START RACING GUYS WITH THE TIRES THE WAY THEY ARE? “You have to race hard the whole race. Even though it’s a 600-mile race and you’ve got to pace yourself and have your car right for the end of the race and all that kind of stuff. It’s so competitive that if you don’t race hard the whole race, you’ll probably go a lap down so you’ve got to do the best you can when the track is slick and hopefully you have the right setup for the end.”

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO RUN THE INDY 500? “No, I really haven’t to be honest with you. I’ve never really watched a lot of open-wheel racing. When I was younger and growing up, when NASCAR racing would come on I’d watch it, but otherwise I was busy racing our own cars and working on our own cars and I never really was around any of that type of racing before, so, to me, it’s not as big of a deal as it is to maybe some other people who grew up in the area or started out racing open wheel stuff, but I’ve just always been a stock car guy.”

DOES IT MAKE SENSE FOR NASCAR TO TRY AND MAKE ONE OF THESE MILE-AND-A-HALF TRACKS A COT RACE THIS YEAR OR CAN YOU ACCOMPLISH IT TESTING? “I think you do it testing. Every track is a little different, but we’ve been to Darlington, we’re gonna go to Dover and we’re gonna go to some faster race tracks with the car – and Talladega – so I think we’ll have enough idea. It’s not gonna be that much different at Charlotte than it is at Dover, so I think we’ll learn enough doing the stuff this year and then ease our way into it next year.”

ARE YOU HAPPY WITH GOING TO THE COT FULL TIME IN ’08? “I would have been happier if we were going back to this car all the time (laughing), but certainly if we’re gonna go to that car and that is the future, it makes more sense to run it every week than to have to run this car a few times and run that car most of the time. It’s gonna save everybody money and it’s gonna be a lot easier to concentrate on one type of race car, instead of trying to build two types of race cars for another season.”

WHY HAS CHEVROLET BEEN SO DOMINANT? “I don’t think it’s necessarily a manufacturer thing as much as it is Hendrick Motorsports and some of those other guys just have their stuff together. They’ve been the team to beat. They’ve been on top of the COT car and they’ve been running good in that right away. All of the manufacturers are pretty even, especially when it comes to the COT. Those cars are almost all identical and it’s just which team does the best job getting their stuff figured out the best right way.”

YOU’RE IN BOTH RACES HERE THIS WEEKEND. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR ALL THOSE MILES? “It’s kind of the same as every weekend, but you try to stay rested and you try to eat right and stay hydrated and be ready for the race. Six hundred miles is a long, long time and the track conditions change a lot during the day and night. You’ve just got to be ready for it. You’ve got to try and be smart and you’ve got to be there at the end when it counts.”

DID YOU EVER THINK ABOUT NOT RUNINNG THE BUSCH RACE? “Not really. It’s a Saturday night race and we don’t race again until Sunday night, so you’ve got all day Sunday to kind of sit around and get rested up and ready. The Busch race is a lot of fun to race here. You get to race at night under the conditions that the 600 will end in, so I don’t think it’s a big deal. Physically, it’s not a big deal. It’s a fun race to run and hopefully we can learn something for the end of the race for the night after.”

DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT THE TIRES LAST WEEK THAT MIGHT HELP THIS WEEKEND? “The biggest thing I think we all learned from watching it and being a part of it is that you need to be in the front. Every week you want to be in the front, but it was very difficult when you got behind. Your car was a lot slower if you weren’t in the lead than when you were in the lead, so, I think you could take a fourth or fifth-place car and if you put it in the lead, you could win with it, and vice versa, you could take a winning car and put it in fifth or sixth and there’s no way you’re gonna get back up and win the race. It was very difficult to pass. The tire is so hard that when you get in dirty air it’s hard to get any grip, so I guess that’s the biggest thing is that track position is gonna be very important. You’re not gonna want to make a mistake and lose track position at the end.”

Greg Biffle, driver of the No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion, will have a new crew chief when the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series goes to Dover next weekend as Greg Erwin replaces Pat Tryson. Biffle spoke about the change after Friday’s Cup practice session.

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion – WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE CREW CHIEF CHANGE? “It’s pretty difficult for me. I didn’t have a real problem. Yeah, the performance was not where it needs to be, but I think the moral of the story here is that the team wasn’t being operated the way that Jack wanted it operated, meaning when we were faltering a little bit on pit stops and weren’t fast enough, he wanted us to make the change and do something about us. I say us – Pat, me, or the team or whatever. As he dissected more and more of the stuff he didn’t feel like we were where we needed to be with personnel. He wanted to see some changes made and I just think maybe there weren’t enough changes quick enough and Jack was unhappy with that.”

SUCH AS? “Fourteen-and-a-half second pit stops aren’t getting it done.”

DOES PAT GET BLAMED FOR THAT? “You’re in charge. What you need is you’ve got to change your guys. You’ve got to change the jack guy, you’ve got to change the tire changer. You guys have got to practice. Our guys weren’t practicing enough, I guess. I don’t know. These are all the things and the reasoning behind why we’re changing to a new guy because I don’t think the team was operated the way that Jack wanted to see it run and our performance wasn’t there. If our performance was there, then that would have carried us. But Richmond is a perfect example. We ran extremely well. We had a top five car. I passed the 48 car – two runs I passed the 48 car and he won the race. We had a bad pit stop and lost four spots. Twenty laps later I got a few spots back and we had another bad pit stop and lost more spots. Then on the second lap of the restart we get crashed by the 66 car because we’re back behind running 14th or 13th. That’s not acceptable.”

DID YOU VOICE COMPLAINTS ABOUT PAT? “I didn’t have a problem with Pat at all. I didn’t want the change, but in order to have the support of the company and to better my opportunities in my career going forward this is what needed to be done.”

COULD YOU AND PAT BE TOGETHER AGAIN SOMEWHERE ELSE? “Yes, you never know, but I’ve got to be a team player. I have to be honest with you, I run my own program. I’m not at the shop everyday. I’m not there everyday. I don’t know what the problems are. We get to the race track and we’re working on it. The guys are thrashing on the car, we’re doing whatever, we go out, we race and we leave. Then I show up for a meeting on Tuesday to debrief the last race and that’s all I see. That’s the only things I touch and feel and put my hands on. Now when the guys are practicing pit stops, I don’t have a clue. Or when they’re loading the truck, are we the last team to get our car loaded on the truck? I don’t know. I’m already at the track or I’m at an appearance somewhere, so I don’t know about all those things. Somebody is better suited to make that decision than me. I certainly can’t make that decision. Yeah, I’m on Pat about the pit stops. The thing is you have to have team morale and you’ve got to build these guys up. I never say a word on the radio about a pit stop because I don’t want them to feel pressure. Sometimes when there’s major pressure I’ll say, ‘Man, what happened guys. Did we drop a lugnut or slip and fall?’ Let’s face it, those guys are trying their hardest. If you make a mistake, you make a mistake, but I don’t raise Cain and complain and scream at them on the radio during the race on a bad pit stop because that ain’t gonna fix it. What fixes it is positive reinforcement like, ‘Give us a good, solid stop next time.’ The whole change is change that engineering and Jack and everybody wanted to make and felt like it would make our team better. If they feel like they’re making the team better, that’s what I want. I want our team to be the best it can be and if that’s what they feel is necessary, then that’s what has to be done. Would I have raced with Pat the rest of the season? Yeah, I would have. Would we have won some races? Yeah, you bet we would have won some races. Would we be in the same situation 10 races from now or 15? That was everybody’s fear I guess.”

CAN YOU COMPARE THIS SEASON TO ’05? WHAT WAS GOING RIGHT THEN VS. WHAT’S GOING WRONG NOW? “The thing is the cars are tremendously different between now and ’05. The tires are completely different. The way that we do things are completely different. Those notes and what we did, you can just shred all that stuff. It means nothing. Technology has changed. Back then we were working on getting a quarter-inch or something like that for travel and now we’re trying to get 50-thousandths. All this tire data – the tires are completely different – so all that stuff doesn’t work anymore and you’ve got to figure it out. If you can’t test, you can’t figure it out. We can’t test anywhere, really. It’s hard to because we don’t have tires and it’s just hard to do that.”

THIS ISN’T THE COT. “No, it’s the regular cars. In ’05, we were OK. We slipped toward the end of the season in ’05. We didn’t win a race past the 15th race of the season, except for the last race of the season, so we knew we weren’t as strong as we needed to be. Then ’06 rolled around and what we were doing wasn’t winning races anymore, so you’ve got to start searching and just looking and trying and that’s where we’ve been ever since then, really, is trying to get back and trying to get back what’s working and winning races. We’ve been close. We had a good run at Atlanta. We got wrecked but we were coming on the leaders. We had a good car. I don’t know if we would have won, but we certainly had a good car and at some other places. We’ve run good in that COT. At Bristol we had a good car. At Richmond we had a great car. At Darlington we were so-so. We would have been top 10, but Kurt Busch knocked us out of the way with 10 to go or something and I ended up 15th. Our performance hasn’t been terrible. It’s been below standard a little bit, but if we wouldn’t have got wrecked in Atlanta by the 00, and if we wouldn’t have got wrecked by the 66, we’d be in the chase right now 12th in points. We’re 15th right now, I think, or we’re right there, so we’re not that far off.”

JACK WAS COMPLAINING ABOUT THE TESTING AND MATT SAID HE’S WANTED TO TEST FOR A WHILE. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT? “I don’t know anything about that. Those are the types of business that I’m not in. That’s the crew chief’s responsibility. Whatever Pat was doing was what he was doing. The crew chief has to watch out for his team and the future of the organization at the same time. He has to kind of have a plan. The crew chief’s responsibilities are real global these days and to be perfectly honest with you, the car chief is the crew chief. He’s the one over there working on the car, wrenching on it, making sure it’s right, perfect, it travels, and Pat lost his guy. Pat’s car chief is gone. We brought a guy up, a mechanic, and I think that hurt us a lot. I’m not saying that the guy we’ve got now isn’t gonna be a good guy as we work him in there, but the problem is we lost that key guy. So technically Pat lost his crew chief. He’s the car chief on the 26 now.”

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU TYPICALLY TESTED? “Just the NASCAR tests. I take that back, I apologize, we went to Rockingham and tested. We went to Rockingham with the COT car.”

WOULD YOU LIKE TO TEST MORE? “Everybody wants to test every week. I want to test Friday on our day off. Where are we racing next? Dover? I want to test Dover on Friday with 10 sets of tires. Everybody wants to do that, but do we have the money? Do we have the cars? Do we have the people? You’d have to pick a different track and it just takes a lot to be able to do that, but everyone wants to do that. We’d like to have a day off, too, but at the same time it’s our livelihood and we know we have to go and test. Matt and Carl went to Milwaukee this week as part of starting out our testing. That was our first test of what we’ve got going and then I don’t know if I’m going by myself or not, but I’m going to do the next test. We’re gonna take two cars and go start from where they left off and keep working on it. So we’re there, but I don’t know what that has to do with Pat. I guess it does, but I don’t know. I hate to be caught in the middle of it because I just want the best for me and the 16 team and the group and the sponsors for winning races. However we have to do that, we have to do that and I don’t know what that is. That’s why they pay me to drive.”

WILL THIS HAVE ANY EFFECT ON RENEGOTIATING? “No, I’m still committed to doing what we’ve got to do. It’s frustrating, but I haven’t even worked with my new crew chief yet. I won’t do that until Dover this next week. We’ve got a fill-in guy with Chris Andrews and it isn’t going well right now, I mean the first practice session of the weekend. It’s not going very well.”

HAVE YOU TALKED TO DEI LATELY? “I haven’t talked to them. They may have contacted some folks or some agencies that have tried to contact us, but I haven’t spoken with them directly, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE BACK IN A BUILDING SITUATION LIKE ’05? “That’s hard. It’s frustrating, but I’m kind of an entrepreneur type of person, so I’m dedicated to whatever it takes to get the job done. I don’t care what I have to do. If it’s being at the shop everyday working with Greg and Chris and all the engineering guys, I’m gonna free up my schedule a little bit so I can get in there and be with them to bridge that gap and get us up to speed a little bit quicker. Maybe we go do a test after the Dover race, schedule something. It would be kind of unrealistic to go before, but see if we can get some more time together right away. I’m willing to do whatever it takes. That’s who they said my guy is and I’m gonna do everything I can. I’m gonna go to dinner with him Monday night, go the shop Tuesday and do whatever I’ve got to do. I’m committed to doing what it takes in this business to be successful. I don’t care what it is, I’m willing to do it.”