Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion, is in fourth place in the points standings heading into this weekend’s race at Texas Motor Speedway. Kenseth, who has a victory (at California) and three top-fives through the first six races of the season, won at Texas in 2002.

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – THERE WASN’T MUCH PRACTICE TODAY. WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS FOR THE RACE THIS WEEKEND? “We didn’t get a whole bunch of practice in, just a little bit in race trim, we didn’t work on qualifying, so if we do qualify here it’ll kind of be a surprise here to all of us, what the car drives like. But the track had a lot of grip today, it was real cool, it seemed like everybody was handling pretty good. So, I don’t think we learned much today. I think, regardless of whether we qualify or not, I think tomorrow will be where we’ll probably learn a little more about the race and see how we stack up compared to our competition.”

THE YEAR TO DATE: WHAT DO YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT, AND WHAT DO FEEL HASN’T GONE AS WELL AS YOU WOULD’VE LIKED? “The best things, a couple of things: our pit stops have been great; they’ve been more consistent this year than they were last year – we changed that group around a little bit and they’ve even gotten stronger. One of our stronger suits has been pit road this year. I feel good about being able to win a race, I feel good about finishing better than what we’ve been running. We haven’t really run as good as our finishes look like – and finishing better than you run is important to gather points, and that helps make up a lot of points that we lost. The other thing I don’t feel good about is we haven’t run as good the last three or four or five weeks as we need to to be a serious contender. We haven’t really been like them top few guys. But, we’ve got some work to do to get our stuff running better, but we have been finishing good.”

WHY NO REPEAT WINNER AT TEXAS IN 12 PREVIOUS RACES? “I don’t really know. Part of it’s probably the track’s been reconfigured a couple times and repaved a couple of times, and when you do that it kind of opens it up to maybe somebody different hitting it just right that weekend, because the tracks’ kind of new to everybody. Other than that, I don’t really know, to be honest with you. I think some of it’s probably just the way things went down, probably, a little bit of a fluke or maybe a little bit of luck or whatever. So, there hasn’t been just one team that really got a hold of it and been able to do the things that Jimmie Johnson’s done to Charlotte and Vegas and stuff like that, nobody’s been able to do that yet. It doesn’t mean that won’t happen in the future, but certainly you could have another first-time winner this week; there’s a lot of great guys that haven’t won here yet. And next year I assume it’ll be a COT race and then that kind of opens up a whole new deal again, too. So, certainly, it could keep up for a while. Being one of the guys who have been able to win here, I hope it doesn’t, but it certainly could.”

WITH AN ONGOING DOMINANCE OF CHEVROLET AS A MANUFACTURER, DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AS THE MAIN ANCHOR FORD DRIVER? YOU SEEM TO BE THE MOST SUCCESS FORD DRIVER RECENTLY. “I haven’t really thought about it like that. I guess if you look at last year, you look at the points, whatever, we had the best-running Ford, but I don’t really look at the manufacturer thing as much, I more look at the race-team thing and look at how we’ve got our stuff running compared to theirs. I don’t think these days there’s a big advantage or a disadvantage through the manufacturers. Somebody might have something a little bit better. Toyota might have a little bit better engine right now than everybody, or somebody might have a little bit of something – but, especially COT cars, they’re all as close to the same as you can get them. Even the car, whatever you want to call it, the car we’re racing today, are pretty similar. I don’t think aerowise there’s a big disadvantage or advantage for the makes. I think they’re all pretty equal.”

JUST AS A GROUP OF CARS, ARE THESE BIG CHEVROLET TEAMS THREATENING TO GET AWAY FROM EVERYBODY ELSE, THE FORDS AND ROUSH RACING, SPECIFICALLY? “I don’t think so. Hendrick has four teams, we have five and it’ll be four soon. Like I say, the manufacturer thing, I don’t think’s a big deal. I think you could give Chad Knaus and Jimmie Johnson any make of car and they’d figure out how to win with it. I don’t think it’s really necessarily a manufacturer thing where they have a big advantage. Certainly, if you look at the numbers, there’s more Chevrolet teams – if there’s more cars in the field, they’re numbers are going to be better, so they’re going to have more good finishes, obviously, because there is more of them. But I still think it’s a team thing. We just have got to keep working on our stuff. We have the same opportunities everybody else does, same rules to work with, we’ve just got to work on it hard and get it figured out. Hendrick, they’ve always done a great job, and so has Gibbs and all them guys. But, it’s tough to keep up with them guys, and they did a good job with their COT stuff, they won the first two races, and we’ve been a little behind on that, so that’s just something we’ve got to keep working on and get it better.”

HOW IS THE STRENGTH OF ROUSH OVERALL? “I think it’s pretty good. I think this year we have the potential to finish strong than what we had last year. When Jamie and Jimmy didn’t start off well together and they took Jimmy Fennig out of there and moved him to the Busch shop, that really hurt the organization a lot. They took Wally Brown, our engineer, and moved him to Carl’s crew chief, and took Carl’s crew chief away from him and gave him Jamie’s. It just mixed everything up, and it really hurt the engineering department. Having Jimmy away from the shop really hurt. And this year they’ve been able to get Chris Andrews come in to head up the engine department, get Jimmy back in there with David, and got Larry Carter with Jamie, which they’ve been working really great together. They mixed things up but we brought people in, you know, we didn’t rob Peter to pay Paul, and take somebody out of a department and make it weaker. And I think that’s what happened to us last year. We just took the people we had and moved them out of there and put them in different positions and weren’t able to finish strong. So I think this year we’ve got a lot better potential to keep developing, keep getting stronger as the year goes on, where last year we started off really strong and just kind of had a steady decline, in my opinion, and by the end of the year didn’t have what we needed to win with. So I’m hoping it’ll be the opposite this year, although we started fairly strong, but I’m hoping and I think that our performance should improve as we go on, should get caught up on some stuff, get caught up on the Car of Tomorrow and keep making it better, and get caught up on our current car and keep making it better for the end of the year. I have a hope that we’re fairly strong now but I have a hope that we’ll be stronger at the end of the year.”

HENDRICK IS GOING AFTER ITS FIFTH CONSECUTIVE VICTORY THIS WEEKEND. EVERYBODY IS SAYING PART OF THE REASON FOR THEIR SUCCESS IS THE SHARING OF INFORMATION. THAT ORGANIZATION HAS BEEN PRETTY CONSISTENT IN TERMS OF CREW CHIEFS; IS IT MORE DIFFICULT TO SHARE INFORMATION WHEN CREW CHIEFS ARE MOVING AROUND? “We all share all of our information. We’ve always done that since right before Burton left, he kind of put it together and all the crew chiefs worked together and all the drivers worked together. We all know what’s in each other’s cars, so that’s all great, but sharing information is only as good as the information is to share. I mean, if we’re all running 15th and we’re sharing information, great, we’ve all got 15th-place information. You still have to be figuring stuff out and making it better, hoping one of the cars is one of the better cars out there that you can look at. So I think that’s the important thing: the quality of the information as much as it is sharing it obviously. When you’re running good and you’re sharing the stuff, but when you’re not you’ve got to go out and learn and figure it out together to get it figured out.”

AT ROUSH, HAVE YOU EVER TAKEN ANOTHER DRIVER’S SETUP AND WON A RACE, LIKE HENDRICK DID AT MARTINSVILLE? “I don’t know if it’s ever worked exactly like that, but certainly we’ve used a lot of each other’s stuff through the years. And before the setups changed as much as they did, and aerodynamics became as important, we used to use each others’s stuff a lot more. When I first started there I used a lot of Jeff Burton’s stuff, and lot of Mark Martin’s stuff, and we’d put one of their setups and go start at the race track with one of their setups and work around it. We kind of figure dit out back then. If I could look at Kurt’s setup and he was running good, and then I looked at my setup, I knew there were two or three things I needed to be different than his setup to make my car drive like it needed to drive. We kind of got used to that, but as the years went on and people got mixed around and all this stuff has happened, it hasn’t been quite that easy. We’re still working on that. I think with the Car of Tomorrow you’ll be able to do that more than ever because the cars are so close to the same.”

WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE ANOTHER WEEK WITH THE COT OR ARE YOU GLAD TO BE BACK WITH THE OLD CAR AT A TRACK WITH WHICH YOU’RE FAMILIAR? “As a driver who likes to drive fast and do all that, it’s more fun to get back in these cars because they feel more like race cars. They go faster, they have more downforce. That part is good. But when you’re all in the same car, it doesn’t matter. It’s fun to get in because you go out and go fast and it stuck to the track and do all that stuff, but by this time next year, the year after, we probably won’t give it a second thought. The cars will be the same again, and we’ll be racing the same thing. They’ll drive different that what we have today, but at that time we’ll all be in the same boat and we’ll be sued to it more.”

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO RACE WELL AT TEXAS? “Just have a good-handling car. It flattens out off the corner, the transitions are real flat in and out of the corner, and to keep your car turning good enough without being too loose like anywhere else, it’s kind of the key. Lately the track has widened out, you’ve been able to run the top or the bottom, and I also think it’s important to have a car that’ll work in both grooves, you know, if you get tight behind somebody, if you can move up the track and get around the top just as fast as you’re getting around the bottom, that’s going to be a big help.”

Rookie David Ragan, driver of the No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion, is 19th in the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup points standings heading into this weekend’s Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway. On Thursday, Ragan won the pole for the O’Reilly 300 Busch race. His time of 28.263 seconds was better than two-tenths faster than the next-fastest time.

DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion – YOU ARE IN YOUR FIRST FULL YEAR IN NEXTEL CUP. ARE YOU ADJUSTING TO THE ROUTINE? “A little bit. The last two weeks have kind of been a little different, having the Busch cars off at Martinsville and then last weekend having the Cups cars off while we were at Nashville. I feel like we’re starting to get in that rhythm of the summer. I know May is probably one of our busier months, leading into the summer. We’re trying to get some last-minute testing in, and getting ready for the road courses. I’m kind of feeling comfortable and feeling like we belong here. We have a list of a few things that we need to work on, so I feel like we’re on the right path to becoming a better race team.”

HOW IMPORTANT WAS YOUR 15TH-PLACE FINISH IN YOUR RETURN TRIP TO MARTINSVILLE? “It was good. I knew all along that we had a car capable of running that well – even last year, if I would’ve done a few things a little different. But I’m just a lot better, lot smarter race-car driver than I was a year ago, and hopefully a year from now I’ll be that much better. So, I think that Martinsville, it’s my style of race track – as of now that’s the kind of race track I have the most experience on, the short tracks, the half-mile tracks I grew up racing on. That was a good run for us, we picked up some more points. That’s what it’s all about for the first half of the year is just trying to get some solid top-15, top-20 runs in to stay in that top 20 in points.”

CAN YOU BUILD ON CONFIDENCE WHEN YOU BACK UP A SOLID RUN AT MARTINSVILLE WITH WINNING THE BUSCH SERIES POLE HERE? DOES EACH SUCCESS BUILD ON THE LAST SUCCESS? “Oh, definitely. Anything we can use in our rookie season, we’re going to use. I mean, we’re still riding off our fifth-place finish at Daytona a little bit. We feel like we’ve had some strong runs here this year, we know some few areas we need to improve on, but everything that’s positive we try to remember and build, but at that same time, things that are negative we definitely make attention and try to work on those things.”

NO CAR OF TOMORROW AT TEXAS. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE KEYS THAT YOUR RACE TEAM ARE LOOKING AT THIS WEEKEND? “Just to get comfortable in the car where you can go fast and you’re not over-driving it, trying to do something that it’s not supposed to. The big thing this weekend is just to get a basic a good qualifying run in. We want to get where we’re at least qualifying in the top-20, top-25, that’s one of our goals. We’ve been pretty good race-trim-wise over the past few weeks. It’s just a matter that we’ve got to have a little bit better track position at the start of the race, because I seem to struggle a little bit the first 50 laps or so, and until that first pit stop we’re usually off a little bit. So we just need to work really hard on our car balance the first half of the race so we don’t fall so far behind. But, get out of here with another top-15, a top-20 run, and going into Phoenix, another COT race, we’ve still got our work cut out for us on the COT program, then we go to Talladega, so we’ve got some good tracks coming up, I think.”