| | COMEBACK | Is 2008 the year Biffle returns to his championship form? | |
| | By Rea White / FOXSports.com The Roush Fenway Racing driver seems to think his team has a solid handle on NASCAR's new car model after the organization closed 2007 with strong runs. While he says the group was still not where it needed to be in terms of performance, he thinks that his team can pick up where it left off and be a threat this year.
Biffle has several assets in his corner as he looks to improve, including a few more months of working with crew chief Greg Erwin, a better understanding of the new car and former Matt Kenseth crew chief Robbie Reiser working as the Roush Fenway general manager. Each of those things should play a role in helping Biffle return to the form he showcased in 2005, when he finished as the Cup series runner-up.
As he looks back over last season, Biffle sees a team that was constantly learning and improving in NASCAR's new model, which was used in 16 races. Now, he sees one ready for the full-season run with it.
He points out that in the model's final three races last season, his team — and Roush Fenway in general — showed marked improvement. There's reason to believe that will continue this year.
"The last time we were in that race car, we got second and potentially could have won the race," he says. "That's big confidence. At the beginning of the season, we were horrible. I think we'll all admit that. We weren't even close, and at the end of the season we weren't where we needed to be, but we were certainly a heck of a lot better.
"I look forward to starting off this season, hopefully, with where we left off last year."
Biffle says it's hard to list any one thing that the team has worked on with the car. While the team tested heavily and worked in the wind tunnel and with seven-post chassis rigs over the course of the last year, Biffle said that it found an odd thing.
Once the team was at the track, there wasn't a lot that could be done to make the car faster. Accustomed to using his technical knowledge to suggest changes to his crew chief, he discovered that nothing really made that much difference.
"What I've found in this car is that whatever they do on the simulation models with engineering and the computers and the seven-post rigs, we'd show up at the race track with a recommended setup and we couldn't adjust on the car," he says. "I couldn't adjust on it as a driver.' I'm like, 'Change this front swaybar. No, put that one back. Put a bigger one in it. No, put that one back.' There was nothing I could do to make it any better when we showed up at the race track."
That led to a certain amount of discontent for a driver who was used to being able to add speed to his car with changes that he made.
"That's a little bit frustrating with this car, that before it was the driver that really determined what would make the car go fast. Now, we're showing up at the race track so close to being optimized that there isn't a lot that's left for us."
Crew chief Greg Erwin admits that teams are just learning how to adapt to this model, how to make changes that will benefit its performance in a race.
To aid that learning curve, he says that all of the Roush Fenway teams have worked together, delegating things and trying not to duplicate what one another is doing in an effort to gain a broader understanding of the model.
"Learning how to adjust on this new-style car is something that we're just kind of getting our hands wrapped around," Erwin says.
Don't take that as a complaint, though, as testing begins and the new season looms on the horizon. These men are ready to go.
Biffle suggests that the brief NASCAR Sprint Cup off-season may have been a little on the long side. He's clearly ready to get going — and to see if this will be the year his team returns to the top.
In December, he went snow skiing in Colorado, to Cabo and to his home state of Washington to visit with his parents. But his mind wasn't completely off racing.
"It kind of got to be an 11-day vacation and I was kind of glad to get back home," he says. "I won't lie to you, we all moan and groan about having to come back to work and having to come back to Daytona today, but part of you enjoys the time off and wants to continue to do that, but the other part of me is eager to get back at it and get back in the race car and get back going again.
"It's just the reality of it. We'd all like to have a couple more weeks or a couple more months or whatever, but I think deep down inside we're all excited about getting back going and testing at Daytona — getting the season started again."
| | Posted January 14, 2008 , 5:45 pm EST
Last Updated January 14, 2008 , 5:47 pm EST | | | | | | |
