| | FAKE-OUT | Kenseth, Reiser still involved | |
| | By Bruce Martin / SportsIllustrated.com DAYTONA BEACH, FL -- Matt Kenseth couldn't help but laugh when asked what life was like without Robbie Reiser as his crew chief.
"It's not like we got divorced," Kenseth quipped. "I still see him as much as I saw him before. At the race track, he won't be there all weekend and that will be different, but he's still involved in everything we do, everything that everybody is doing at Roush Fenway. He's trying to make a difference from there."
It's hard to imagine Kenseth without Reiser or, for that matter, Reiser without Kenseth. The two Wisconsin natives played a vital role in each other's careers, both heading south to NASCAR in 1997 to compete in the Busch Series.
Three years later, team owner Jack Roush moved Kenseth up to NASCAR's premier series and Reiser was his crew chief. It was Kenseth - not Dale Earnhardt Jr. - who was named Rookie of the Year that season as he combined with Reiser to win one race in 2000.
They would celebrate the NASCAR Cup title in 2003 and enjoyed success together by making The Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup every year since its inception in 2004.
Sixteen Cup victories and $49,358,563 in winnings later, the relationship between the two has changed. Rather than seeing Reiser on top of his pit box plotting race strategy, Kenseth will deal with Chip Bolin, who formerly was the team's lead engineer.
"Chip has been there the whole time," Kenseth said. "He has been there as nearly as long as Robbie has and as long as I've been here. Over the last year or two the sport has become a lot more technical. Chip was doing most of the car science any way. He was the lead engineer and he was running the stuff in the computers all week and figuring out what we needed to run in the cars."
Reiser moves upstairs to the position of team manger, taking over a role vacated by longtime Roush employee Max Jones, who went to work across the street for Yates Racing.
Now, instead of focusing his efforts on Kenseth's No. 17 car, Reiser will plot and scheme for ways to make all five Roush Fenway cars successful in 2008.
Kenseth's teammates already have seen big dividends from Reiser's new role.
"It's going to be the single most benefit for Roush Fenway," said Greg Biffle of Reiser. "We have not had a competition director before in our company - never. And all these other teams have them. They have that guy that helps bring all the technology together and make it work as a whole. By doing that, by putting Robbie in that position, it's going to help bridge that gap.
"He's a great people person. He understands these cars as good as any crew chief does. He is going to help spread that technology and know what we need to be working on."
Biffle noted one immediate benefit followed pre-season testing at Daytona International Speedway in January as teams prepared for next Sunday's 50th Daytona 500.
"We all went to Daytona and (squawked) about these cares vibrating," Biffle said. "Robbie Reiser comes here at 5 a.m. and sits down in his office and creates a solution and gets all the cars and transmissions and driveshafts and all the parts together and sends a team to Nashville and tests it that quick. It's been vibrating forever. We've been complaining about it forever. Robbie Reiser said that's not going to happen anymore.
"That's what we need to catch up to these guys down the road. He's going to make that difference."
Bolin's new position also should help Kenseth continue his stature as one of NASCAR's most consistent drivers. Many of the same qualities that made Bolin a top engineer will be transferred to his new role as crew chief.
"I've always enjoyed working on the cars, figuring out chassis setups and trying to figure out the next best thing," Bolin said.
A Clemson graduate, Bolin started as an intern for Andy Petree Racing in 1996.
"Up until then, the only thing I knew about NASCAR is what car Cale Yarborough drove, and that was about it," Bolin said. "Whenever I interviewed for the intern job at Andy Petree's, I didn't know who Andy Petree or (APR drivers at the time) Harry Gant or Ken Schrader was. It was just something that was in the automotive industry that I could get interested and involved in."
Bolin's first season with Roush was in 1999 the same year that Kenseth and Reiser came on board.
"Matt did a five-race deal that year," Bolin recalled. "He had always built his own shocks, but obviously he couldn't build shocks for both his Busch car and his Cup car so, since my previous experience with Andy Petree was primarily with shocks, I became the 'shock guy' on the No. 17 team at Roush.
"Since he was a rookie, that also meant we could test 12 times that season, and when we went to test, I was the engineer that went along and doubled as the shock guy."
Bolin became the full-time team engineer in 2001 but got his first experience as a crew chief last season when Reiser began a four-race suspension for failing a post-qualifying technical inspection for the Daytona 500.
In only his second race as acting crew chief, Bolin scored his first career victory at California Speedway in the Auto Club 500. Bolin finished out his brief stint as interim crew chief with a fourth-place finish at Las Vegas and a third-place finish at Atlanta.
Reiser's desire to move out of the crew chief role was a long time coming, according to team owner Roush. But when it came time for find a replacement, the choice was easy.
"The thing that happened is Robbie told me 18-24 months ago that he was at the end of his crew chief career, that he was going to do something different," Roush said. "He wasn't telling me that he wanted to do that with me but he was going to do that generally.
"When Max Jones made his decision that he wanted to move with Doug Yates and work with his team, then it gave me the first opportunity to meet what I thought was Robbie's goal to stop being a crew chief and take a more behind-the-scenes role. He brings strengths and he brings weaknesses, but his strengths are many more than his weaknesses."
When it comes to his strengths, Kenseth knows better than anyone what Reiser can do.
"He is a great organizer and a great motivator," Kenseth said. "I think those are the main two things. I think the whole shop is going to be more organized. He is going to run a tighter ship than they have ever run here before.
"If he didn't think he could make more of a difference for the 17 and the rest of the team, I don't think he would have ever taken the job."
| | Posted February 09, 2008 , 11:55 pm EST
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