Roush Says Team OK: Jack Roush insists his NASCAR empire is not in a slump. That, despite only two combined top-5 finishes and six top-10s in 32 starts this year among Mark Martin, Jeff Burton, Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch. Until this year, Roush has always had championship-caliber teams. Martin has been top-10 in 12 of his 13 full seasons, nine of them within the top five. Burton has been top-5 in four of his five seasons with Roush. Never has the organization struggled like this. But Roush dismisses most of it as bad luck. “How can an owner prepare for some of what’s happened to us?” he said over the weekend. “We’ve had a hard year because we’ve been involved in wrecks and had structural failures and broken parts that we’ve never broken before. Jeff had a tire problem at Bristol that wasn’t his fault, and when he ran into Mark, we lost two cars right there. Over the winter we prepared our engineering effort, our aero program, our chassis program and our motor program better than ever. But we couldn’t have prepared for the chain of events that have occurred one after the other. We understand some of the parts failures, so I’ve taken steps to see they don’t happen again. If you’re talking about points, yes, we’re struggling. But we’ve had some very good runs this year.”(Daily Press)(4-11-2001)
