Jamie McMurray, driver of the #26 Crown Royal/IRWIN Tools Ford Fusion, will make his 200th career Sprint Cup start this weekend at Pocono. McMurray met with reporters this morning, and quickly dismissed a report from earlier this week that said he was leaving Roush Fenway Racing at the end of the year. WHAT ARE YOU DOING NEXT YEAR? McMURRAY “The same thing that I’m doing this year: the Crown Royal, #26, with Roush Fenway.” WHY DO YOU THINK [REPORTER] THINKS OTHERWISE? “I don’t know. I’m not a speculator.” THERE IS PLENTY OF SILLY SEASON SPECULATION GOING ON. ARE YOU PUTTING OUT ANY FEELERS? “No, I have not.” HAVE YOUR REPRESENTATIVES? “Not that I am aware of.” HAVE OTHER TEAMS INQUIRED ABOUT YOU? “Not that I’m aware of. It’s hard to answer questions because anything I answer will lead to the next question, and there’s not really anything to talk about. I don’t know where he got his story, and so it’s certainly drawn attention to something that – it’s, I don’t know how you can say it, it’s like whenever there’s not anything to talk about, and you tell the truth, you feel like you need to add to the story so you can make people believe you. But, there’s not anything to talk about.” DO YOU WANT TO BE THERE NEXT YEAR? “Yes.” DO YOU WORRY ABOUT IT? “No.” ARE YOU HAPPY? “Yes. Certainly, we want to run better. I’m at an incredible organization, and we have all the cars and people that are capable of running to win every weekend. So, the move from Ganassi to here I really hoped was going to be able to put me in the chase every year, and that we’d contend to win races on a regular basis, and our performance hasn’t been as good what’s expected – whether it’s from me, the race team or the sponsor. So, you want to continue to get better, and the car of tomorrow has brought some new challenges. The first four or five races we didn’t run bad, but we just seemed to have bad luck or freaky things would happen to us, and it just put us in a really bad position. But the last four or five weeks have been pretty good, and you just try to continue and build on that. The thing about racing is that if you run well for four weeks everything’s great, and if you run bad for two it seems like you need to go find somewhere else to drive, they say. Everything is fine here. I don’t really know what the basis of his story was.” HAVE YOU TALKED TO JACK ROUSH OR GEOFF SMITH ABOUT IT? “Well, when all of it came up, we just all talked and I never asked to get out of my contract and they never said that they were going to release me from my contract. There was never any discussion of any of that. So, we just were all trying to figure out where it came from.” (Ford Racing PR)(6-6-2008)
