#16-Greg Biffle spoke about a few issues with members of the media on Friday at AMS:
Q) WHAT HAS BEEN WRONG WITH ROUSH FENWAY THIS YEAR?
Biffle: ‘I wasn’t specifically calling our team out, I was more specifically calling our organization as a whole, Roush Fenway. We let go of our guy who was the head of engineering a while back. We don’t want to point fingers in our organization, but we plain and simply didn’t keep up with the Joneses. We got behind in simulation. We are still behind in simulation. We’re trying to roll out a new model that is gonna carry us on into the future and make us as equal as some of these other teams are. And quite honestly the worst we ran, the harder we worked, the more we tested, the more meetings we had, the worse we ran because we were pushing down a wrong road on aerodynamics and our theory and balance and everything else. You can clearly see that it’s plain and simple we were headed kind of in the wrong direction and since we’ve kind of righted that ship, we’ve really woke up so to speak and saw what we were doing wrong. We don’t know everything yet, but we saw a lot of what we were doing wrong. Michigan is a perfect example. I had a 28th-place car at Michigan in the first race and that’s one of my best race tracks with four wins, and that was so devastating for us. We finished 20th, but literally had a 28th-place car and we go back there we had a 10th-place car ‘ a solid 10th-place car, maybe a little better than that. So that’s a huge swing. We can’t celebrate yet because we weren’t leading the race and leading laps, but that’s a huge celebration within the organization that we kind of turned the corner and are going in the right direction. That’s all I care about is getting the trajectory going better not worse, then we’ll win races and we’ll lead laps. But it’s just gonna take a little bit of time.’
Q) HAS PENSKE’S SUCCESS ADDED TO THE FRUSTRTION?
Biffle: ‘It’s done both. It’s added to the frustration, but at the same time it’s given us the confidence that these cars are capable of that. And Penske has helped us a ton. Penske has allowed us to compare our cars to their cars some, which has shed some light in some areas that maybe we needed to work, and they’re only gonna share so many things with us through our alliance with Ford, and we appreciate the help we’ve gotten from them. We’re looking at their cars more than the competition trying to figure out how to make cars the same because we have the same type of car. We’ll get there. Unfortunately, this season has felt frustrating for us. Now Carl is a helluva a driver and he’s put himself in position and won some races, but he’ll admit too that we’re not certainly where we need to be – competitive enough ‘ but we’re getting there.’(in part from Ford Racing)(8-31-2014)
