Embittered Roush not willing to give up his goal

HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- The question came, as everyone expected it would as darkness fell over Homestead-Miami Speedway, and multiple NASCAR team owner Jack Roush's reply could hardly be considered a surprise.

TIMELINE  •  Nov. 3: Martin's car fails post-race inspection  •  Nov. 4: Martin penalized 25 points for coil infraction  •  Nov. 5: Roush ponders challenges to penalty  •  Nov. 9: Roush probably will not appeal penalty  •  Nov. 11: Roush Racing might file appeal  •  Nov. 13: Commission to hear Roush appeal  •  Nov. 16: Roush's appeal denied

"Jack Roush ... has much less interest in a Winston Cup championship than I ever have before based on the way I've been consistently treated," Roush said, "but that doesn't mean that my pain to pleasure ratio is such that I won't come back and do it again.

"We like what we do -- we enjoy the challenge."

That's good news to millions of Ford racing fans around the world.

When the moon rose over Miami Sunday night, Roush held a double-armful of success -- marked by veteran lead driver Mark Martin's second place finish in the Winston Cup standings and outrageous youngster Kurt Busch's third place.

What's more, Roush was absolutely sunning himself in the glow of victories in four of the last five races of the season: Three courtesy of Busch, including Sunday's Ford 400 and the fourth by another up-and-coming young man, Martin's prot?g? Matt Kenseth -- who was eighth in the standings.

REACTION Jack Roush comments on the commission's ruling. Play video

And it didn't end there. Friday night in Orlando, Fla., Roush will celebrate his second NASCAR championship courtesy another relative youngster, Greg Biffle -- who has won in the last three years the Craftsman Truck Series championship, Busch Series Raybestos Rookie of the Year and 2002 Busch Series championship.

What does the future hold for Roush? Martin says his career -- which holds 13 top-10 Winston Cup points finishes in the last 14 years, including four second places -- is revitalized.

Jeff Burton, who has supposed to have been a championship contender the last two years but only rallied to finish 12th in 2002, is teamed with new crew chief Paul Andrews -- a former championship winner with whom he scored top-12 finishes in seven of the last 10 races since Andrews joined.

Kenseth won a Winston Cup leading five races, Busch won four, and with Martin's single victory, Roush claimed almost a full third of the available race wins.

Jack Roush's year  Jack Roush's cars won 10 races -- four more than any other team.  Matt Kenseth: 5 wins  Kurt Busch: 4 wins  Mark Martin: 1 win

He has another star on the horizon in the Truck Series in youthful Jon Wood -- and maybe the best of all of the above -- Busch's 17-year-old brother Kyle, waiting in the wings to rejoin the Truck Series in May 2003 when he turns 18.

So there's no question, Roush will continue the fight.

But after the latest blow from NASCAR, in the form of the denial by the National Stock Car Racing Commission of his organization's appeal of a 25-point penalty to Martin, Roush and a $5,000 fine to Martin's crew chief Ben Leslie -- the thrill is gone for the owner.

Pounding him over the years has been a 46-point deduction to Martin in 1990 for an unapproved carburetor spacer. Martin lost the championship that year to the late Dale Earnhardt by 26 points.

In 1999, Biffle received a 120-point Craftsman Truck Series deduction for a manifold that Roush said was used numerous times but was declared illegal after Biffle won a race in September at Las Vegas. He lost that championship to Jack Sprague.

Earlier this season, Kenseth and Martin and their crew chiefs were hit with heavy monetary fines after they won races and their cars were found to be too low in post-race inspection.

Roush has been a racer, and a fighter all his life. His survival of an experimental ultra-light aircraft crash last spring proves that without a doubt.

So it's no surprise that, despite his bitterness, Roush would say there was no other way to look at it, considering the lifestyle that anyone involved in the sport readily accepts.

"This is what we do -- NASCAR is a life," Roush said. "When you think about going to the races 36 times for the points schedule and the extra weeks for The Winston and the (10-day) Daytona (Speedweeks) program, it's a life.

"There's not much room around the racing for any of us to do anything else of consequence, other than to spend some time with our families. So we've got to go back and get ourselves organized to move forward.

Roush said that, after Sunday's race he keyed his microphone that was connected to Martin, Leslie and the rest of the crew and gave them a message, saying "This is our 15th year and 14 times before we've packed up our stuff after the last race and we've gone to our shop and we've made a plan for next year trying to understand what our weaknesses were and what our strengths were and to minimize our negatives and accentuate the positives."

"I re-committed us to go and do that again as we have so many times before," Roush said.

But there is one price, and it's one he has paid twice in terms of lost championships; and once in terms of the supreme frustration of knowing he had what he and his group considered an airtight case for reducing its penalty, which failed to materialize last Saturday morning.

"We wish we had a better justice system to adjudicate the issues as they relate to penalties and to punishments that NASCAR deals out, but that's the way it is," Roush said. "What I mean is in a circumstance where there is a belief by somebody that they've been treated unfairly by a penalty, we have no choice today but to go into a NASCAR court that has, over a period of time, been very much a rubber stamp of whatever the initial decision was.

"I made the suggestion when I was in the proceeding the other day. They asked me, 'Do you feel good about what's happening here?' And I said, 'Well, I'd feel much better if it was more like the Roman English form of justice that we as Americans have come to expect.

"I'd like to see some of my peers around, some more car owners and some drivers or other people that were experts in the industry that were not associated with NASCAR in particular, and that's not what we have here.'"

Sunday he said he would move on.

"So we're in and we'll put that aside and say that if we win a championship sometime in the future with Mark, that'll be great," Roush said. "I can't imagine for the next five years what they (NASCAR) could do to stop a number of these guys -- Kurt and Matt and Jeff and Mark -- from having a number of championships as they go.

"It would be a travesty if they're not able to with the way they're running."