As it did this season in the Busch Series, the No. 16 Ford will sport Ameriquest colors in the Nextel Cup Series next season. Credit: Autostock

Ameriquest steps up to the Cup level with Biffle

By now, you'll have noticed that Jack Roush has a lot of cars that go fast on NASCAR tracks.

Racing, especially at the level that Roush and his team do it, is somewhat akin to a nuclear brush eater: The beast has to be fed regularly, and racing teams eat cold, hard cash 24/7.

	Credit: Autostock
	Inside the Numbers Greg Biffle's Cup career Starts 149 Wins 10 Top-fives 29 Top-10s 49 Poles 3 Laps run 42,308 Laps led 2,772 Avg. Start 15.5 Avg. Finish 18.0 Lead-lap finishes 81 Earnings $19,792,908

From Stroh's and Folgers to Valvoline, Citgo, Exide, John Deere and Keystone Light, any number of companies had stepped up to feed the beast on Roush's behalf over the 19 years he has owned his Cup teams, and he was in need of another for 2007.

Roush had to find a replacement for the National Guard on Greg Biffle's No. 16 Ford Fusion after contract talks failed to produce an agreement.

"We worked very hard to put together a program for them to be associated with this program and we couldn't get it done," Biffle said. "I don't know all the details of it, but, personally, I'm really disappointed that we weren't able to put that together.

"It looked like up until the last hour that we were gonna still have the association and have them with us next year at a lesser capacity, but it just couldn't work out. I don't know what the deal was about it, but there were some business things we just couldn't get put together."

Enter Ameriquest, one of the nation's leaders in mortgage lending.

Ameriquest had funded Roush's four-car Busch Series effort this year, with Biffle, Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards and Mark Martin running races in the company's colors, and it made sense for the company to step up with Biffle for the Cup season in 2007.

Biffle said the agreement was long-term, but Ameriquest is focused on 2007, according to Barbara Palmer, a senior VP for the company.

"We're announcing ... just our plans for 2007, but we are committed to the sport, we're committed to Roush Racing and we're committed to Greg, so we'll see what happens beyond 2007."

Still, that means the No. 16 will continue with Biffle and new crew chief Pat Tryson.

"I'm really excited to continue our relationship with Ameriquest," Biffle said. "I had a lot of fun racing the Busch car this year and in only our second race got to Victory Lane. It's been a while since then and we've been trying to get back to Victory Lane. But we've had this planned for quite some time with Ameriquest and it's a long-term deal.

"We're gonna be Nextel Cup racing together for a long time and I'm real excited about it and excited about having Pat and his group next year as part of the 16 team. We look forward to getting ourselves back in the Chase."

For his part, Roush was glad to have Ameriquest in place going forward, especially after the innovative "four stars" program the company funded in the Busch Series this year.

"We certainly enjoy the fact that we trade a new way of doing sponsorship and operating race teams in the Busch Grand National Series this year with four of our Busch cars being sponsored by Ameriquest," Roush said. "We feel and are proud to be involved with them as a premier mortgage company in the American economy here.

"To have a chance to see Greg compete for and be successful in competing for a Nextel Cup championship to go with his Busch and his Truck championships would be a wonderful thing and that is out there. It'll be a huge disappointment to me if we're not able to do that in the very near future with Ameriquest.

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"The development of Greg into Cup racing, the development of Ameriquest to find success that met their parameters in the Busch Series and see them advance with us into the Cup Series is a wonderful thing."

Ameriquest has had some success in the Busch Series with Roush, winning five races with Carl Edwards (3), Biffle and Matt Kenseth. The chances that they will parley that success on the junior circuit to the Cup series are quite good, according to Roush.

Of course, there is the hole that Ameriquest moving up will leave in the Busch Series program.

"Ameriquest will have some involvement with our program next year, but certainly not the four-team dream team arrangement that we had this year," Roush said. "The idea of being able to carry four of our five regular Cup drivers to that program in 2006 meant that they were gonna have a chance to win a lot of races and I think, in fact, we've won five and really provided some stability among our Busch sponsorship activities that really made it easier for the guys to go concentrate on some other things rather than have to chase four sponsors to make those four things work."

In all, Ameriquest becomes the latest in a series of sponsor innovations in the Cup series that will have a far-reaching effect on the way traditional sponsorships are crafted. Several teams have done the primary-switch-week-to-week deal, and have had success at it, but this is the first time in recent memory that a major corporate sponsor has gone from four cars to one in the space of a single season.