DOVER, Del. -- Drew Blickensderfer burst into laughter Sunday evening in Dover International Speedway's garage area when he was asked if breaking up his team and reorganizing it had been discussed by Roush Fenway Racing.

"No, no talk of that," said Blickensderfer, crew chief of the No. 17. "We need to go win a race or two and make sure there's no talk of that."

“

We have a list of ideas of what we think we're getting beat by that's a mile long, but if you unload 35th you're scrambling just to try to salvage the weekend and you can't get ahead.

”

-- DREW BLICKENSDERFER

Driver Matt Kenseth's strong third-place finish in the AAA 400 enabled Blickensderfer to laugh, rather than swing at the questioner, swear or even cry, given the absolutely cryptically imperfect season he and his team had endured.

"This is very good," Blickensderfer said.

The question came because not only had Kenseth's team missed the playoffs for the first time in the Chase's six years, but Sunday was only their second top-five finish in the past 15 races. Ironically enough, their last had come at Dover in June, when Kenseth finished fourth.

"I kind of had a conversation, about this time last year with a couple other managers in the shop, that if we could put morale or good spirits in a syringe and inject some of our guys with it, it would be big," Blickensderfer said. "Because you can only [so often] give them the line, 'You know, everything's getting better and we're working hard.' I mean, people bust their butts seven days a week and they want to see something happen.

"And they haven't seen it in so long, so to be able to get a good finish it'll be easier to go to work [Monday] for everybody, I'm sure."

Kenseth was one of only two non-Chase drivers -- along with A.J. Allmendinger in seventh -- to finish in the top 10 on Sunday. The ubiquity of the Chase was proven by the fact that all the questions Kenseth was asked, save one, dealt with his opinions of the Chase.

But he knew what his finish meant.

"It ended up being really good," Kenseth said of his run, the best of the seven Fords in the field. "We didn't qualify very good [23rd] but we were really happy with our car. When the race started I didn't think we were quite as good as we were [in practice on Saturday], but we were able to have really good pit stops."

Blickensderfer said having the car close when it came out of the transporter on Friday was a key.

"Oh yeah, that was obviously what we'd missed the last few weeks, is that we unloaded close enough to where you could try things and do things you think you're getting beat by," Blickensderfer said. "We have a list of ideas of what we think we're getting beat by that's a mile long, but if you unload 35th you're scrambling just to try to salvage the weekend and you can't get ahead.

"And this week we got to try different things and always knew we could go back to 'Oh, that was pretty good and we can go back to that if we don't excel.' "

Kenseth had the fastest last lap, 24.82 seconds, of any of the 32 cars still running; a reason why race winner Jimmie Johnson said he'd feared Kenseth the most.

"I didn't see him all day long," Johnson said of Kenseth, "and then he showed up at the end and I thought, 'Uh, oh.' "

“

[Sunday] is a step in the right direction. We had really good pit stops. Our car was reasonable, it wasn't blazing fast, and we were able to get a good finish.

”

-- MATT KENSETH

But Kenseth said he had his troubles, despite the quality of his finish.

"The tire blackened the track up, but for whatever reason it made it really, really difficult to pass," Kenseth said. "We got most of our track position through pit stops and restarts.

"I kept getting in the proper lane on restarts and my car would run for two laps, and I'd get two or three spots. And you had to do it right there because there weren't many people that could pass very good. So we had a nice, solid day on pit road. And the car was OK, also, and I was able to get a decent finish out of it."

With the way his cars faltered Sunday -- with Carl Edwards finishing 11th and Greg Biffle 13th, leaving them 11th and ninth in the Chase -- had owner Jack Roush morosely striding from pit road into the driver/owner coach lot with just under 30 laps to go.

Edwards, at least, drew some pleasure from his teammate's success.

"Bob [Osborne, crew chief] made good calls, but our mousetrap just wasn't good enough [Sunday]," Edwards said. "Matt was good, so we'll go back and learn from that. It's frustrating, but not as bad as it could've been, you know?"

Kenseth, who's solidly placed himself 13th in points, said his outlook won't change for next weekend at Kansas. He'd been asked what Edwards could do to get into contention.

"Everybody at Roush Fenway is working really hard to get the cars better, to be competitive. We got behind a little, and we're working hard to get that back.

"So I'd like to say [Sunday] is a step in the right direction. We had really good pit stops. Our car was reasonable, it wasn't blazing fast, and we were able to get a good finish."

Blickensderfer, who looked as if he'd had a three-ton weight removed from his young shoulders as he strode away from his hauler with RFR general manager Robbie Reiser, engineer Chip Bolin and engineering head Chris Andrews, was optimistic as he looked ahead to Kansas.

"Probably a lot better because at Michigan, one of the last bigger tracks we had, we ran pretty good," Blickensderfer said. "We ran up to the lead and we ran with [Johnson] and the 5 [championship leader Mark Martin], which a lot of the people haven't been able to do a lot of the year.

"We had to save fuel at the end [while running in the top five], so that hurt us a little bit [finishing 14th]. But we had a good direction at Michigan and similar lines to what we had in the car this week, so obviously we're looking forward to going to Kansas."