Looking forlorn, not necessarily stunned, Roush Fenway Racing crew members slowly pushed the team’s three Fords from pit road through the Richmond International Raceway garage late Saturday night and loaded them into the haulers for an unprecedented competitive detour from NASCAR’s post-season.
There will not be a RFR car eligible for the championship for the first time since NASCAR instituted its Chase for the Sprint Cup playoff in 2004 – a season Kurt Busch hoisted the championship trophy for RFR.
The veteran of the 2015 Roush team, Greg Biffle, came closest to maintaining RFR’s streak of title eligibility. His best and last chance of making the 16-driver Chase field was a victory in Richmond but he was never close, starting 38th and finishing 31st. Teammate Ricky Stenhouse Jr.’s 16th-place showing Saturday was actually the best RFR effort in the regular season finale, but the fact it was only his first top-20 since early July speaks to the struggles this storied and championship team has endured this year.
Biffle, 45, has only three top-10s in 26 races – a career low – and his 20.6 average finish in the No. 16 Ford is also on track to be a career worst. Stenhouse, 31, the 2013 Sunoco Rookie of the Year and a two-time XFINITY Series champion, has only one top 10 – a fourth place at Bristol in April. Similarly his 26.0 average finish is a low-water mark.
Teammate Trevor Bayne, 24, the 2011 Daytona 500 winner, is still looking for his first top-five finish in his first full-time Cup season. His average finish is 25.8, and he is yet to break into the top 25 in the points standings.
It’s been one tough season for one of NASCAR’s most respected and accomplished organizations.
Roush Fenway Racing won back-to-back Cup championships with Matt Kenseth and Busch in 2003-04 and has finished championship runner-up four more times since, most recently with Carl Edwards in 2011.
Edwards, who left RFR for Joe Gibbs Racing this year, is the last driver to pull a Roush Ford into Victory Lane, doing it twice last year at Bristol and Sonoma. This year, he has a pair of wins with JGR – including the Bojangles’ Southern 500 – and is seeded eighth in the Chase, which begins Sunday in Chicago.
It’s hard for Edwards to imagine a Chase without his former team.
“Yes, I am surprised at that just because I know how good those guys are and how hard they work,” Edwards said over the weekend in Richmond.
“It’s like I said before, I would expect at any moment those guys are going to turn the corner. They really do work hard, they’re racers and I see Jimmy Fennig here every week and everybody working hard and I’m sure they’ll get stronger.”
Earlier this season Biffle conceded the group hadn’t quite adapted to new technical specifications.
“Since the ride height rule changed from 2013 to ’14 has really affected us on the Cup level,” he explained. “If you look at that change, which we were excited about and thought getting our cars on the track and what-not, that’s the way the Nationwide (now XFINITY) cars still are. They still have that minimum ride height, and really we’ve kind of struggled when that ride height rule came in.
“We’ve sort of struggled a little bit with that, so we’re still working through figuring that out.”
Biffle does have victories in five (Texas, Dover, Kansas, Loudon and Homestead) of the 10 Chase venues, including three straight at Homestead-Miami Speedway from 2004-06.
Stenhouse told reporters Saturday night that he remained optimistic about the rest of the season and the team is focused on improvement this year while others go after the big trophy.
“We really needed this finish after the past couple of weekends,” Stenhouse said. “We have 10 races remaining and hopefully we can get a win.”