Organization hopes to boost program that struggled in 2014
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After last season's bottoming-out, Roush Fenway Racing headed into the offseason needing an injection -- of performance, new attitudes and fresh faces. Definitive changes have transformed the latter two, and the team's hope is that the former will follow suit.
Roush Fenway didn't use name tags for its refreshed roster during last week's presentation at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom, but it may as well have. New drivers in both the NASCAR Sprint Cup and XFINITY Series have joined the mix, and new engineers are bent on deconstructing the team's shortcomings and closing its technology deficit.
If first impressions mean anything, the team's first media session with a new core in the competition department showed a loose, enthused group aiming to climb from the performance valley of 2014.
"I think Roush Fenway has kind of been the same for a long time," said Ricky Stenhouse Jr., a Roush mainstay since 2009, now entering his third NASCAR Sprint Cup season, "and when you're promoting from within all the time, the guys that you're promoting kind of learn from the guys ahead of them, everything kind of stays the same. At some point, it just kind of gets stale. With the new faces, we kind of went all-in."
On the driving side, the personnel may be new to Roush Fenway but are familiar to most in the NASCAR crowd. Longtime Ford driver Trevor Bayne makes the jump to a full-time Sprint Cup ride in Roush's hallowed No. 6, and former truck standout Darrell Wallace Jr. joins veteran Elliott Sadler to round out the team's new look on the XFINITY circuit.
But some of the most important changes have taken place behind the scenes, with two key hirings last November. Mark McArdle has joined the Roush Fenway fold as its engineering director on the Sprint Cup and XFINITY side after a successful stint at Richard Childress Racing. Kevin Kidd signs on as the Sprint Cup Series team manager in charge of at-track operations, moving over from Joe Gibbs Racing.
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The new dynamic, plus a freshening of the team shop, has already helped the team break some of its old patterns.
"Problem-solving is very, very difficult," said Greg Biffle, Roush Fenway's longest-tenured driver. "We recognized when there are single-car teams running better than our cars were that we had a fundamental problem right from the very beginning. It wasn't until we brought in some new blood and got a 10,000-foot view of what we're looking at, and kind of dissected the car all the way down to the chassis."
Robbie Reiser remains in place as the team's general manager, a position he accepted at the end of the 2007 season after a long-running career as a championship-winning crew chief. The additions of McArdle and Kidd help bolster the team's engineering staff, a luxury that Biffle said Reiser didn't always have.
"We gave him a crescent wrench and a hammer, and he didn't have the right tools," Biffle said. "When we put him in charge of Roush Fenway competition, we were a couple years late as a team, as an organization, maybe three, four, five years late in doing that. So we put him in that position; instantly, our performance went up. We ran better, we made challenges at the title -- Carl tied in points with Tony (Stewart, in 2011) -- but we never gave him any more support. It was Robbie on an island, and he had to do it all. We needed to provide more stability for that. As other teams grew, we kind of stayed in that position."
The overhaul hasn't been limited to technology; changes have also given team chemistry -- often a finicky quality to balance -- a significant boost. Jamie McMurray, who drove for Roush from 2006 to 2009 before returning to team owner Chip Ganassi, said he knew the potential pitfalls first-hand during his time there.
"The dynamic at Roush was definitely different, and I think it's different now. It's changed," McMurray said last week. "I don't want to put words in anyone else's mouth that's driven there, but most guys that drove for Roush and then left couldn't believe how much different the environment was at a different organization. I was here initially and went to Roush, and I was like I couldn't believe how good I had it at Ganassi, just the vibe throughout the shop and the way you were treated. …
"First off, Jack's mellowed out a lot in the past five years. Jack would take, you'd have the team meetings on Tuesday and you would go in and sit at this long conference table -- all the crew chiefs and all the drivers -- and I swear Jack got a kick out of just humiliating you in front of everybody. As you would be the guy being humiliated, you would look around at other teammates and you could tell they were like, 'Sorry you're having to go through it,' right?
"I don't think it's that way any more, and I think that got Jack a long way at times treating people that way. I wasn't motivated by being humiliated. I was more motivated by a guy like Chip, wrapping his arm around me like, 'We're going to get through this. Hang with me.' Just way different environment than what I have now."
The team has dealt more recently with the departures of Matt Kenseth after the 2012 season and Carl Edwards this offseason. The exodus appears to be stemmed: Biffle recommitted to Roush Fenway after declining offers from other teams, keeping one of its keystone drivers in place.
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To hear Biffle and the rest of Roush's current drivers tell it, the rise in confidence is already palpable.
"As far as the shop, making it nicer and bringing in the new faces, I think it kind of re-energizes everything, but it transfers down," Stenhouse said. "I guess it would start with the drivers, being in shop, hanging out with the guys. When they feel the confidence that I have in what they're doing and what our organization is doing, a lot of the workers in our shop feed off of that. We've got to make sure that we don't set a bad example. You want them to follow what you're feeling and what you're doing. We've got a lot of energized drivers.
"We had a photo shoot yesterday and all the drivers are getting along, hanging out, and I think that's part of it. I don't know if Roush has ever had all the drivers get along and hang out and have fun. I think Jack's enjoying it as well."