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The familiar refrain of the Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour -- of drivers, crew chiefs and team principals using the word "excited" to describe preseason morale -- continued unabated Wednesday. Roush Fenway Racing kept the drumbeat going during the tour's second day, expressing their own optimism about the 2016 racing season.
But it's a persistent note the team has sounded before, most significantly ahead of last season -- arguably the organization's worst in 28 years in NASCAR's premier series. The team had just brought in Mark McArdle as a senior engineering director and added Kevin Kidd as team manager, making significant personnel and structural changes within the organization to stem its decline -- all the while knowing that true change in on-track performance wouldn't happen immediately.
"I think it was unreasonable to expect that they were going to come in and then 30 days later, everything will have changed," said Steve Newmark, Roush Fenway's president since 2010. "They spent the year evaluating our structure and putting in place these processes, and I think that's why you saw some uptick improvement at the end of last year.
"There's a runway. You can't change an organization that is this large overnight. And I think that applies to any of the race teams. We've all gotten so big that it's not just 12 people working on a car where you can walk in one day and say we're going to shift directions."
This year's changes at Roush Fenway appear to be subtle, but dig deeper and they're far from it. The team's three-driver Sprint Cup stable is unchanged -- with Greg Biffle, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Trevor Bayne all returning -- but two of the three have new crew chiefs. Brian Pattie transfers over from the remnants of Michael Waltrip Racing to pair with the veteran Biffle, and Bayne starts his second full season working with Matt Puccia.
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But the changes go past the company's flow charts, extending into consolidating, rearranging desks and meeting places and making the most of their space at the Roush Fenway shop. It's the next stage of a long-term overhaul with hopes of shaking off the 2015 doldrums, where its three teams finished 20th (Biffle), 25th (Stenhouse) and 29th (Bayne) in the final Sprint Cup driver standings.
"Last season, we were kind of shooting in the dark a little bit," Bayne said. "We didn't know what we were going into. We were optimistic, but we didn't know. This year, we have a lot more knowns. We've had people in places for longer. I know my crew chief, Matt Puccia. I've done this for a season, so I know what that grind is like. So I feel like I can be more optimistic and be assured about that this season versus last season, the way that our team is working together is a lot different. It's not just saying, 'hey, we're working together,' it's actually making physical changes in the race shop."
The alterations also extend to other branches in the Ford Racing family tree, continuing its technical alliance with Richard Petty Motorsports but opening a new partnership with Front Row Motorsports. The Bob Jenkins-owned Front Row No. 34 team will get support in the form of technical know-how and a driver in Chris Buescher, last year's XFINITY Series champion making the jump to the talented Sprint Cup rookie ranks.
That piece of the puzzle expands the collaborative effort for all three Ford teams, which will try to overcome last year's aerodynamic deficit in the midst of a new reduced-downforce rules package and a new nose on the Ford Fusion model in 2016.
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"Everybody in this sport is continuing to get better, and I think that's one of the things that makes our NASCAR sport so tough is that the technology is always evolving and every team's always getting faster," Stenhouse said. "It's not like football where you just get a new college athlete up that's really good that kind of makes your team just a little bit better every year and you come up with some new plays. It's building whole-new race cars and pieces to be better. The problem is, everybody else is doing it at the same time."
Playing catch-up is a tall order for a three-car outfit that collectively led just 43 laps and registered only nine top-10 finishes last season -- both all-time lows. How soon can Roush Fenway gauge if the turnaround effort has taken root?
"Atlanta, West Coast Swing," Biffle said, pointing at the first four or five races of the Sprint Cup season. "Let's get through Las Vegas, Phoenix and at the checkered flag at Phoenix, we're going to have a clear picture where we stack up for the first part of the season. Till June, I'm going to say that's going to be a good indicator on where we're at."
The proof will come in the results column, but with on-track activity still three weeks away, being excited -- the media tour's running cliché -- will have to suffice, not just for the Roush Fenway brass but for competing executives as well.
"Whenever they get up, they're going to say almost the same thing, but I do think there's a genuine energy level and optimism, and I think there's a real belief we're going to do a lot better this year," Newmark said. "We've got to prove it, but I the reasons why is that we've now had the time to be able to implement those new structures."