But with the team firmly in rebuilding mode after its recent slide toward substandard performance, Biffle shed light on just how close he came to following the path of two prominent former teammates out the door.
Biffle plumbed the depths of the company’s recent low points Wednesday during the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom, saying that he had fielded offers from "great teams" to drive elsewhere. Ultimately, the 45-year-old driver made the choice to stay, in an effort to help lead the team out of its dark days.
"You know, loyalty in this world only goes so far," Biffle said. "… I felt like I had to wrestle with the decision on whether I leave or not. It makes it easy to leave, it’s easy to kick a guy when he’s down, right? So we were having tremendous trouble last year, and I’ve been there through three of these cycles, and we’re not going to sugar-coat it — last year, we were at the bottom of the heap compared to the teams. We just were, and no light at the end of the tunnel, and so it would’ve been an easy way for me to leave at that point.
"But knowing that the stock is at the lowest price that it’s been at, sometimes that’s the opportunity. It’s going to go up. It doesn’t have to, but logic says it’s going to go up, and so I wrestled with it and sat long and hard about it and said, ‘I want to be the guy that brings this organization back out of where we’re at. We’re in a bad place. I could jump ship right now.’ And I decided I didn’t want to do that. I was going to give it another opportunity."
Biffle’s tenure with Roush Fenway includes an enviable collection of career highlights — 19 victories in the top-level Sprint Cup Series and championships in both the XFINITY Series (2002) and the truck circuit (2000). Even though he managed to qualify for last season’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoffs, his losing streak stretched to 57 — nearing the longest dry spell of his career.
Only Carl Edwards won races at the Sprint Cup level for RFR last year, and he departed in the offseason to restart his career at Joe Gibbs Racing. That move followed a similar career shift by Matt Kenseth — another longtime Roush Fenway competitor — just two years earlier. Biffle could’ve been the third domino to fall, but even with all the frayed emotions, the connections he’d established over the years kept him from severing those ties.
"I stayed for relationships and things that I had built for a long period of time that I really cared about, and that was one of my decisions that really weighed on me to stay," Biffle said. "After I elected to stay, other people didn’t and so I was left holding the bag a little bit, but I can’t say enough about the partnerships that we’ve created since then.
"I can talk forever about what’s gone on, and I hate to keep — so to speak, the cliché — beat the dead horse. We all recognized the position we were in last year. We were drowning and we were trying to get to the surface, and it was difficult on all of us. All the relationships were all taxed, between me and my crew chief, the other drivers, the team engineers, the simulation group, and then fabrication, the guys hanging the (car) bodies. We were all taxed because we were not performing."
Roush Fenway president Steve Newmark admitted that the offseason mission of rebuilding the team’s stature in the sport had come with some soul searching. The organization has made plenty of offseason strides to meet the goals — primarily through digging to the root cause of what went wrong in 2014 and closing the gap on its rivals in the technology department. But it’s also revamped its mindset in more subtle ways, freshening the look of the shop and bringing it up to more state-of-the-art standards.
Even though the overhaul has been dramatic, Newmark said losing Biffle was a change the team couldn’t afford to withstand.
"It was critical," Newmark said. "Greg and I spent a lot of time talking. He was solicited by a lot of teams, which I would expect with a driver of that caliber. After a lot of the discussions, I think he felt like Roush was the right fit for him and the right place, and he and Jack had some unfinished business. But he brings an element that we wouldn’t have had without him. We have a lot of other talented drivers, but none of them has had the history with both our organization and the championships, so he’s been fantastic."
Though Biffle cracked in his opening remarks that Jack Roush, 72, had been racing Ford products since 1901, it’s clear the team has begun to skew younger as it enters its 28th year in NASCAR. Biffle will race alongside third-year driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr., 27, and 23-year-old Trevor Bayne, promoted to his first full season in the Sprint Cup Series.
Change isn’t all bad, as Biffle was quick to mention the championship fruits of the first-year partnership between Kevin Harvick and Stewart-Haas Racing last season. Taken a step further, Biffle said Roush Fenway’s expectations equal those of the title-winning No. 4 team.
"We’re all that confident," Biffle said. "We all feel that good that that’s the position we’re in now. Everyone’s so excited about the way our company looks, about how everybody’s getting along and how excited everybody is to work together again, and on a common goal. We all feel really good."
