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NASCAR

Roush finally gets a Daytona 500 trophy

By SceneDaily.com

Feb 17, 2009

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Jack Roush had never won the Daytona 500 until Sunday. For 21 years, he's endured heartbreak and probably heartburn in the NASCAR Cup season opener at Daytona International Speedway as solid runs turned into crushed sheet metal in a matter of laps.

For a while, it looked as if Sunday night would be no different. Roush Fenway Racing's Jamie McMurray was having a strong outing when he was caught up in a lap-124 crash sparked by contact between Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Brian Vickers. McMurray's car was heavily damaged. Roush Fenway’s Carl Edwards caught a piece of the action as well, though he underwent repairs and was back in action.

So Roush, now the team co-owner after merging with the Fenway Sports Group in 2007, was enduring his usual season-opening Daytona International Speedway drama. When rain started falling at the track, it never really occurred to him that the race could be called. The red flag came out seven laps after Roush Fenway’s Matt Kenseth took the lead, but Roush wasn't thinking about a victory yet. Upset over the carnage from the crash, he just assumed that NASCAR would get the race going once more.

"It really surprised me," Roush said Monday. "I was not thinking about winning the race at that early juncture in the evening. I was looking forward to having Matt race to win because I knew that he had a fast car, and I knew that David Ragan had a fast car that was still in good shape and that they’d done a nice job of repairing Carl Edwards’ car. He was still on the lead lap and had speed left in his car, so I knew we were going to be a factor. I’d expected the issue to be resolved later, and I was disappointed it rained.”

But when the race was called 48 laps short of the finish, Kenseth had the victory and Roush finally had a Daytona 500 trophy.

There was a time when Roush says that he expected to win at Daytona. After all, he'd had significant success at the track in other series.

But as he failed to find victory lane year after year, he began to believe that a win there just wasn't in the cards for him.

“The first 14 times that I came to Daytona road racing I always took a trophy home – every time we came," he said. "So as we started coming with the Cup cars and it didn’t happen right away – ‘Well, it will happen next time’ – but I’d actually kind of put it out of my mind. I decided that I was snakebit, and it was one of the things that I’d already had more success than I deserved and I would be denied this one, but I was actually in the NASCAR trailer trying to get the best take on the weather when they called the race. It was a surprise to me that it got called then, and then, of course, I ran into [NASCAR official] Brett Bodine, and he reminded me how long it was going to take to dry the race track and what the race now had been, and then as the cars started to come off the track every single car, regardless of manufacturer, regardless of team affiliation, that came off the track congratulated me on behalf of what Matt had done.

"It was a humbling experience because I felt like that had I been on the other end of that circumstance, I probably wouldn’t have been as generous or as congenial or as congratulatory as my peers were.”

Some might have thought that Roush simply wasn't investing as much research and attention on the four annual restrictor-plate races held annually at Daytona and Talladega Superspeedway. He's won three July races at Daytona (Jeff Burton in 2000, Greg Biffle in 2003 and Jamie McMurray in 2007) and has a pair of victories at the other restrictor-plate track, Talladega, with Mark Martin in 1995 and 1997. He admits that the perception might exist that he wasn't working on these type of races as hard as some of the others, but he says that's not the reality.

“That is the perception, but we have, I think, worked as hard as anybody else has, and I just haven’t done as well at figuring out what I needed to do," he said. "There was a time when you had to have the gimmick or the trick to be able to snooker the officials to figure out to find the speed, and we didn’t have the tricks. So we missed some races that were won there clearly with cars that were outside the bounds of the rules that got away with it. We missed those. And there was a period of time when the absolute best body and the absolute best engine came into play, and as hard as we worked, we didn’t have that. …

"As you look at people that strive for excellence and try to achieve it, we have put the same amount of time in the wind tunnel and the same amount of time on the dynamometers and the same amount of time in preparation, minus the occasional really superior job somebody would do. … But we’ve done that. It’s not that we’re not interested in it, but we just have not been successful, and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to win as many races on restricted formats as I was otherwise just because I wasn’t good enough at it.”

Now, he finds that he is.

The experience of winning the Daytona 500 was heightened, Roush says, by the fact that partner John Henry of the Fenway Sports Group was there with him in victory lane.

Some were surprised when Roush announced plans to merge his operation in February 2007. At that time, mergers between major sports players - or even groups in the Cup garage - weren't commonplace. Roush's move was bold and gutsy, something that at the time was fairly unique but later became the model for Cup survival and improvement.

Roush seems to have enjoyed his relationship with Henry, to find more pleasure in the success they've shared.

"As far as John Henry is concerned, he has been a great partner," Roush said. "He has not given me any task that I wouldn’t have already accepted as it related to the operation of the business, and, to be honest, there has not been a circumstance where I’ve been faced with a challenge that I think I couldn’t have met in the prior circumstance. So it’s been fairly transparent and invisible to the team and to me, but it’s kind of like when you’re on a school playground and you’re a young teenager and you’ve got the seniors out there sometimes bouncing folks around. I enjoy having a big brother with me on the playing field here, and if trouble does come, I think we can more easily face it ourselves than I could by myself.”

In fact, when it comes to looking at that Daytona 500 trophy for the remainder of the year, Henry will have the real deal - and that's just fine with Roush.

"He got the trophy," Roush said. "I'll get the replica."