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NASCAR

Biffle excited about his chances in Las Vegas

By SceneDaily.com

Feb 27, 2009

LAS VEGAS - Roush Fenway Racing's Greg Biffle is ready for the challenge of competing in Sunday's Shelby 427 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Biffle comes to Vegas with plenty of momentum as he's fresh off a fourth-place finish in last Sunday's Auto Club 500 at Auto Club Speedway and currently sitting fifth in the series standings.

"We ran really good here last year," Biffle said in reference to his 2008 third-place finish at the 1.5-mile track. "I'm pretty excited about our chances here."

Biffle also said the Las Vegas track is getting better since it was resurfaced in 2006, and the driver of the No. 16 Ford Fusion expects to see plenty of side-by-side racing come race day.

"It makes it challenging for us and those bumps make us keep the splitter off the track,” he said. “It's also made the upper groove more desirable. I don't think you'll ever see this race won from up near the fence."

Biffle also mentioned his gaffe on pit road during last Sunday's Cup race in Southern California in which he missed his marks in the pit box and rolled the car over the air hose.

"We had a really good car, and it's really tough when you have to go home not the winner of a race like that," Biffle said. "The other thing was whether I was going to be able to beat Matt [Kenseth] out of the pits. He beat [Jeff Gordon] and we were behind [Gordon]. It wasn't a gimmie that we weren't going to be able to pass [Kenseth] for the win."

Biffle doesn't blame himself or his crew for the pit-road mistake.

"I stopped in the box. I didn't stop out of the box and have to back up," Biffle said. "I just stopped a little bit deeper than they expected. There's a number of things that could have changed the outcome of that. It certainly kept us from our opportunity to win, but we don't know if we would have won. ... We felt confident that we could."

Biffle doesn't believe NASCAR’s ban on testing this season has led drivers such as himself and Dale Earnhardt Jr. to struggle in the pits this season.

"We race just as hard as we do out on the track ... on pit road," Biffle said. "A lot of people don't understand what we do to try to get an advantage. We're going 55 mph down pit road, and that's close to the speed people drive on the freeway, and we're pulling into a parking space and coming to a complete stop [at that speed]. It's tenths of a second difference. We're trying to get that last millisecond of speed."

Biffle will do his best this weekend to make sure the pit-road incident that happened in California doesn't happen in Vegas.

"You have to get all that you can get," Biffle said. "I was faster than [Gordon], but I couldn't catch him. I tried to beat him on pit road, and it cost me. I guarantee we're coming off the truck exactly how we finished here last year. We're not points racing. We want to win."