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NASCAR

Engine troubles slow Roush team in Vegas

By SceneDaily.com

Mar 2, 2009

LAS VEGAS - Team owner Jack Roush said there was nothing experimental or new in the engines that his teams brought to Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Yet he watched as some of those engines expired during Sunday's Shelby 427 NASCAR Sprint Cup race.

The Roush-Yates engines were also in the Yates Racing and Hall of Fame Racing cars, and none of them suffered failures. But three of the Roush Fenway drivers had problems, with the first being Matt Kenseth, who felt his engine go after six laps. Next came David Ragan, who suffered a failure 72 laps into the race. The final was Carl Edwards, who could see the white flag waving before his engine failed. He was fifth at the time but fell to 17th.

“I think we misjudged how fast this tire was going to be, and the engine turned more," Roush said. "It’s the same spec on the engine that we had all of last year. It wasn’t something new or experimental, I had great confidence in it. We had it the last third of last year, but we saw more RPM with it in qualifying than we ever had and we saw more RPM in the race than we ever had.

"The tire didn’t fall off as much as we expected it to, so the tire did a real nice job, but we just over-revved the engine. We had a choice of which rear axle ratio to use and we used the higher of the ratios, and it was 200 RPM more than the other ratio would have been. We just made the wrong choice from a crew chief and from an engineer point of view on that.

"If we can go back I’d say I need to have more margin in the engine and it needs to be not that close to its limit, but if you go through and win the races we won last year late in the year in the Chase and we had the success that we had [last weekend] in [the Auto Club Speedway at] Fontana [Calif.], there’s no reason to be nervous about it. The fact that it crept up a little bit didn’t raise the alarm that it should have. We’ll be wiser going to Atlanta.”

Roush said that it appeared that a valve broke in Kenseth's engine and that a valve spring was the culprit in another failure.

Aware of their teammates problems, Edwards, Greg Biffle and Jamie McMurray were attempting to conserve their engines throughout the race. He said that the drivers were told that they needed to hold the RPM down if they could. It looked like they had it made when Edwards suffered the final setback of the night.

"When it comes down to the final laps like with Carl, you’ve got to go for it," Roush said. "You’ve got to try to win the race and do the very best you can in the closing laps. Everybody had been going slower than they might have based on limiting the RPM at the end of the straightaway. Of course, they loosened the demon after the last caution there, and the result was the 99 wouldn’t go either.”

McMurray felt a vibration and worried about his engine but made it to the end. Ragan heard his problem developing as well.

“On the restart it just started skipping and popping, and we switched ignition boxes because I felt like it might just be something small, but it kept getting worse and worse and just wouldn’t go down the straightaway," he said of his final run. "I’m pretty proud of our UPS car so far today. It wasn’t great, but we picked it up some and seemed to be in decent shape to make some more adjustments, but it looks like something just let go in the engine.”