Greg Biffle, driver of the No. 16 3M Ford Fusion, is third in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings with six races remaining in the season. Biffle spoke about last week’s race at Talladega and his hopes for Saturday night in the Bank of America 500.
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion –
YOUR THOUGHTS ON LOWE’S? "I’m really excited about being back here. We had a great test a few weeks back and our company runs good on mile-and-a-halfs. I’ve always run real good here – two second-place finishes in the spring – certainly try and better that by one spot.
We’ll wait and see what this weather does and what we’re able to do with the car once we get on the race track. We think we’re gonna run really good this weekend. I’m pretty happy about it."
HAVE YOU TALKED TO CARL ABOUT LAST WEEKEND AND ARE YOU MAD AT CARL FOR THAT MOVE IN THE CORNER? "We can point fingers all day about what happened. Yeah, Carl and I have talked. He understands that he made a mistake and there’s nothing we can do about that now. I didn’t understand at first what had happened. We had been bump-drafting – not Carl and I – but we had been bump-drafting in the corners a little bit throughout the race, which, done properly, hadn’t been a problem all day. You’ve got to be real careful about it, so I had a real problem understanding what happened and why the car turned sideways like it did – so fast that I didn’t have any time to react whatsoever.
I went back and once I watched the tape, then it was clear what exactly happened. Maybe Carl didn’t think it was gonna be a problem, but when I went back and watched the tape – first of all, we got a great push and we got into the beginning of the corner and he gave me another little push. It looked like we had cleared the 20. I elected not to move down because I knew I had a teammate behind me and I didn’t want to hang him, not being able to move down behind me and stay in line because I wasn’t sure if he was clear and I was really trying to focus on holding the wheel straight and keeping the car real stable.
I knew he was back there and I knew he was gonna continued to push. Where the mistake came is, he moved down, it looked like on the video, the best I can tell, there again it’s just speculation, but it looked like he moved down about four feet or so on the race track – maybe a quarter car width, whatever – and then still had some momentum or sucked back up to my rear bumper and tried to just come against my bumper or bump me or give me a push or whatever – however you want to state it. And these bumpers have a slight radius to them.
They’re much flatter than the old car, but tapers off at the corners a little bit and so does the back bumper, so if you’re not perfectly in line – not 100 percent – going down the straightaway you’ve got a little leeway, but in the corner that car has 2.5 g’s on it wanting to go that direction, so if you biased yourself to the inside whatsoever and pushed that – there are laws of physics involved. One, when he pushes the car has to go forward, the energy has to go somewhere.
Well, the easiest path of resistence for that car was up the race track for the rear bumper because it got pushed a little bit to the left side and it just squirted the back of the car out, like you tried to squeeze it and it shot it that way. It’s just probably a miscalculation on his part on being lined up enough, I think was the major key. We haven’t really talked about that because I hadn’t really seen the video and we talked Sunday night. I know he didn’t mean to do it. Certainly he didn’t want to wreck himself because that’s what he did, he wrecked himself.
Certainly that wasn’t his intention and I understand that. All we can do is learn from it and go on and move forward. There’s nothing I’m gonna do about it now. I’ve lost the points. We’ve wrecked the cars and it’s gonna do no good to point fingers and say we should have done this or that, it’s just move on and do the best we can in the future."
ANY SENSE NOW THAT IT’S JIMMIE’S CHASE TO LOSE NOW? "I think that’s clear. That’s a real statement because you do the math and we have to gain 11 or 12 points per race. We have to gain every single race to be tied with him at the end, so, yeah he’s in the catbird’s seat – seventysome point lead. I figured there would be a points shake-up at Talladega, but I just didn’t know which way it was gonna go. Unfortunately for us, I’m sure in his way he’s fine with that, but I wish we could have been on the receiving end of some of that."
ARE YOU MAD AT CARL AT ALL AND JIMMIE SAID HE RAN INTO YOU THE OTHER NIGHT AND YOU SEEMED SURPRISED WHEN HE OFFERED CONGRATULATIONS ON THE START OF YOUR CHASE? "I’ve heard it throughout the garage a little bit and I don’t know if I find it as a surprise, but a lot of team members from other teams and in the garage area – and some guys that didn’t make the chase – are pulling for the 16 to win the title or were excited that we were doing so well and got two wins.
So that’s a pretty big boost of confidence for us – the 16 team and a lot of people out there watching us. I appreciate the thoughts of the other drivers wanting to see us do well. Nobody wants to see anybody do bad, of course, but I’m happy that Jimmie is a supporter of ours. I’m a fan of all the drivers in this series. And, no, I’m not mad at Carl.
There’s nothing else you can do about it. Carl made a mistake. He said he made a mistake. I went back and watched the tape and it’s obvious that he was just overanxious or excited or didn’t think though – ‘I need to be lined up perfectly when I try and push him in the corner.’ I don’t know what else to state about it, but I’m not mad at him."
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE YELLOW LINE RULE? SHOULD THERE BE A DIFFERENT STANDARD FOR THE LAST LAP? "I don’t want to get NASCAR mad at me and I don’t want to get Tony mad at me, but my feeling is they tell us in the driver’s meeting – first of all, NASCAR makes rules for a reason and that’s to keep us in line and to keep us from acting crazy. You have to block. As the guy leading the race, you’ve got to block in order to win the race, so where do you cross the line at (David) Hoots telling us, ‘If you force a guy below the yellow line.
First of all, if you pass below the yellow line, you will be penalized.’ Then he says, ‘If you force a guy below the yellow line, you may be penalized.’ Not ‘you will,’ it’s ‘you may be penalized,’ so that’s where I need clarification is when ‘may we be penalized for forcing a guy under the yellow line and what circumstance?’
Now, I would feel differently about it if Regan would have only had maybe a car width or a little bit more – a car and a few feet – and darted down there and tried to take that position and Tony would have just moved down a little bit and blocked it. Regan was up the race track and Tony was up the race track a long ways.
They were three, four car widths off that yellow line, so Regan dropped to the inside of Tony and was inside of him – clearly. He had his fender inside of him, two or three car lengths off of the yellow line, and Tony moved him down to block – all the way down there – and Regan just went down onto the flat to avoid the accident.
It’s one of those things, the last lap does anything go? When will we be penalized for forcing a guy below the yellow line? I think that’s the biggest thing that needs to be answered and if we’re not gonna be penalized, then we need to understand that.
The other thing is we don’t want to send a message to Regan Smith that the next time he tries to force you below the yellow line coming for the stripe in the beginning of the tri-oval you’re supposed to spin him out and send him through the grass and have him come back out in front of 15 cars and wreck the whole field. We don’t want to send that message at the same time, so I don’t know what the right way is to do it and the wrong way to do it. If we’re not allowed to pass below the yellow, that’s fine.
Two other guys have done it and won – Junior and Benson in the trucks, so we’ve done it twice and it’s been OK and then this time it’s not. He was forced below the yellow. There are lots of things and NASCAR ultimately makes the decision, we just need to know what it is ahead of time so that we can make the right decision behind the wheel, and I think Regan felt like he made the right decision to avoid the accident and go ahead and go down on the apron. Obviously, that’s not the decision that he should have made."
HOW GOOD IS IT TO BE IN THIS POSITION WHEN YOU’RE UP FRONT ALL THE TIME? "Yeah, absolutely. We have really come on strong in the last eight races, probably. We had a great run at Bristol, a great run at California. We really had a spectacular run for us at Richmond. Even though we finished 14th, I got the car up in the fence and wrecked it and the guys were able to fix it and we came back and finished 14th there.
That was a great championship effort, and then to start the chase out like we did has been spectacular, and then the confidence here for Saturday night. I feel like we have one of the cars to beat on Saturday night. That’s big-time confidence and a lot of momentum for these races, so I feel good about the race cars that we’ve been able to put together."
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHAT A WIN MEANS HERE AT CHARLOTTE? IS IT LIKE WINNING THE HOMECOMING GAME? "Yes, it definitely would be. A win would feel good after last week as well. We were off to a great start and had a little hiccup there, so a win here would definitely be a big boost for the whole organization, certainly, because they’re feeling a little pain right now with how battered we got this weekend. So, yeah, I think this certainly would be a big deal for us going to Martinsville."
YOU MENTIONED CARL MAY HAVE BEEN OVEREXUBERANT AT TALLADEGA AND WERE SOMEWHAT CRITICAL ABOUT HIS MOVE AT KANSAS. IS THAT OVEREXHUBERANCE BECOMING A PROBLEM WITH CARL? "Well, when you’ve got a guy that’s trying hard like Carl, and to follow up from last week, I did think that it was a spectacular move to look back and it took a lot of guts to try that. I was simply stating the fact that I probably – not in the third race – would have been as daredevil as he was, but he felt confident in pulling it off and he did, and it worked.
This week, I guess when I say he was a little overanxious or whatever, I don’t know what I’m trying to say, I guess I’m kind of making excuses for him because I don’t know exactly what was going through his mind when he’s holding onto the steering wheel and the gas and the brake and saw my car in front of him and tried to push right there not being lined up. From what I’ve seen so far, I haven’t seen detailed footage, but that’s what it appeared to me is that he was down a little lower on the track, so I don’t know exactly the mindset right there. I wasn’t driving that car.
Inside there you feel that urgency. You’ve pushed a guy all the way down the straightaway and into the corner and you bumped him and you’re almost in the lead and it’s like they’re kind of coming back and it’s like, ‘We’ve got to go.’ It’s 10 to go, it’s 13 laps to go. We’ve got to go now, so he probably crept up there and tried to give us a little push."
WHAT ABOUT YOUR RELATIONSHIP OVERALL? "I think that Matt probably took it a little bit harder than I did because Matt was an innocent bystander in that thing and got caught up in it and he’s had a rough start to the chase. But I think all of us are hard drivers and we understand that we’re gonna have problems in these close quarters. Look at Dover. We were all racing our butt off and Carl told me there the next week that he barely missed my bumper cover.
He asked if I saw him and said, ‘When you were racing with Matt, I got down in the corner and got loose. I had to go up the race track and I missed your rear bumper by six inches,’ so that’s close quarters. He could have spun me out at Dover if he would have been up further on me or maybe I didn’t enter the corner as hard, so when you’re close quarters like that, things are happening all the time that you guys don’t see and we don’t see a lot of times, but things will happen in that race and you’re like, ‘Whew, that was a close one.’ That’s just part of it."
Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion, sits ninth in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup going into Saturday night’s race. He spoke about a variety of issues during his Q&A session Thursday at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – YOUR THOUGHTS GOING INTO THIS RACE? "I look forward to it. I think we all look forward to racing here at Charlotte for a lot of different reasons, but it’s a great track. I look forward to being here and close to home where all the teams are from and, hopefully, getting back on track."
CARL ADMITTEDLY CAUSED LAST WEEK’S WRECK. DID THAT DO ANYTHING TO HELP WHAT LAST YEAR WAS ALREADY APPEARING TO BE A PRETTY STRAINED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU AND GREG AND CARL? "The first question I guess, our relationship is fine. We pretty much got over that deal from Martinsville last year and it’s all been alright. Yeah, I was disappointed there was a wreck, but you knew there would be wrecks and some of that stuff is gonna happen.
I was disappointed it happened because we were almost out of contention and I thought we were gonna have a good day and gain some points and maybe be a contender again if we could get it back around 100 points or something like that, and then we got wiped out. I was disappointed. I thought that Carl knew better.
He’s been preaching the stuff about being careful and working together and teammates and all this stuff, so I was disappointed it happened, but yet it was an accident and that stuff will happen."
HOW SPECIAL WOULD IT BE TO WIN AT CHARLOTTE AGAIN? IS IT A BIGGER RACE THAN NORMAL? "There are some races that seem like they’re bigger than others. I think they’re all big races. These races are really hard to win. Obviously, it’s special to come here. The all-star race is a huge race and then you’ve got the 600 and then the 500-miler in the fall, so they’re all big races. For us, we haven’t won this year yet, so for us to get a win anywhere right now is real important and would be big for us."
HOW DO YOU ASSESS THE CHASE NOW? "Anything can happen. Greg and Carl are running awful good, obviously. Especially after last weekend, Jimmie is probably in the best position. He had some trouble last week and got a lap down and still came back and got a top-10 and missed the wreck and did all that. They’re always difficult to beat, in my opinion.
I’ve said this many times before, but since they put that team together and him and Chad got together, in my opinion, they’ve been the team to beat on average every week and every year. So I would have to say in my book the 48 is probably pretty heavily the favorite right now, but yet that’s not a lot of points and you know one flat tire or one broken part can change the way the whole thing looks. I hope Greg and Carl can get back in it and hopefully have a tight race down at the end."
HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF FORMER CHAMPS LIKE YOU AND JEFF DON’T WIN A RACE THIS YEAR? "It’s a big deal to win and it’s really hard to win. If we don’t win a race this year I’ll be really disappointed in that, but I can’t do anything special to try to get a win in the next six weeks. I race as hard as I can race every single race. We do everything we know how to do to try to win races and bring our best stuff and race as hard as we can and you can’t do anymore than that.
The second you try to do more than that is when you end up wrecked or have problems or make mistakes, so we’re doing everything we can do. If it all lines up and something happens and we can win a race or two here before then that would be great, but, like I said, I don’t feel like we can try any harder than we’re trying. We think we’ve been improving here lately, so hopefully we can have our stuff running good enough to be able to get one."
IN LIGHT OF WHAT HAPPENED SUNDAY, SHOULD THEY ENFORCE THE NO BUMP-DRAFTING IN THE CORNER RULE MORE STRICTLY? "I don’t know. Man, there are a lot of rules and that’s always kind of a judgment call and in the past you’ve heard people get warned when it looks kind of crazy and I didn’t really hear a lot of that Sunday. Talladega is pretty forgiving. It’s got a lot of grip. It’s really wide. These cars are really, really stable, so we should all know better that you can’t run into somebody in the middle of the corner, especially in the left rear.
I mean, if you’re squared up on their bumper and you’re kind of right behind them and you’re pushing them, you can get away with that a little bit, especially on restarts or if you’re not going as fast, but when you’re making a run to the front and you’re running real fast and you’re closing on somebody, you kind of know you can’t really run into him in the center of the corner.
It’s hard to ask NASCAR to enforce everything and to make sure we don’t have any wrecks and don’t cause any wrecks because, I mean, that’s part of racing. Everybody is pushing it to the limit as far as you can, but, hopefully, you know where that limit is before it’s a disaster."
Carl Edwards, driver of the No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion, is second behind points leader Jimmie Johnson in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. Edwards held his Q&A session late Thursday afternoon to discuss last week’s race at Talladega and his hopes for this weekend at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion – HAVE YOU AND GREG TALKED? "Yeah, Greg and I talked and I’ve thought about it a lot this week, about what happened, and just like anybody, the first thing is you think, ‘Man, I lost all these points,’ but then the worst part of it is what happened to Travis and Greg and Harvick and Dale and Matt. It ended up costing a lot of people. I’ve gone there a lot. I’ve been caught up in wrecks and I can tell you that starting them is the only thing worse than getting caught in them, that’s for sure."
COULD THIS BE SOMETHING THAT HELPS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MATT AND GREG? "Matt and I, our relationship for the last however many months has been the best it’s ever been and I feel like, as a team, that we’re working together more than we ever have. I hope those aren’t the points that cost everybody real big. I hope we can make them up, but I also appreciate Greg telling me that he understands it was a mistake and not an intentional deal. It wasn’t like a wreck here."
WAS THERE AN ISSUE BETWEEN YOU AND KEVIN HARVICK? "The deal with me and Harvick is between me and him and there’s nothing else to talk about. I’m not talking about it."
WAS IT ABOUT COMMENTS FROM LAST WEEKENKD? "We know where each other stands and that’s it."
THERE WERE PICTURES OF YOU GUYS SHOVING EACH OTHER. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THAT? "No."
LAST WEEK BEFORE TALLADEGA GREG WAS KIND OF QUESTIONING YOUR MOVE AT KANSAS AND THEN THIS TIME HE SAID HE WASN’T MAD AT YOU AND THAT MAYBE YOU WERE A LITTLE OVERANXIOUS. "Let me explain. I go out there and I race as hard as I can. I do everything I can, just like all these guys, and sometimes it doesn’t work out the best. Really, there are gonna be people that have opinions or feel a certain way and that’s just the way it is and that’s OK."
SO THERE’S NO CHANCE THAT THE CARL EDWARDS WHO HAS BEEN PROVIDING ALL THE THRILLS THE LAST COUPLE OF RACES IS GOING TO BACK OFF? "Not a chance. This is me. This is how I do things and how I race and that’s the way it is. It’s been a good year."
IS JIMMIE THE GUY TO BEAT NOW? "Jimmie is a guy that I think we all know that he’s tough. I don’t think it’s necessarily his to lose. I don’t think we’re far enough back yet, but we didn’t help ourselves by letting him get that many points on us last week."
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT YOURSELF IN THE CHASE? "In light of last weekend, I don’t know how much I’ve learned. I just feel like I’m a better racer and better at communicating with Bob. Even though last week turned out to be a mistake, I’ve made less mistakes and I feel like that’s helped us in the points all season – not just in the chase, but all season. I just feel I’m a little more savvy."
WHERE DID YOU GO WRONG LAST WEEK? "I looked at the tape and the deal is I was pushing Greg down the back straightaway. We’re in a box where the only way you can really get by people is to team up like that. We went in the corner and I ended up getting too far off the center of his bumper. All day, people had been pushing me and I had been pushing people and I had no hint of the loose characteristic and I just got too far off center with Greg – too far over to the left – and that’s it for whatever reason. And Greg’s car snapped so quick. Like him and I talked, it just happened so quick that we were both surprised."
YOU HAVE TO BE FEELING BAD AS IT’S HAPPENING. "Nobody else pushed Greg’s car around. It’s a bad deal. I don’t think I could have sat down before the race and said, ‘Hey, what’s the best that could happen and what’s the worst that could happen,’ and I don’t even know if that would have been on the list. That was pretty bad."
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU THAT HELP WITH FINANCES AND THINGS LIKE THAT? "I’ve got a really great group of people around me. I handle my contract stuff myself and I’m advised by some really good people on that and some other things with the money and all that. I look at what’s going on with Helio and I just feel bad for the guy. I’m not sure, but I can’t imagine sitting down and saying, ‘Alright, let’s come up with this illegal scheme.’ It probably was a bunch of iffy things that added up to something bad. I feel bad for him."
DID YOU GO INTO ALL THIS WITH YOUR EYES OPEN SAYING ‘I’M NOT GOING TO PUT MY LIFE IN ONE GUY’S HANDS?’ "That’s just basic business, you can’t put everything into one person’s hands. You can’t take all your advice from just one person and you have to have some checks and balances. I’m real lucky. I’ve got a great accountant and then another great accountant that watches and helps to make sure everything is alright. I’m real happy with it. It took me awhile to get everybody in line, but I’m real happy with it."
IS THIS A GOOD PLACE TO REBOUND? "This is a good place. You can’t knock Jimmie out. He’s got some sort of magic here. It’s tough, but Greg was so fast in testing and that’s the hope for all of us is that the things that Greg tested and worked for him, that we can kind of lean on that and Bob Osborne can come up with a setup as fast. We’d like to have such a good run here to make up some of those points right now and not over the long haul."
COULD YOU SEE A ROUSH DOGFIGHT HERE LIKE AT DOVER? "Yeah, that would be pretty cool. We’re a good team. People have been working hard – everyone. Robbie Reiser, the engine guys. I talked with Jack about it yesterday and how much this means to him. If it were to come down to me and Greg or me, Greg and Matt, that would be good."
IS IT AN ADVANTAGE THAT JIMMIE HAS HAD THE SAME CREW CHIEF FOR SO LONG? "Continuity is big in this sport, I think. If the people are really good, you’ve got to keep them around. Bob Osborne has been huge for me. Everytime you make a change, it’s just like managing anything, if you make a change, even if it’s a more capable person, by the time it takes to get them going, you’re gonna perform a little worse. In this sport, there’s hardly any timing. You don’t have that wind-up time, so, yeah, Jimmie’s got a good deal there. You look at what Tony and Greg Zipadelli have done, I hope I can keep Bob for a long time."
IT’S NOT JUST THE CREW CHIEF. "Oh yeah, it’s the car chief and engineers. It’s neat at Roush because everyone works so well together that there’s more people – a change might not be as big of a deficit, but it’s still big."
WERE YOU PARTICULARLY UPSET WITH ANYTHING ANYONE SAID AFTER THE RACE SUNDAY? "Yeah, but like I said, we took care of that privately. I think that’s the right way to do that – man to man – talk about stuff and make sure you understand how everybody feels."
HOW WAS JACK AFTER TALLADEGA? "Jack and I talked about it and he just wanted to make sure that I understood, and I do now – more than ever – understood how bad that was for everyone – not just me but everybody involved. That’s just a terrible result from a day there."
WHAT ABOUT YOUR PSYCHE AND HOW YOU RECOVER? "After that race, I’ve never been so excited about racing on a Saturday night. I wish we could have started this race as fast as we could get here to race. I would have loved to have raced last Sunday night.
That’s how racing is. When everything is going really well, you have everything to lose. And when it’s not going too well, man, you just want to race and go get back on top. That’s how I am, so I’m pretty excited about this race."
DID THAT ENERGY LEAD UP TO YOU AND HARVICK THERE? "No, no."
WHAT MAKES YOU SUCH A LIGHTNING ROD? "Like I said, I’m just a passionate guy and I stand up for what I think is right. That’s how I am. That’s how I’ve always been and that’s just the way I’m gonna continue to be. That’s how I race and I stand up for myself when I believe it."
DO YOU THINK ALL OF YOUR ENDORSEMENTS MIGHT BE THE REASON AND THERE’S SOME RESENTMENT? "I don’t know."
IS IT IMPORTANT TO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A LOT OF FRIENDS NOW ON THE TRACK? "We’re all competitors and I think no matter what goes on off the race track, we all run pretty well together. There’s just too much to lose out there on the race track. There’s a lot to lose out there and I think we all race pretty well on the race track, so I don’t think there’s.
- FORD -
