ShareThisBy MIKE MULHERN
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Greg Biffle was one of the stars of the show at Homestead-Miami Speedway last year, charging to a photo-finish win over teammate Mark Martin in the Nextel Cup finale and missing the NASCAR championship by a scant 35 points.
But this year has been quite forgettable for Biffle, and at times it has been hard to remember that he's in the field.
Biffle was fast out of the gate in 2005, winning bunches of races and was always a threat to win. But he fell short in his title bid, perhaps because of a loose lug nut at Texas Motor Speedway.
Any hopes of finishing this season off with a victory here don't appear likely for Biffle, who lost his primary car in a crash at Texas two weeks ago.
"To be perfectly honest, we're pretty disappointed, because at Texas we ran over a piece of debris that nobody, unfortunately, saw (and) wrecked," Biffle said. "It's completely ruined. So we have a car we didn't test, which is a disadvantage. Now we've got to start over."
That's about the way Biffle's season has gone. After a miserable start at Daytona and California, and sluggish runs the next few months, he finally bounced back to win at Darlington, and by the middle of June was back in the top 10. But trouble at Pocono, Indianapolis and Watkins Glen doomed him, and by the time the Chase cut after Richmond rolled around, Biffle was no longer in contention.
"Our one win at Darlington is obviously a big deal for us, and we ran very well at a lot of places," Biffle said. "We were probably going to win at Texas and got wrecked by a lapped car. It's been an up-and-down season. We've just gritted our teeth."
It has been much the same for Jack Roush, his car owner.
Roush may win another NASCAR championship this weekend, but at the moment he is quietly reflective about what might have been and what didn't go right this season, after his amazing 2005 season.
"Looking at 2005, the thing I was most excited about was, as we got our five cars in the Chase, everybody from all five teams carried any idea they had, everything they had seen on somebody else's car, every curiosity they had, into a forum where it could be analyzed by the entire group. And they were absolutely unselfish to that," Roush said.
"This year as things went bad, things were a little chilly in the meetings. We didn't have as much interaction among the teams. We've got to re-establish that chemistry. And we've got to try to leapfrog technologies.
"We're just off just a little. It's not big things. It's not aero, it's not engine. We're just off in the way we put our chassis together, and the kinematics, and maybe we have been less progressive on chasing the coil-bound springs and things that really weren't working for very many people last year. The more traditional things are where we were."
Coil-binding springs have come to the fore because the new, high-tech springs that teams can buy on the world market will meet NASCAR specs on the inspection line but will compact to virtually zero-spring in the corners. That allows the car nose to drop down to the pavement, improve aerodynamics and help the car turn in the corners. Of course, then a driver must learn to like the feel of essentially having no springs at all in the front suspension.
Matt Kenseth, Roush's most solid money-driver, must pick up 64 points on leader Jimmie Johnson in Sunday's Ford 400 to wrestle away the championship. But at least he's still in the chase.
Biffle is not.
And Biffle's failure to make the Chase was one of Roush's biggest disappointments. Since plucking him out of obscurity, Roush has worked hard to polish Biffle into championship material.
"Greg hasn't peaked yet," Roush said. "He's very near peak. I was amazed to find that he's only won 10 races in Cup, even though he's got his championships in Truck and Busch.
"But last year he won six times.
"Of course, in this business things ebb and flow. Greg wouldn't agree with this, but we may have gotten more success last year than our effort or our technology or our strategies deserved. It was nonetheless great, and we're anxious to get back on track.
"And it will be a huge disappointment to me if we're not able to win a championship with Greg in the very near future."
