Edwards helps Roush get back

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FONTANA, Calif. -- To listen to the hype surrounding the beginning of this NASCAR season, the Hendrick Motorsports behemoth is poised to roll over everyone in its path. This amuses longtime owner Jack Roush, who not so long ago was the other behemoth in the garages. "Right before the race started in Daytona, I was besieged for 10 days down there with people that had questions like (that): How was I going to deal with Hendrick's domination? What was going to happen," Roush related, after Carl Edwards put him in victory lane, in Monday's conclusion of the Cup Series race at The Track Formerly Known As California Speedway. "I felt that I had five really good cars for Daytona. I told them. I'll tell you the same thing: Just watch. Write the future not based on the past, but on what happens at the time. We don't feel we're underdogs by any means." Two years ago, when Matt Kenseth won the winter Cup Series race at Fontana, it finished a Roush sweep of the weekend after Mark Martin had won the truck race and Greg Biffle the Saturday Busch Series race. Roush had just come off two championships in the previous three years (Kenseth in 2003 and Kurt Busch in '04), and had placed all five of its drivers in the Chase for the Cup in '05. They were, some daffy columnist suggested at the time, the Yankees of NASCAR because of their financial resources and research and development assets. That shows you how much This Space knows. Last year the organization officially became Roush Fenway Racing, when Roush entered a partnership with Red Sox owner John Henry. And since the Red Sox have won two World Series in four years, being the Yankees of anything isn't the distinction it once was, anyway. But we digress. The point is that Hendrick ascended to what appeared to be super-team status when Dale Earnhardt Jr. signed on, creating a colossal marketing/competitive triumvirate of Earnhardt, two-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon. Yet through the first two weeks of the 2008 season, Penske's Ryan Newman and Edwards have won races, and Joe Gibbs Racing's Kyle Busch -- the guy Hendrick tossed overboard to make room for Earnhardt -- leads the points standings. Johnson and Gordon finished second and third in yesterday's 163-lap conclusion of the Cup race, but both acknowledged afterward that not only wasn't anyone beating Edwards on Monday, but no one had been able to run faster when the fellows assembled here for testing at the start of February. "I think we all knew the Roush cars were coming," Johnson said. "They were getting real strong at the end of last year. They've showed that." Edwards, Kenseth, Biffle, David Ragan and Jamie McMurray acquitted themselves fairly well here in Roush Fenway's Ford Fusions. Besides Edwards' triumph, which he celebrated with his traditional back flip, Kenseth finished fifth, Ragan 14th, Biffle 15th and McMurray 22nd. "I hope it's an indication that we've caught up" with Hendrick, Edwards said. "I hope this is a sign that we're up to their standards, to their level. I believe we are. I know that last year I would not have traded my car in for one of theirs at any of the CoT (Car of Tomorrow) races towards the end of the year. I thought we had the best car. "I mean, everyone knows, all the drivers know for sure, it's what you're sitting in a lot of times that makes that tiny little bit of difference. I'm proud to be driving this car. I'm proud of what Jack and Bob (Osborne, crew chief) and all the engineers did last year once we saw how far behind we were." Roush Fenway had taken a hit when it fell behind in the early development of what was known last year as the Car of Tomorrow. As Roush explained it, his organization had limited its testing with the understanding that NASCAR was going to set restrictions on how much teams could do. When it didn't, Roush Fenway was behind and spent the last seven months of the season trying to catch up. "I've really got to screw up bad to mess it up for the guys," Roush said. "I tried to last year. ... (But) we had a good, deep, strong organization, the guys were highly motivated, didn't all quit on me, didn't have a bad attitude about it. We all just suited up and did what we could. We couldn't do what we'd done in the past, couldn't correct that, but we had all the future to deal with." There is still some fine-tuning. Roush talked about the need to improve the pit crew operations. And he talked about some discomfort on the part of Robbie Reiser, who had been promoted from Kenseth's crew chief to the position of team manager. "If he had a choice today between going back and being a crew chief or being a manager, he'd probably go back," Roush said. "But we're not going to give him that choice." Still, his drivers are competitive, his cars are competitive, and today he's one up on Rick Hendrick for the season. In other words, life is good.(Contact Jim Alexander at jalexander@PE.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)