Q: JACK, YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO WIN ONE OF THESE THINGS. WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT RICK HENDRICK THAT HE’S BEEN ABLE TO WIN SIX CHAMPIONSHIPS NOW WITH THREE DIFFERENT DRIVERS?
JACK ROUSH: “I’m a slow study; it took me 17 years to win my first one, and of course the second one came easy, which lulled me into complacency. So in 18 years we won two and in 17 years we won one, and of course we came up short last year, a little with second and third, and this year we were not as close as we were last year. But, it takes a tremendous effort. This thing goes from the middle February to Thanksgiving time, and it consumes your life and the lives of the people doing this.
You’ve got to have focus on it. It’s unbelievable how much energy goes into this thing and for the Hendrick organization to be perennially competitive, it certainly set a standard for me, and that’s what I request and the goal that I set for my organization as well. Unless they’ve found some shortcut on things, it’s a monumental job and they’ve got a lot of people working at it, and they certainly deserve what’s happened to them.”
Q: CAN YOU TALK ABOUT NASCAR TRYING TO MAKE THE CARS SO EVEN WHEN CHEVROLET WON SO MUCH?
JACK ROUSH: “Left of my own device, I would have a rule book that said you came to the race track at the assigned time and you had four tires and you burned gasoline. That would be about all I would require. I’d pretty much run what you brung if left to my device, but they’re determined to have this thing to where it’s convenient for them and not necessarily easy, but it’s possible for them to regulate it and to officiate it even-handedly and fairly and to that end they make every effort to take the racing out of all but just a few things. There is very little innovation in the car today.
With the templates that they’ve got and particularly the car of tomorrow they’re gonna have, you don’t have the offsets that you can deal with. If you looked at a handful of drivers like the Roush organization has and one guy is really just nervous when it’s got a loose end condition, so you have to put the aero torque in the thing, you have to put the side force in in order to stop it from being loose in and other guys like Mark say, ‘I don’t care if it’s loose in, just get me all the grip that you can, all the downforce that you can and that’s a different set of offsets.
But what they’ve got going for the car of tomorrow is gonna be an aero variance that’s gonna be much, much less than it is today and I tell you this, there’s gonna be a lot of people that won’t be able to drive those cars that will be able to drive cars today where they could compensate or adjust the setup, the aero-match on the car, to suit the preference of the driver. There’s gonna be winners and losers at this deal. It’s not necessarily gonna have the desired effect, but at the end, there’s less that we can do that is low-cost, to be able to optimize the car for our teams and it’s forcing us, unfortunately, into spending the money on technology that we would rather not have to spend it on in order to try to find an edge and to suit the needs of the driver that you might be committed to.”
| 
|