DREW BLICKENSDERFER, Crew Chief – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion –
“It hasn’t sunk in yet. It’s pretty surreal to have the chance of being associated with a team like the 17. When I worked at Roush Fenway before on the Cup side, you kind of looked over at them as the model team in the series. They were just about to win the championship, so that was a team you wanted to be involved with, and then getting to work with Matt on the Nationwide side, and then be able to come back to him and lead the team is pretty amazing.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW YOU FINISHED LAST YEAR AND WINNING THIS RACE?
“Honestly, I haven’t thought about it. You get swept up into this windstorm of going to a different shop, even though I’m at Roush Fenway still and doing the COT thing has kind of consumed me since the season ended at Homestead, so I haven’t thought about that too much. I’m very fortunate, obviously, to be at Roush Fenway and have two drivers like Carl Edwards and now Matt Kenseth. I know I’m blessed with that, so I’m thinking about that, but the success last year is kind of over with, especially since we only finished second in the points and it’s on to this year.”
DID YOU THINK YOU HAD A CHANCE YESTERDAY AFTER PRACTICE?
“I really did. I think the two runs we made in practice yesterday, I know we put more laps on our car than anybody else. It was fast. He made comments afterwards that it was as fast as certain cars that are your benchmark when you’re at a plate race, so I thought if we ended up in the right line at the right time and everything goes well, this car is capable of winning. I know he is. The pit crew is, so I really thought we had a chance. If you would have seen me the previous 10 days, it wouldn’t have been that smile. It was a rough week-and-a-half leading up to yesterday when we got this backup out and we got to put laps on it.”
ANY THOUGHTS TO RETIRING?
“That’s what I told them out there. I said, ‘It can only go downhill from here.’ I was fortunate enough when I went with Carl last year we won our first race at Milwaukee – first race out – and I knew the next week at New Hampshire it was gonna be downhill. So I’m thinking if we don’t win the first practice at California, it’s a failure. But seriously, Matt and I have similar personalities where you’re a perfectionist. I thought yesterday our car was good, but not great. It can always get better. I thought today our car was good, but not great. So I am looking forward to California, actually, now that you say that.”
YOU KNEW RAIN WAS COMING. DID YOU HAVE TO CALM HIM DOWN?
“I think he realized – he got a little excited himself. As soon as we took the lead from nowhere I heard a Matt Kenseth kind of scream that said, ‘Rain, rain, rain, rain.’ It’s very uncharacteristic of him, so then when the caution came out he said, ‘What’s it look like? How is the radar?’ I said, ‘It’s here. It’s gonna be here. It’s gonna rain for a couple of hours. We’re gonna be OK.’ And he said, ‘Let’s just stay calm here.’ And I think that was him catching himself thinking, ‘OK, this could be a good thing here.’ But he’s so calm and cool and kind of ice cold that you usually don’t have to say anything to Matt to calm him down.”
DID YOU LOSE THE PRIMARY IN THE 150?
“Yeah. We lost a car in the Bud Shootout and then we lost another car in the 150. Our car in the 150 actually seemed to have really good speed. It might have been a blessing in disguise. It didn’t seem to handle too good in the 150 or in practice before that, but, yes, we lost a car Thursday.”
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion –
“I’m just pleased to be here with Chip Bolin and with Drew. I don’t know if Drew deserves this (joking). I had to wait over 20 years and this is Drew’s first race as a crew chief. Chris Andrews gave us a great engineering package behind the cars. Robbie Reiser, of course, managed everything in the shop and managed Drew and sometimes managed me to my dismay, so there are a lot of good people that formed the organization that helped make this possible. Of course, Matt is at the center of it. Matt Kenseth is as good at this business as anybody has been and on days when he can’t do what he needs to it’s because I haven’t given him the tools. Last year I let him down by not being able to do for him what I needed to. Matt should have won last year. We made some changes. We’re a promote-from-within company and we moved Robbie Reiser off his program and we didn’t manage to get the organization of his team exactly right, and you only have to be off a little bit in this business. If you’re off just a hair, you just can’t quite get it done and that was the year we had with Matt last year. Matt did everything he needed to do, but we just didn’t quite get it right for him. But over the winter Drew came on board and Chip stepped into the role of being the senior engineer for not only this team but for the entire group as far as team engineers are concerned and, boy, they got the magic back. They had the speed in the car. They had depth in the organization. We took one of the cars that had some damage and I thought we might see it again. I need to count my fingers after I shake hands with these guys after a meeting because generally there’s an extra car or some extra piece of hardware attached to one of them that I wind up losing track of, but, anyway, we had a lot of depth. We had great cars. The Ford Fusion did a super job and Matt deserved to win. Like I said, it was my fault that he didn’t win last year, but he’s gonna win a lot this year and a championship, I hope.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion –
“Thanks, first of all. To be honest, it really hasn’t sunk in. I woke up this morning not really thinking I was gonna win the Daytona 500, especially when you come to a speedway. It’s really more about the team than it is about the driver. It’s always about the team, but, really, they make the cars go fast and I wasn’t happy with my 500 car and it ended up getting wrecked in the 150s anyway, and as soon as we unloaded this car it drove much, much better. I kept complaining about it and they kept adjusting on it all night and did the right stuff at the end, so it was pretty unbelievable to sit here and be able to actually be in the Daytona 500, much less win one. It’s just a dream come true.”
DO YOU EXPECT TO SEE RAIN TIRES AND WIPERS NEXT YEAR?
“That’s pretty funny. There have been a couple of occasions where we’ve had maybe not the best car but close to the best car at a few races that got shortened by rain that we didn’t win, and we certainly lost some on fuel mileage. I don’t think we’ve ever won one on fuel mileage as far as the 17 goes, so I’ll take it. I’m not gonna think any less of the victory. A lot of these races get won and lost like this. We still raced 400 miles almost and we were in the right place at the right time and we had our car as fast as we needed to be. It was really a team effort. Without that last really good pit stop, we would have been in the wreck. Actually, Kyle was right in front of me and got in the wreck and Carl was right behind me and got in the wreck, so if the pit stop was faster or slower, we would have got in the wreck, so they did their job and got us up there when we needed the track position and after that wreck, I felt we were the fastest car up in the lead group.”
YOU WERE EMOTIONAL.
“I actually am a pretty emotional guy, you guys just don’t always see it. It’s kind of funny. Yesterday I was sitting in the motorhome telling Katie, and it wasn’t like a feel sorry for myself or pity party or anything like that, but I was just telling her, it was like, ‘Man, I’m really getting fed up with not winning and with not being a contender.’ It was actually starting to weigh on me more than I thought and we really struggled all week until yesterday. We finally got the car to handle good and it’s not like I had a bad feeling about today, but we haven’t been a serious contender for the championship for a few years. We’ve been able to win a race here or there, but we didn’t win any last year and just to be able to put it together and actually win the Daytona 500. I don’t feel like I’m the best, really, at plate racing and I feel like a lot of times I make mistakes, which is really frustrating. I don’t get my car in the right place at the right time and to be able to put it all together and win the race is pretty overwhelming.”
YOU STAYED IN THE CAR ON PIT ROAD. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
“That’s how I am. I hang out in my car with a cover over it. I sit in the back pew at church. It’s just me. Seriously, I just wanted to wait until it was either over or we were gonna go race again. I was just waiting for that. I didn’t want to let my emotions get too high one way or the other and I just kind of wanted to wait until it was over and go from there. I was just hoping it would keep raining.”
DID YOU HAVE AN IDEA THAT COULD BE THE PASS FOR THE WIN? WHEN KEVIN HARVICK PUSHED YOU PAST ELLIOTT SADLER, WITH WORD OF RAIN COMING, DID YOU HAVE AN IDEA RIGHT THEN THAT THAT COULD BE THE PASS FOR THE WIN?
“Yeah, I mean, I really had it in my mind that that last restart when we were behind Elliott that if I got around him and could hold it a little bit – I didn’t think we were going to pit again. I thought the ran was coming, Drew said it was coming, you could see the sky getting darker and it was sprinkling for a while – actually when I got around Elliott and I was able to get in a position where he couldn’t block it, and he just kind of stayed in his lane and I got pretty good momentum and Kevin saw that I had momentum and hung a left and went behind, and when I cleared him there actually was big rain drops all the way through one and two and I knew that it was getting pretty close. Then they had that accident where they threw the yellow, so you didn’t know if it was going to be the pass, but I knew it had the potential to be.”
YOU WON THE DAYTONA 500 AND YOU WON A CHAMPIONSHIP. IS THERE A COMPARISON?
“Winning a championship, I think, is probably the biggest accomplishment you can have in this sport. It’s a long season, nine months, 36 races, on all kinds of different sizes and shapes of race tracks, and you’ve got to race and think about it and work at it for a long, long time, where this is one race, but yet this is the biggest stock-car race we have anywhere, and to be able to win this race and put our names in history as Daytona 500 winners is also pretty awesome.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED –
“I tend to get all tore up for the bad things that happen – you know, Jamie McMurray got caught in one of the early wrecks and had a great car, Carl Edwards got caught in a wreck and damaged his car. So I was really agonizing over those missed opportunities rather than starting to count my chickens for the fact that Matt was in the catbird seat and had a chance to do it. I hadn’t done the math, I knew that NASCAR was willing to keep this thing going until midnight. I hadn’t thought about that fact that it was going to take three hours, as I was told later, to get the track dry from where it was. You look at three hours to get it dry and you’ve got three hours of predictable rain coming, and it’s seven o’clock, the math really tells you that you’re finished. So, I was not focused on that. I was thinking that if it did get started, Matt would have to hang on and that was going to be a challenge that David would be coming, he had a good car, David Ragan would be coming, had a good car. So I was thinking about what if it came back and helping myself to try to get ready emotionally for what that was going to mean more than I was to really anticipate the rain-shortened race at something like 7 p.m. when they finally called. We’ve been here for more than 20 years, trying to do this thing, and I got so conditioned for being frustrated through it that I was almost not believing that it happened. I’ll be black and blue for the next few days just from pinching myself to make sure that I’m not dreaming.”
IT TOOK YOU LONG A TIME TO WIN THE FIRST FEW CUP CHAMPIONSHIPS, AND A WHILE FOR THIS WIN. WHEN DOES IT SET IN? ARE YOU ABLE TO APPRECIATE IT NOW? AT THE END OF THE SEASON?
“I’ve never been through an enshrinement, they’re going to enshrine the car, I guess, tomorrow morning or later tonight or something, and when all the team gets around the car and we incarcerate the car for a year over at the museum, I’m sure that will set in at that time. It’ll be a big deal. We’ve had other cars in there. We had Paul Newman’s Nobody’s Fool Mustang, which was the 10th 24-hour race we won here. It’s not in there now, but it was in there for a period of time. That really kind of put an exclamation mark at the end of our road racing. We were able to celebrate that victory with Paul and to have the car under glass for a period. So, to have this DeWalt Ford Fusion in Daytona USA for a year is going to be a big deal. Plus, we’ve got to put it behind us because we’ve got some unfinished business on the west coast that we’ve got to deal with the next couple of weeks.”
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