Q. Matt Kenseth joins us, our reining Daytona 500 champion. New sponsor, No. 17 Crown Royal Ford. We’ll have to get used to that, although you’re familiar with them as a sponsor. You had a fun event yesterday, a full day, I know, doing a media tour for the 500. Tell us a little bit about that.
MATT KENSETH: Yeah, we had a full couple days. I had a good time. We got to go to Busch Gardens yesterday, which I’ve never been to. I did a little tug-of-war with a tiger, and of course I won and that tiger will never be the same. Got to go to the hockey game last night and just kind of been hanging out talking about the race.
Q. Two-parter, your reaction to the bulletin that went out today that they’re going to phase the spoiler back in.
MATT KENSETH: I think it’ll be cool. I mean, I’m all for mixing things up and trying something, especially the way we’re running at the end of the year. Whenever they change something and you’re not running great, it’s kind of a good thing because you hope to get back on top of it and you hope you work out different set ups and can try some different things. I’m kind of looking forward to it. I don’t know what it’ll change. I don’t know if any of us do until we really run it. I assume it’s because of the wing this car has always been so forgiving. There’s never really been a penalty for making a mistake, and there’s never really been a reward for keeping it off the wall all day, because you can slam them into the wall so hard and they still run the same speed. You can get them sideways 45 degrees and almost anybody can catch them. They’re so forgiving with that wing and everything. I think this is going to get it back to being a little more like what we had before, maybe a little less forgiving and make qualifying a little bit more exciting, where some people might get over the edge and not be able to catch it type of thing. I don’t know what it’ll do, but I think it’ll make it a little bit more difficult.
Q. The Daytona 500 has produced a lot of very unique endings, yours certainly would be classified as a unique ending. Why does this race seem to lend itself to unusual finishes and unlikely winners, and at the same time it was such a—
MATT KENSETH: I get it, an unlikely winner? I got that little dig. I caught it. (Laughter.)
Q. I mean—
MATT KENSETH: I’m just kidding. Go ahead. I got up way too early this morning, and I’m just pretty much full of it right now. Go ahead. I’m just joking.
Q. Rusty Wallace has never won it, and it took Earnhardt almost 20 years to win it. It’s a hard race for some, and for other people they make a pass and it starts raining and they win.
MATT KENSETH: At least it was under green, right?
Q. I’m trying to get myself out of this.
MATT KENSETH: You’re good.
I know what you’re saying. I agree with you. I remember for years and years, as soon as the stuff became nationally televised I remember basically watching the Daytona 500 at home as a kid in Wisconsin. It was always fun because I always went snowmobiling after the race. It seemed like two different worlds from Wisconsin to Florida. But anyway, I remember Earnhardt and hitting the burn and getting a flat tire, and I remember all that stuff, and I totally know what you’re talking about.
I think this race is a little bit unique because it’s a restrictor plate race because it’s kind of turned into a half restrictor plate race, a half downforce handling race, so some cars you can give up a little bit of speed and handle good at the end of the run and that kind of mixes up the order, and you’ll find some cars faster in the beginning of the run, some faster at the end of the run. There’s a lot of that, and all winter long everybody prepares to try to run and try to win the Daytona 500. You’re down here for a week and a half practicing. There’s just a lot that goes into this race. It’s just a different race from any other race we do all year with all the prep time and lead time and practice and preliminary races and all that kind of stuff. I think for that reason every once in a while you get different winners and different things happening at the end.
Q. You brought it up, I wouldn’t have gone there, but the way you ran a lot of the season, can you talk about what you’ve done to try to reverse that, and considering you won the first two races of the season, any optimism going back to Daytona obviously and California?
MATT KENSETH: Well, you know me, if there’s one thing I am it’s optimistic. (Laughter).
I haven’t really done a lot personally. We’ve made a couple small changes on the team. Not a lot, but we changed a couple people around a little bit, moved some things around a little bit. Really when I sit down and look at it at the end of the year, I looked at it hard, do we need to change something on our team, is it leadership, is it me, is it—what is it? What do we need to mix up to make it better.
But then I really look at it as an organization, and I look at it, okay, in 2008 Carl won nine races, in 2009 he won zero. Greg won some races this year. I started looking at it, you know, if I’m really objective about it, we probably ran as good as anybody in the organization overall even though we didn’t make the Chase. Flat tire here, engine there, gas mileage there, we would have made it like Carl and Greg did and would have had a couple of wins. Really when I looked at it, I felt pretty good about my personnel and their performance. Me and Drew have been you together for a year, and I think that helps. The relationship grows over the year. He’s worked with Chip for a year. We’re just getting comfortable with each other and we understanding each other a lot better than we did at this time last year or mid-season last year or even the end of the season last year.
I feel pretty good about that, and I think really what we had to do was get our cars faster. When we show up at the track the hardest thing for us is as a group we’d all unload relatively slow. We’d all unload toward the bottom of the sheet, the right side of the sheet, and we’d be off. With these cars, and the way the rules are, it’s very difficult to take something that comes off the trailer, a 30th place car on speed and turn it into a winner. It’s just not going to happen, or if it does, it’s not going to happen very often. That’s what we’ve worked on, Drew and Chip and the engineering department, everybody there has been working really hard on just getting our cars faster, just refining our cars, figuring out how to make as much downforce as we can within the rules, how to make the cars as light as we can, how to make the motors run the best, just going through everything on our equipment top to bottom and hope that we can get it better. I think they’ve made some improvements. I don’t know how much. I don’t know if we’ve made enough improvements to go win right away. We’ve still go to, I think, work on our setups and work on other things that we can control at the track as hard as we can, but I feel like we’ve made some improvements.
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