by REA WHITE, Special to FOXSports.com

Updated: February 29, 2008, 8:37 PM EST 43 comments

add this RSS blog email print

After falling behind with NASCAR's new car in the early portion of the 2007 season, Roush Fenway joined other teams and started testing the new car more. Team co-owner Jack Roush has said the organization originally didn't test its cars at non-sanctioned tracks, thinking that was prohibited by NASCAR rules, but once it became clear that was an acceptable practice, his teams began testing heavily.

Roush Fenway's depth and commitment quickly became evident, with the team's Fords steadily gaining ground over the final third of the 2007 season. That work continued in the offseason and led to a series of preseason tests in which the Roush Fenway cars were increasingly watched by the competition.

Now, with former Matt Kenseth crew chief Robbie Reiser overseeing all five teams and with the entire organization's greater understanding of how to manage the car, Roush has shown once more that when it dedicates itself to solving a problem, the results follow.

Roush Fenway's Carl Edwards won Monday in the rain-delayed Auto Club 500 at Auto Club Speedway in the car's first appearance at the track. Teammate Kenseth was fifth, with David Ragan and Greg Biffle also finishing in the top 15.

For more news from the track and the shop, check out our NASCAR Scene headlines page. Get NASCAR Scene headlines

"Ford and Roush Fenway, all the engineers, everyone has worked really hard," Edwards said after his win. "All of them have worked very hard this winter. It's paid off. The reason we won this race today is because of the preparation. I'm just proud to be driving that car right now. It's a lot of fun."

It's only one race, but the Roush Fenway teams were also solid in preseason testing in Las Vegas, where the Cup series moves this weekend, and Edwards is optimistic that this is just the beginning of good things to come.

"If there's one thing we've learned, we've got to stay on top of it. We have to keep working as hard as we can," Edwards said. "There are very minor differences between the cars that are winning these races and the cars running fifth or sixth. We have to keep on top of it. It's a great way to start. I hope we keep going like this."

Certainly it's easy to be optimistic when you've just won a race, but that victory combined with the success in tests at the 1.5-mile Las Vegas oval and improved performance last fall at tracks like Phoenix have this group thinking they finally have a handle on the new car.

While all the preseason hype surrounded the Hendrick Motorsports program that dominated the 2007 season and the Toyota program, which was bolstered by the addition of Joe Gibbs Racing, Roush Fenway quietly labored to improve its program.

For Jack Roush, who put all five of his teams in the Chase for the Nextel Cup in 2005 but had only two competing for the title in 2007, this season began fielding questions about others' success instead of discussing his own program.

"Right before the race started in Daytona, I was besieged for 10 days — 'How was I going to deal with Hendrick's domination? What was going to happen?' I felt that I had five really good cars for Daytona," Roush said. "I told them, (and) I will tell you the same thing: 'Just watch. Write the future not based on the past but on what happens at the time.'"

Roush says he never felt like an underdog against other teams, but he and Bob Osborne, the crew chief for Edwards, felt their pit crews needed some work.

Other than that, however, Roush sees his teams as capable of competing with anyone, especially now that all of the additional work has gone into the new car.

Prior to the season, both Roush and Dan Davis, director of Ford Racing Technology, adamantly insisted that the team and the manufacturer were prepared for the season. They were sure that the gap between teams with the new car should be lessened this year.

So far, that seems to be the case. Time will tell how all the teams measure up against one another, but preseason tests, recent practices and races have shown a variety of teams vying for positions at the front of the pack.

Now, with more research and understanding of the car, Roush is adapting to the model. Whether or not he truly likes the new car yet is difficult to decipher, but he freely admits that he certainly likes running just one model instead of bouncing between two, as the teams did last season.

It seems his drivers do as well — now that they've gained so much ground with the car. Roush says that, in the end, it will be the drivers who determine which teams are successful in the car.

He certainly seems confident that the ones rising to the top will be his.

"It's going to define a much narrower group of drivers that will drive these cars that are very much like (International Race of Champions) kind of cars where you can't change them enough to suit the individual preference of drivers," he says. "Not everybody is going to be able to drive these cars."

---

Rea White is a writer for NASCAR Scene, which is published weekly, 50 weeks per year. Visit www.scenedaily.com for more information. © 2007 Street & Smith Sports Group.