Ricky Stenhouse Jr. sees surge coming from Roush Fenway Racing
Corrections/clarifications: A previous version of this story incorrectly listed the year Carl Edwards joined Joe Gibbs Racing. Edwards began racing for JGR in 2015.
This year feels different to Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Those empowered with the stream-lining and retrenching of once-mighty Roush Fenway Racing tend to agree, and the signs have been encouraging through the first seven races of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season.
Entering this weekend’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway (2 p.m. ET, Fox), RFR’s Trevor Bayne is 12th in points and currently inside the 16-driver playoff boundary, with Stenhouse 19th. Stenhouse, a two-time champion of the second-tier NASCAR Xfinity Series, has seen heartening starts fizzle before but a 10th-place run at Martinsville Speedway convinces him that numerous offseason changes in personnel and a surge by Ford might have changed the team’s trajectory.
Stenhouse was 14th in the driver standings last season entering Martinsville — “my worst track by far,” he calls it — finished 32nd and spent the rest of 2016 flitting from the high teens to low 20s in points. He finished 21st.
“For us, we’ve changed really a lot this offseason,” said Stenhouse, referring to changes that included veteran driver Greg Biffle being let go, and the team down-sizing to two Cup teams. “Now we’ve finally got all the pieces in place so we can maintain that speed, maintain that performance.
“To have a good Martinsville race was really important for us. … It feels totally different from the past couple years when we had a good start. I think we’re pretty confident we’re going to keep getting better.”
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Roush Fenway president Steve Newmark said competition director Kevin Kidd and operations director Tommy Wheeler have “rallied the troops” since being named to their positions in November.
“You’ve seen significantly greater speeds in our cars and we’re consistently running between eighth and 15th — and you don’t always get the finishes — but, overall, I think there’s a lot of speed in the cars,” Newmark told USA TODAY Sports. “I am a big proponent of the new stage format, but if we didn’t have the stage format and stage points, I believe Trevor would be sitting seventh in points right now, just the way they’ve raced their races, which is to get the finishes. And, probably, we haven’t maximized the stage points as well.”
Stewart-Haas Racing’s addition to the Ford camp seems to also have helped the burgeoning manufacturer, which has already captured three wins — two by Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski and the Daytona 500 with SHR’s Kurt Busch.
Roush Fenway was a performance and business power at multiple NASCAR levels in the 2000s, developing and retaining long-term most of its talent, and in 2005, claiming half of the then-10 playoff spots available with drivers Biffle, Busch, Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Mark Martin. The team won Cup championships in 2003 with Kenseth and 2004 with Busch.
Performance began to wane as drivers peeled away, however, with Martin leaving in 2007 for semi-retirement then a return to fulltime racing at Hendrick Motorsports and Kenseth and Edwards joining Joe Gibbs Racing in 2013 and 2015, respectively. Subsequent seasons were a struggle, and RFR did not retain Biffle to regroup around Stenhouse, 29, and 26-year-old former Daytona 500-winner Bayne.
Streamlining, Newmark said, has allowed for quick implementation of the positive changes Stenhouse feels in his No. 17 Ford.
“The teams work extremely well together and when we have a change we need, we can get it through the system quicker than we could before,” he said. “Doesn’t mean we don’t aspire to grow at some point, but we think being at two, while continuing to maintain and add to the engineering infrastructure, they’re just laser focused on two teams.”
Stenhouse, who admits there were times in his first four Cup seasons when he was tempted to “give up and ride around,” said this feels like a turning point for him and the organization. A playoff berth is realistic, he said, although Ryan Newman breaking a 127-race winless streak at Phoenix absorbs a spot he assumed would be available. With two top 10 finishes so far this season, Stenhouse believes he could in one season surpass his career total of 19 if the team continues to bring improved cars to the track each week.
“I think Matt leaving and Carl leaving, I think it kind of took a lot of wind out of the sails of everybody at the shop, really,” he said. “A lot of the guys at the shop have worked mainly with Matt and Carl and Greg and so when one of them left at a time, it really just slowed us down. The development of the cars weren’t coming around as they needed to, maybe the quality of the cars wasn’t as good as it needed to be.
“But I feel like right now we’ve got a lot of people in the shop that really support us as drivers.”
Follow James on Twitter @brantjames
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