The Kenseth Diary

Roush Racing Driver Diary: Matt Kenseth
Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Hey guys!

It’s funny sometimes how things work out. Just a week ago I was saying how we were ready to move on after Speedweeks, and it’s true, we were. We were ready to move on to the type of track and racing that we’ll be doing for the large part of the season, because we meaning myself and the crew can have more of an influence on the outcome.

I was still a little bitter with what went down at Daytona. Mainly because I though we had a car that was capable of winning. There’ve been a lot of times I couldn’t wait to get out of a restrictor plate race because it seemed as if I was making bad decisions, or something happened with the car, or we wrecked. But, Daytona was different because it seemed everything was right; the car was good, we were running up front, then something happened that could have been prevented but was out of our control. So, it was extra frustrating.

Then we go to California and everything seems to fall into place. A lot of what happened at California was out of our control but everything seemed to happen in our favor. First off, I want to say what an awesome crew I have. Out pit crew is the best in the business. Seriously, we’d be an average team without those guys, but they make us so much better. All day they had great stops and we picked up positions on pit road.

But, I don’t care how fast they were, nobody was going to catch Greg (Biffle) on Sunday. His car was really fast until they had some sort of engine problem. Tony (Stewart) was fast too, although we were catching him and had actually passed him before his engine let go. It looked like we had a top-five car at best, but then Robbie (Reiser) was able to free the car up a little on that last run and we felt as fast as we had run all day. With Biffle and Stewart behind the wall suddenly we’re the best car on the track.

There’s been so many times where we’ve had a dominant racecar and then something happens at the end to take the win away from you. At California my rookie year we were the fastest car on the track, but a two-tire stop beat us. You just never know, so I’ll gladly take a win any way I can get them. We may not have had the best car all day, but we did when it counted, we were one of the best five cars, and we were able to hang around and put ourselves in position to race for the win. In this business that’s about all you can do, and this time it all worked out our way.

- Matt