Watkins Glen, N.Y. — It was a very productive first day for Roush Racing after four Roush rockets pocketed top-10 starting spots for the Sirius @ the Glen road course event.
Best in class for not only Ford, but of the Roush team was Greg Biffle, who in the Grainger-sponsored car missed the pole by less than a tenth of a mile per hour.
“We've always been pretty good at road racing, Randy [Goss, crew chief] and I,” Biffle said after his run. “I love to road race. I don't have a big background in road racing, but I like it."
“Track experience is track experience,” replied Biffle when asked if his seat time in a Craftsman Truck helped with his Cup efforts. “We did run here in 2001 in a Busch car and finished second to Ron
Fellows. So, we had a really good run here in a Busch car, but both the truck and the Busch car — we were on the pole here in the truck and won from the pole and qualified up in the top five in the Busch car and ran real well.”
Biffle said, “There are more opportunities to make mistakes here than other places and that experience has been valuable to me — running those races here in the past."
Starting third is Biffle teammate Mark Martin, who is one the tour’s noted road course racers. "That's why I do this,” said Martin after qualifying his Viagra Ford third. “If I was gonna be a middle-of-the-pack runner, you wouldn't have ever saw me or heard of me because I have no interest in that. Unfortunately, you have to do that some in this business. You can't always go that well, but we have a whole lot faster race car than I've had here the past few years and, hopefully, we won't have all the awful kind of luck that we've had at so many other places recently.
“We got a top 10 finish at Indy and maybe that's a start of some good things to come,” Martin added. “We feel pretty confident about going forward from here and certainly feel confident about being fast here. That doesn't mean that things won't go wrong for us, but at least we're gonna be fast."
Point leader Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch qualified seventh and eighth, respectively, and rounded out the Ford efforts in the top 10.
“I thought I could get a little more out of it, but there was probably more grip out there than I thought there was and I didn't attack the course hard enough,” offered Kenseth about his lap. “But it was a good, solid lap and that will get us a top 10 starting spot. That's a good place."
The fifth of the Roush entries was hampered somewhat by driver Jeff Burton, who was not feeling at the top of his game during the morning practice session. “We're not running like I thought we would coming here,” offered Burton about his 23rd place qualifying effort. “The Citgo team has worked really hard. To be honest, I'm having trouble telling them what the car needs. I haven't felt very good the last couple of days and I don't know if that's hurting me, but the guys are working really hard.
“The car drives OK, but it's just not real fast."
In total, 17 cars bettered the previous track record, something that a combination of Goodyear’s Martinsville, Va. tire and optimal weather conditions brought to the series Friday.
