Matt Kenseth

The resurgence of Roush Racing this season has been led by Matt Kenseth, who started the year by winning two of the first seven Winston Cup races. After Kenseth finished 13th in points and posted no wins last season, he and teammates Mark Martin, Jeff Burton, and Kurt Busch are back at the front of the pack. Kenseth recently spoke to Stock Car Racing about the improvement.

SCR: Your performance has improved dramatically this season. Was there a point last season when you began to doubt yourself?

Kenseth: I never really doubted I could drive the cars when they got them right. I just doubted my ability to figure out what was wrong with our cars because we were running so bad, and we were so far off, that I couldn’t tell them what to put in the car to make it better. That part I doubted. Our team morale, considering how bad we ran, stayed pretty good. Morale is going to get down when you run bad and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. If I’m smiling at the shop and at the racetrack, I’ll go home when I’m running bad and be miserable. It’s tough to keep your chin up.

SCR: Stories circulated last year that you wanted out of Roush Racing. Was there any shopping around on your part or did other teams contact you?

Kenseth: Not really. You’re always going to have people in the garage mention that “if something happens to your deal then call me,” or something like that. It was never really anything more than that. Jack’s been good to us as far as giving us the equipment that we need or the cars we want to build. I’ve still got some time left on my contract, and I never really considered last year doing anything different.

SCR: Is this the last year of your contract?

Kenseth: I’ve still got another year left.

SCR: Are you content at Roush Racing or do you plan to see what else is out there when your contract is up?

Kenseth: Right now we are running great and trying to contend for a championship. I am not going to worry about contracts or rumors in the middle of the racing season. I am going to concentrate on winning races and staying up in the point standings.

SCR: Were you surprised by the overall performance of Roush Racing last year?

Kenseth: Yeah, because when I came here in ’99 and ran my five-race deal, we ran really well in the five races. We didn’t finish great in all of them but we ran pretty well, and it really wasn’t much harder than the Busch Series for us to run well right away. I was feeling good about life. Mark, in ’98, won seven races and was second in points. Burton won a few races. Everything looked good. Everything looked like it was going to be great, and my rookie year started out really strong, started out really, really good. In the middle of my rookie year we started a downhill slide and it just continued last year until the first of this season when it started coming back uphill, and it’s still going up now.

SCR: How much has the one-engine rule for qualifying and racing helped Roush Racing this year?

Kenseth: We never put a lot of emphasis on qualifying engines. Instead of buying special parts and doing special stuff, we just pretty much used old race motors. Up till a few years ago, that would work just fine. But last year it was really getting out of control with people building qualifying motors. They would build a qualifying motor that was 40-50 more horsepower than their race motor. For me it was really tough qualifying. I felt like we were at a big deficit there. Even though you wouldn’t know it from my average starting position this year, I think it’s helped our qualifying quite a bit. Even for the race, we’ve always worked hard on race motors and our stuff is as durable or more durable than most teams, and we haven’t really had to detune our stuff. We’ve been able to keep improving our power where some people might have had to back their stuff up a little bit to run through an entire weekend.

SCR: You and crew chief Robbie Reiser go back to your ASA days when you drove against each other. How much does it mean to have him calling the shots?

Kenseth: It means a lot. We’ve worked together for a long time, since 1997. He’s been pretty much my only crew chief (in NASCAR). It’s been great working with him. We understand what each other is saying. We don’t always agree with what we’re saying to each other, but we understand. We have a lot of trust in each other. If I tell him I need something done on the car, need a setup that I just have to have, I know that I’m going to get it. We have a great relationship on the track and away from the track, too, so it makes it a lot more enjoyable.

SCR: If you look at Dale Earnhardt Jr. and consider that you guys came into Winston Cup together, and you’ve essentially equaled his success in Cup, does it bother you to see all the publicity he gets?

Kenseth: I would say the first couple of years I raced the Busch Series against him, he did run a little better than me and he won two championships. We were pretty strong, but he probably got 10 times the amount of publicity, and that was true even in our (Cup) rookie year. It maybe irritated me a little inside. But I’ll tell you a story. After Darlington this year he needed a ride home and asked to ride with me. My wife Katie and I were driving one of Jack’s (Roush) Mustangs down there so we gave him a ride home. We stopped at Wendy’s to get a bite to eat and went inside to use the bathroom and then get food to go. Everybody in there recognized him and started screaming like we were at a rock concert and they had spotted a rock star. Little girls in there were screaming and cornered him and swarmed all around him. Nobody even noticed me. I didn’t envy him one iota. If it was like that for me everyday, it would drive me crazy. It really doesn’t bother me at all anymore since that day. I enjoy my time away, and I enjoy being able to go where I want without necessarily being cornered all the time.

SCR: You ran several different series coming up—ASA, Hooters ProCup, NASCAR All-Pro, to name a few. What circuit would you recommend to a young driver attempting to move up?

Kenseth: That’s a tough thing. If you look around in the Busch Series, in Winston Cup, everybody has his different route. There’s not really a planned route. There’s not an A, B, C, D, E, F route, where you start in A and then move on to B. A lot of it is luck, being recognized by the right person. The main thing I was lucky enough to do a lot, and I would suggest, would be to race as many different tracks as you can. Don’t get stuck racing at the same track every week. I think it’s really important to get out and race as many different types of racetracks as you can.

SCR: You have maturity about you that some of the younger drivers seem to lack. Does that come from your upbringing?

Kenseth: My dad, when he used to race, would get pretty hyper, and I used to get really hyper when I was younger and started racing. I would fly off the handle and stuff like that. There are some people who have taught me to keep my cool a little bit better, even though no one keeps it all the time. I really try to keep everything in perspective. When things go wrong, they go wrong; there’s not really anything you can do about it. You need to take the highs and the lows. Last year we had a lot of lows, so that was definitely a humbling experience. It makes you appreciate the highs a lot more.

SCR: How much more intense is the action on the track this year compared to your first two years in Cup?

Kenseth: This sounds dumb but, to tell you the truth, the most intense racing that I’ve done was probably last year running in the back. Running in the back is really, really hard. When you’re back there fighting for 20th and your car is handling terrible and you’re fighting your car like crazy and you’re trying to pass cars and get the best finish you can, it’s really tough. When your car is handling good and you can run up front and you can pass cars and you catch them and try to figure out how to get around them, that’s when it’s fun. That’s when it’s maybe not as difficult, but it’s difficult when your car is not handling good and you don’t have the equipment underneath you to do as good as you think you can do and you’re over-driving all the time to try to make the car go faster. That’s the most intense racing you’ll do. The most intense racing happens from about 19th to 27th.

SCR: What do you like least about the sport today?

Kenseth: The thing I like the least is how many rules there are and how they (NASCAR) take a lot of it out of the teams’ hands. When I started racing I really enjoyed trying to figure something out before the next guy. The things that bother me most is like the top-five cars after a race they’ll take the shocks apart and show everybody, even though there’s no rule in what you can run in the shocks. They’ll make an announcement in the garage and say, “OK, here’s the shock teardown from last week,” and they’ll show everybody the shocks that you ran, and that’s one of your only tuning tools left. Stuff like that frustrates me more than anything. There’s just so many rules on so many things that they don’t leave you a lot of room to figure out stuff for yourself, so that part is really frustrating.

SCR: It’s well known that Mark Martin has been a mentor of yours. Other than Mark, what veteran driver do you look up to?

Kenseth: There’s a lot of them. Dale Jarrett is one of them and probably for a different reason. I remember when I was a little kid watching when he drove that Hardee’s car and he ran really bad. It seems like he was always running in the back and having problems and was really struggling. Then to be able to come back and win races and be a Winston Cup champion, I think that is really cool. That says a lot about not giving up and keeping after it. To see somebody do that well after struggling early in their career, to me that is something that’s really cool.

SCR: What do you do to relax in your spare time?

Kenseth: I just like to hang out. My wife and I built a little log cabin up in Wisconsin. My best friend from high school has some land out there also. When we get enough time off, I like to go up there and hang out for a few days. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. There are no people around, and it’s fun to get away and relax. No cities. No nothing. I like to do that.

SCR: Do you see your 9-year-old son, Ross, as much as you would like?

Kenseth: No, I don’t get to see him near as much as I would like. He lives up in Wisconsin. I do get to see him, though, and he gets to come to some races. When I do get to spend some time with him, I enjoy that.

SCR: Is he a future racer?

Kenseth: Yeah, he’s been racing some go-karts and doing stuff like that. To be honest, I wish he wasn’t, but he is though. I wish he was just playing football and baseball until he is at least a little bit older. I think he’s a little too young.