Jack Roush Saturday press conference
Ford Racing: News
October 8, 2005

JACK ROUSH

"The first thing I'll do is apologize to two or three of you guys that ambushed me this morning. The question that apparently is being raised through some meeting that some of you had with NASCAR this morning is so serious and so important to the future of this business and the people that made an investment in it that you won't get a hip-shot from Jack. I'm not gonna give anybody a sound bite and I'm not gonna respond to a meeting that I didn't know about with whatever the agenda was for it, but I'm not going there. So responding to a meeting or anything that you might have been told is not something I can do because I'm ignorant of what happened, and the reason I'm ignorant in this case is that I was given neither the consideration or the courtesy of either being consulted or informed of what they'll do or what they might do or what they're considering doing. The thing that I would say to all of our fans and all of our sponsors and all of the drivers and all of the media people that report it is that we are committed to this business. We've made a huge investment in it. I've raised myself to do what I'm doing today, just like many of the people that have put their charge and their trust in me and we won't let them down. Having said that, we will cooperate and participate with NASCAR at any level, with any part that they'll let us have to have rules and process and morays that are understandable and defensable and are in the best interest of the sport and the business. So whatever rules they ultimately come up with, we're in. You're not gonna get a sound bite from me or anybody in our organization that says, 'Man, this might be the last straw.' They've put a lot of loads of pig iron on my back before and we'll truck this one just fine, too. With that, I won't respond to the meeting nor will I all weekend. We'll have to see what their intention is, if it is a trial balloon or if it's something cast in cement and see what that means to us and our investment and our investors. We've got individual as well as corporate investors in our business and we've got commitments going both ways and we're gonna work to make all those things work on our program."

WOULD YOU GO ALONG WITH A RULE THAT ALLOWED FEWER CARS THAN YOU HAVE NOW?

"I am committed to participate in this business and in this sport as long as I live and to carry forward the trust that my sponsors and my employees and my partners have put in me to provide some leadership and my best energies in that regard. For the foreseeable future, until we come to a determination that the business is not viable, I'm committed to abide with whatever convention, whatever rule, whatever circumstance that NASCAR puts on us and that's open ended."

DO YOU THINK NASCAR COULD LIMIT THE NUMBER OF CARS AND DRIVERS PER TEAM AND STILL WORK WITHIN THEIR SO-CALLED INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR BUSINESS MODEL?

"I'm not sure. I'd have to hear more about what their intention is and what the background is and then we'd have time to mull that. I am not the guy that does the financial analysis of whether we're viable or not. I'm one of the point and grunt guys, 'this is what we need to do,' and I'd like to ask the first question. What's the right thing to do? Then I don't really like asking that next question. Geoff Smith or Evan Mile or some of those folks keep me restrained so that I don't give them a task that's too big."

THE REASON GIVEN TO THE MEDIA ABOUT THIS WAS THAT MULTI-CAR TEAMS HAVE BECOME AN OBSTACLE TO GETTING NEW TEAMS IN THE SPORT. HOW WOULD YOU RESPOND TO THAT?

"I won't respond to that as I indicated. I won't respond to the meeting. I haven't had a brief on what NASCAR intended, nor have I read anything. Anything that I respond to is based on hearsay and I won't go there."

DO YOU FEEL THIS STRETCH IS A CHANCE FOR ONE OR TWO OF YOUR GUYS TO JUMP INTO THE BATTLE?

"If you look at what Jimmie Johnson was able to do last year. He had the misfortune of having two bad races early in the 10 and came back very, very close and certainly had the best performing program throughout the 10, it was just a matter that the bad finishes from the parts that broke took him out of contention for the points for those races. So I think that we're very much in there. Obviously, if Tony and Ryan don't have any problem, it's gonna be hard for anybody to make up from 100 points out on back - from 100 to 170 or whatever it is out. It's gonna be hard to make that up, so if somebody has the kind of luck that Matt Kenseth had in 2003 or Kurt Busch had in the stretch of 2004, it's gonna be awfully hard to overcome that, but chances are that won't be the case. We're certainly expecting that we're gonna run well. This is the best year that Roush Racing has ever had in terms of our level of performance. We obviously didn't distinguish ourselves at road courses and we haven't at restrictor tracks, but we've been game on just about every place else and, of course, that's where we place our emphasis from a testing point of view and from a hardware analysis point of view. We figure that down the stretch at those tracks would be most important to us. I consider Talladega to be a race that, regardless of how much time I spend on it; regardless of how much we invested in it, I wouldn't have the likelihood of being able to determine my outcome, so we carried back to Talladega pretty much the same car we had in the Firecracker 400, which we worked harder for - the individual restricted races than proportionally we have for any other race track, but I was not surprised that we didn't do well at Talladega. I certainly knew that we had great risk there and there was nothing the crew chiefs or the drivers could do to avoid the prospect of losing points. It was just a crapshoot. On the mile-and-a-half tracks and going to Phoenix and Martinsville, we'll be in control of what happens to us and it will be a matter of if somebody else doesn't break a part. We had four flat tires from debris and trash at Dover. Now, that was probably half of the flat tires that occurred there as a result of the condition of the track, but if NASCAR doesn't make a revision in the way they clean the tracks to get it up, well then the next time somebody else will have those four tires - some other teams are more likely to have it the next time than us. But we've been extraordinarily lucky and fortunate in the things that we couldn't control and the way it's broke for us. Except for that we wouldn't have won the two championships we've had. We haven't dazzled anybody with blinding speed. We've got the speed this year, but my prediction is that we have to give back the luck that's been behind us the last two years and that will be our undoing."

HAVE THERE BEEN SOME CHANGES FOR 2007? WHAT ARE THEY?

"I'm not sure what's been announced in terms of sponsors and I won't respond to that. Geoff and the folks in the marketing office, with the sponsors, will have to decide the timing for that if it hasn't already been made clear, but our short-term plan is that Todd Kluever will be in the 6 car in 2007. Mark will be in the car in 2006 and Todd will run a Busch Grand National program full-time in 2006 and, most likely, in 2007 he'll do the same sort of thing that Carl did this year in 2005 - we'll do that in 2006. So we've made that change with what Kurt wants to do. I certainly respect his right to say he didn't want to take a position and he didn't want to negotiate with me going forward. That's his prerogative. This is America and that's what he needs to do if that's what he wants to do, but for 2007 it's my expectation that Jamie McMurray will be in the 97 with the sponsors that are there at that time."

MATT WON THE TITLE IN 2003 AND THEN THEY CHANGED THE POINT SYSTEM. NOW WITH THIS MEETING TODAY, ARE YOU STARTING TO FEEL A LITTLE SINGLED OUT?

"It feels like Get Shorty to me (laughing). I can't do short jokes (laughing). But that's the stuff of editorials you guys should write at the appropriate time - on slow news days you amuse yourselves and a lot of people read your stuff - so go get you some (laughing)."

SO YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN CONSULTED BY NASCAR IN REGARDS TO FUTURE CAR OWNERSHIP AND ANY TYPE OF LIMITS, WHETHER IT'S BEEN ANYTIME RECENTLY OR ANY TIME IN THE PAST?

"That's not what I said. Let me tell you what I said. What I said was I did not know about the meeting. I was not given the respect nor the consideration of being informed or questioned as to what they had in mind, and if there is a policy that has been made, I don't know about it and they haven't asked me about it. The thing that they have told me consistently is they did respect the investment I had made. They did understand the commitments that I made and that they would not do harm to those. That I have been told on numerous occasions by numerous people and that's what I expect."

HOW MUCH OF A CONCERN IS IT TO YOU THAT THEY ARE SPEAKING TO THE MEDIA ABOUT THIS SUBJECT BEFORE GOING TO SOMEONE LIKE YOURSELF?

"This is NASCAR. I've been down here with you for 18 years. I mean, we all know what the rules are and how it works. The rules are flexible when it comes to what NASCAR does and the way they interact with the media and the way they interact with the drivers and the way they interact with the owners. I think we all know what to expect. It's NASCAR."

THOUGHTS ON THE CAR OF THE FUTURE?

"Well, it's pretty incredible that one of the first things they did was shorten the nose up. I don't know which part of engineering brilliance decided they were gonna make a safer car with regards to its crashworthiness by shortening the nose up, but they first made the nose shorter and I guess they're gonna make it back to the same length that it is now. They've got a number of things in the car that are certainly desirable. Richard Childress and most of the owners believe the things they want are, by and large, achievable in the existing car, but they've decided not to do that. Whatever they decide to do, if it's affordable and if it's possible, I'm sure that myself as well as the other owners will satisfy their wants, if not their needs."

DO YOU FIND TODAY'S EVENTS CURIOUS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CHASE?

"I was thinking, 'If you were trying to do something that might put some more blood in the water and create some more excitement, what would you do?' This is one of the things you might do."

YOU EXPRESSED CONCERNS ABOUT THE COST OF THE CAR OF TOMORROW. DO YOU STILL HAVE THE SAME CONCERN?

"The answer is, for the time being, I'm guardedly optimistic. They did in fact call a second meeting that I and a number of the other owners were asked to participate in and they did ask our input as far as scheduling and some other things that wasn't on the table - at least it wasn't on the table for me previously. If they can move the dates out, so that we're able to balance out our existing hardware, and be able to make the changes they want with the present staff, it'll be a seamless transition at a modest cost to the teams. If they compress that to where you have to dig a hole and bury your existing cars, you haven't got value out of them regardless of whether you might have a strategy with the IRS or a strategy with investment folks, whoever they would be, that says that you're able to amortize your car by using it the amount of time that you expected when you built it, well then there's a loss. Given the number of cars that are potentially involved, the loss could be huge. It could be catastrophic. At one point I gave somebody a soundbite. I said it was a disaster, well some unmentioned people within NASCAR wouldn't talk to me for a race or two because they thought I was not showing the right kind of support, but I am in support of anything we can do for safety and I certainly am not resistant to anything that we could do to make the cars easier to regulate and litigate and safer for the drivers. We want all of that. The car of today is not the same as the car of yesterday at any point in time in the reasonable past, so looking forward, if they'll come back and relent to the timing that was proposed by the owners - the change to this car is something that certainly can be achieved without dire consequences to the viability of the teams nor the quality of the racing, I think."

SO WHAT IF THEY SAID IT WOULD HAVE TO BE DONE IN 2007?

"That is not the schedule that we talked about and we asked them to go back and look at it. That would be a problem. One of the things that winds up being a problem here is if you look, say in my world a team can built about a car a month. If you've got four teams, let's say it's five cars a month, but a car a month. If you're racing and you figure out that you need to have a car a month, that means in a year you can only build six cars that were towards something with the same people. Now if you say, 'I need to build twice that many cars,' then I need to go get Chip Ganassi's people to work for me, or Rick's people to work for me, or Ray's people to work for me. So the owners wind up being in a situation where they don't have the capacity - not withstanding the philosophy investment of their cars - they wind up not having the capacity to respond to that, and that was the thing that we begged for. I'll be curious to see if they're willing to go there or not. I know that's not the schedule that they had their mind set on before we had our meeting and they may not go there. They may go back and say, 'Guys, we hate it for you, but it's 2007. Build your cars and go fight among yourselves and decide how you're gonna do it and we don't care.' That would be NASCAR, too, you know."

Roush wants more info on ownership limitations
floridatoday.com
October 18, 2005

Despite the frenzy surrounding NASCAR's stated intention to limit the number of teams a team owner can own, the man perceived as public enemy No. 1 is not yet panicked that his organization could be cast to the wind.

Jack Roush, who owns five teams, all of whom are among the 10 competing for the Nextel Cup, certainly is not embracing bossman Brian France's proposal but at the same time is not ready to hyperventilate -- yet.

He believes France's bombshell, dropped at Kansas two weeks ago, was more of a trial balloon. But that being said, Roush, never one to back down from anything or anybody, doesn't plan to hold the garage door for France and company and allow them to rip asunder what it has taken him years to build.

"I think it's wrong-headed," Roush told a Ford Racing teleconference on Monday.

"I think what we saw with what Brian said was a trial balloon based on maybe -- I haven't had a meeting with Brian -- but there are some issues with Formula One owners and the organization and what they're gonna do next year, so there is some anxiety in that organization.

"There seems to be some anxiety over the people that, as my friend (fellow team owner) Rick Hendrick says, have got skin in the game that we could roll over or we might do something contrary to the long-term interest of the sport and the fans and the sponsors. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Hendrick and I and Joe Gibbs and all the other teams that could potentially present a threat, we're NASCAR's biggest fans and advocates, and we're determined to make it work -- through debate if necessary -- but we're determined to make it work."

One of NASCAR's main points in wanting to break up and then constrain the mega teams is to create opportunities for new owners to enter the sport and to level the playing field -- certainly tilted in favor of the big teams -- for the less financially and technologically endowed teams.

Understandably, the owners who do not have the financial -- read sponsorship -- and engineering and mechanical resources of Roush and the other big teams came out in favor of NASCAR's proposal.

And, understandably, Roush, who is as much a student of the business end of the sport as the mechanical and competitive facets, doesn't agree.

"It sure looks like it would be counter to it, to me, for everything that we see," he said about attracting new sponsors in an environment free of multi-car powerhouses. Because as Roush sees it, even though the teams compete with each other each Sunday, there is much sharing going on that makes it possible for some teams to be in business at all.

"In today's world, the fact that Ford Motor Company has given me encouragement to help the Ford teams that would like to get started -- Chevrolet has obviously encouraged Hendrick to help teams get started," Roush said.

"The MB2 team . . . that's the same thing. Hendrick engines and Hendrick cars and much of Hendrick technology -- wind tunnel information and that sort of thing -- has benefited those guys dramatically. As a for instance, if you had 43 separate teams all struggling just to hang onto the bottom step of a ladder that was three stories high, it would be awful hard to get somebody concerned about standing back and holding the ladder so it wouldn't tip over."

From NASCAR's perspective, unless it steps in to do something the sport itself is in jeopardy of tipping in favor of powerhouses, but the big bosses have yet to sit down with the big owners to discuss the big issue.

"I look forward to having a chance to sit down with Brian . . . and with Rick and with Joe Gibbs . . . and say, 'What is the issue here?' " Roush said.

" 'What is it we're trying to accomplish that we can do and not jeopardize the investments of years and time that the multi-team owners have got?'

"There are many deep issues we've got to work our way through. I need to have a better understanding. NASCAR runs trial balloons up sometimes to see what kind of debate they can stimulate. Whether this is something they've got resolve toward and an issue, or a policy has been established they intend to enforce and it's just a matter of implementation, or whether they're just wanting a debate, I'm not sure."

Roush is not alone in his uncertainty. Even though NASCAR president Mike Helton followed France's comments with a SPEED Channel interview, specifics were lacking on the No. 1 issue -- how NASCAR would enforce any cap on multi-car teams.

Until that information comes forth, all anyone can do is speculate. And, as much as many in the sport profess to detest speculation, that's the fuel that keeps the whole shebang firing on all cylinders.

Contact DeCotis at 242-3786 or e-mail mdecotis@flatoday.net

Roush ready for a fight
By Godwin Kelly - Motorsports Editor
The Daytona Beach News-Journal: SPEED Magazine
October 18, 2005

DAYTONA BEACH -- It took more than a week, but Jack Roush gave his definitive opinion about NASCAR's proposed plan to cap the number of cars owned by one person in coming seasons.

"I'm ready for a big fight," Roush said Monday in a national conference call with racing media.

On Oct. 8 at Kansas Speedway, NASCAR chairman Brian France and president Mike Helton said they hope to attract new team owners by capping the number of teams one person is allowed to have in Nextel Cup.

"I didn't understand what was behind it and I don't know what the end game is yet," Roush said of the France-Helton press conference.

Roush Racing fields five, full-time teams in the series and his entire stable of cars made the 10-car Chase field this season. Rick Hendrick has four cars and drivers in the elite division. Other owners have three-car teams.

"We don't care if Jack's got five, six or 10 cars -- if it were good for the sport," Helton said. "But we don't think it's good for the sport and we have to address that, and that's a big move for us."

During their impromptu discussions with media in Kansas City, France and Helton said a cap timetable would be established and hinted strongly at a three-car, ownership limit in Nextel Cup competition.

"We haven't arrived at that (cap figure), but very shortly we're going to be announcing a long-range policy that will speak to that," France said.

"There are many deep issues that we've got to work our way through," Roush said in response to the discussed cap.

Roush, whose teams have won the last two NASCAR championships, said he has not spoken to France on the subject but has discussed the matter with Helton.

Roush wants to bring all the major players to the table for a summit and hinted at possible legal ramifications.

"We're in the process now of reviewing some relevant case law and some other things that are precedents in our national economy and in this sport-marketing business to understand where we stand," Roush said.

"I look forward to having a chance to sit down with Brian and to sit down with Jim France and to sit down with Lesa Kennedy and Mike Helton all together and with Rick and with Joe Gibbs at the same time and say, 'What is the issue here?' " Roush added. " 'What is it we're trying to accomplish that we can do and not jeopardize the investments of years and time that the multi-team owners have got?' "

Jim France is vice-chairman of NASCAR. Lesa Kennedy is president of International Speedway Corp. and on NASCAR's board of directors.

Joe Gibbs, head coach of the NFL's Washington Redskins, owns three Nextel Cup teams that have won two championships since 2000. Gibbs got a big assist from Hendrick when he started his team in 1992.

NASCAR says it won't franchise race teams, which would create immediate financial value for car owners. Roush said multi-car team ownership helps create equity and some liquidity as an independent contractor.

godwin.kelly@news-jrnl.com