Matt Kenseth won the rain-postponed Samsung/Radio Shack 500 on Monday, getting his second victory this season. It also was the second straight win for Roush Racing, and the third in seven Winston Cup events.
``This is a real turnaround for us,'' said Roush, wearing the hand-crafted hat each member of the winning team gets at Texas Motor Speedway. ``We're really having a good time with it right now."
Already more fun than last season, when the four-driver team had just two wins in 36 races.
Kenseth, forced to start at the back of the field because of a blown engine in practice, beat Jeff Gordon by 0.888 seconds - about eight car-lengths. Roush teammate Mark Martin finished third, his fourth top-10 finish this season.
After a battle at the front with Tony Stewart, the leaders pitted on lap 308, in the last of seven caution periods in the 334-lap race.
Kenseth took two tires, and the fast stop got his Ford back on the track ahead of Gordon, who also took only two tires on his Chevrolet. Stewart, who had taken two tires his previous stop to get track position, was forced to take four and slid to eighth and out of contention, finishing fifth.
``Clean air was a big deal,'' Kenseth said. ``If you were up front and had clean air, you were in pretty good shape. We were up front when it counted.''
Kenseth, the former rookie of the year, took the lead for the first time on lap 231 and led three times for 84 laps, including the final 25. It was his fifth top-10 finish after just nine last season.
``My main goal this year was just to be more competitive. We wanted to put ourselves in position to win races,'' Kenseth said. ``Last year, we very seldom put ourselves in a position to win.''
That was the same situation for most of the Roush team, which last year had only Jeff Burton in the top 10 in points after he earned the only two victories.
This year, Burton is 14th - and the lowest-ranked driver on the team. Kenseth is second, 70 points behind points leader Sterling Marlin, while Martin is fifth and Kurt Busch, who won two weeks ago at Bristol, Tenn., is seventh.
``I've said all along when we got running good again that we wouldn't know what we did,'' Martin said. ``Sure, we say we do, but we haven't worked any harder than we worked to run bad. We've been working the same and, evidently, it's just been paying off a lot more.''
Busch had three flat tires and finished 23rd. Burton was 39th, completing just 255 laps after a run-in with Buckshot Jones.
That made it a bittersweet day for Roush, whose car ownership began with Martin in 1988.
``The downside of four teams is that only one of them can win, so I'm really greedy,'' Roush said. ``Those things will be bothering me as much or more than the joy I feel for winning the race.''
Kenseth, who won earlier this season in Rockingham, N.C., was listed as starting 31st in the 43-car field. He actually had to pull to the back of the field for the green flag after a blown engine Friday.
Under NASCAR's new one-engine rule, the teams must use only one motor for the entire race weekend or start from the back.
The fast 1 1/2 -mile oval was repaved last summer, and that put a premium on passing, making Kenseth's task impressive because he had only five laps of practice. Saturday's practice was rained out before more wet weather Sunday postponed the race.
``I never thought we had a shot at winning,'' Kenseth said. ``We were all worried about it being a one-groove track, with the repaving, but it really wasn't. I was really surprised how fast it came in. You could run side-by-side.''
Gordon, the four-time and defending series champion, broke a career-long streak of 14 races without a top-five finish, going back to his victory in Kansas City, Kan., last September. Gordon made his 300th straight start, becoming the first Cup driver to do that at the beginning of his career.
Ricky Rudd, who led 29 laps early, finished fourth, followed by Stewart, rookie Jimmie Johnson and Marlin.
Dale Jarrett, the defending champion, led a race-high 134 laps and was running second on lap 229 when he ran out of gas and had to coast a half-lap to the pits. He then got trapped in his pit stall behind Gordon's car and wound up losing two laps. He finished 24th.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/4/196345