Roush Racing came into Sunday’s race at Las Vegas with a ton of confidence.
Matt Kenseth had won the last two races, and Carl Edwards was the defending champion of the race and Greg Biffle had won the Nationwide Series race on Saturday.
The entire weekend went well for the Roush teams while others, namely the Toyota teams, struggled with engine problems.
Sunday however it all fell apart as Roush engines, which are actually built through an alliance with Doug Yates, began to fail shortly after the green flag fell.
Matt Kenseth was the first to fall. After fighting a sour engine the first few laps Kenseth’s powerplant let go on lap 7. He finished the day 43rd, last, for only the second time in his career.
“I think it’s the first engine we broke in two years,” Kenseth said. “The guys at Roush Yates engines do a great job. It’s bound to happen sooner or later, it just didn’t happen at a good time.”
Next came David Ragan. Ragan saw his engine and his race fall apart on lap 74. The warning was issued to the other teams still on the track Biffle, McMurray and Edwards not long after to watch their engines and try not to over rev them.
Biffle led laps and came home 7th while a physically ailing McMurray finished the day in 9th. Both their engines survived the event. Edwards Ford, in the top five with less then three to go imploded on the white flag lap. He would be scored in 17th.
“Honestly, as soon as Donnie (crew chief Donnie Wingo) started saying, ‘Try to save the motor,’ I would just kind of go wide open off the corner and then as soon as I’d get to about 9000 I would just about half-throttle all the way down the straightaway,” McMurray said. “It’s frustrating because cars would pass you, but you’ve got to finish. As a driver, you’re sitting there and I kept seeing guys blow up. Even if you were to finish 20th, it’s better than blowing up and finishing in the forties.”
The engine problems seemed reminiscent of another powerhouse team one week prior. At California Hendrick Motorsports had cars suffering engine problems and drivers worrying. In their case the fault was found to be a bad batch of engine parts that caused the failure.
Team co-owner Jack Roush said the problem Sunday at Vegas didn’t seem to be engine part failure, simply the wrong chassis setups on the cars.
“I think we misjudged how fast this tire was going to be and the engine turned more,” Roush said. “It’s the same spec on the engine that we had all of last year. It wasn’t something new or experimental, I had great confidence in it. We had it the last third of last year, but we saw more RPM with it in qualifying than we ever had and we saw more RPM in the race than we ever had.
The tire didn’t fall off as much as we expected it to, so the tire did a real nice job but we just over-revved the engine.”
What it all came down too, according to Roush was the rear gear used in the cars.
“We had a choice of which rear axle ratio to use and we used the higher of the ratios and it was 200 RPM more than the other ratio would have been,” Roush said. “We just made the wrong choice from a crew chief and from an engineer point of view on that.”
In hindsight though, Roush said that based on their experience he’s not sure the teams would have done anything different.
“If we can go back looking at it I’d say I need to have more margin in the engine and it needs to be not that close to its limit,” Roush said. But if you go through and win the races we won last year late in the year in the chase and we had the success that we had in Fontana, there’s no reason to be nervous about it. The fact that it crept up a little bit didn’t raise the alarm that it should have. We’ll be wiser going to Atlanta.”
Kyle Busch won the race in a Toyota after winning the pole but being forced to start last due to an engine change.
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