Baffled Biffle: Roush Fenway Racing driver frustrated by lack of results
As the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup schedule kicks off the second half of the season, Greg Biffle and the three-car Roush Fenway Racing organization is still searching for answers.
Once a powerhouse organization that contended for race wins and Sprint Cup titles, none of the team's three cars sat higher than 18th in the standings headed into Sunday's race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
The three RFR cars fared no better as a group at Loudon, with Biffle finishing 27th, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. 17th and Trevor Bayne 32nd.
Since the end of last season, the Ford Racing organization has been working diligently to find answers in an attempt to turn its program around and get back to being the formidable group it once was.
However, as the season has gone along, whatever answers RFR has come up with have seemed to do little to solve the major problems facing the organization.
At Talladega Superspeedway in May, Biffle told FOXSports.com the changes made within the organization and how they were building cars was not leading to the results they anticipated.
"We didn't go in the wrong direction, we just didn't find all that we thought we found," Biffle said in May.
Fast-forward two months, and the team is still searching for answers. While Biffle was able to finish second to Carl Edwards in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway thanks in large part to fuel mileage, he has failed to finish inside the top 10 since.
His Roush Fenway teammates have not been faring much better, either. Through the first 18 races of the season, Stenhouse Jr. has a best finish of fourth at Bristol, but also has 12 finishes outside the top 20. Trevor Bayne had two top-10 finishes in the four weeks leading up to New Hampshire, but his poor finish at Loudon marked the 13th time in 18 events this season that he has finished 24th or worse.
After multiple attempts to turn the program around and little results to show for it, Biffle says it is difficult to stay motivated when the hard work is not paying off.
"It's very hard to stay enthusiastic," Biffle admitted Friday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. "I wouldn't say it's like one arm tied behind your back, but it is difficult to get dressed, buckled in there, and get out on the race track. But every time we do we're searching for that speed, so we're back at the shop working on stuff, we're testing, and then we're bringing it to see what it does competing to that next guy."
The team unloaded new cars at Texas Motor Speedway in April that began to show promise, but that promise eventually leveled off without any notable improvement. Once the team failed to perform at Michigan in June, it was "back to the drawing board" for the entire organization.
"We're kind of pinging around it and trying to find that moving target and every time we feel like we're getting closer, we get knocked back down to the bottom rung again and start back up," Biffle said. "The chassis made a difference. We found some aero stuff, and we're just continuing. We think we found a little bit more speed at Chicago (where Sprint Cup teams tested this week). Any time we find a little bit of speed we don't want to celebrate yet until we get a result from it on the race track."
Unfortunately for the team, the results on the track have not been forthcoming. Meanwhile, frustration is mounting and time is running out if Roush wants to have a team included in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
"We look at the same stats you're looking at and we look around us and the cars we're racing with and it's definitely frustrating. But, at the same time, we're working as hard as we can to try and figure out what we need for speed -- what we have to do with these cars," Biffle said. "To be quite honest with you, we don't know what to do to them and we don't know where the speed is at so it makes it really difficult to fix it."
VIDEO: Greg Biffle starts massive wreck earlier this season at Atlanta
Roush Fenway Racing
