Roush Fenway Racing hires new crew chief for Greg Biffle, other key personnel
On the heels of a miserable 2015 season in the Sprint Cup Series, Roush Fenway Racing is wasting little time making wholesale changes.
As widely speculated, veteran Michael Waltrip Racing crew chief Brian Pattie has replaced Matt Puccia and will call the shots for RFR's senior driver, Greg Biffle, next season.
"I'm looking forward to it," Pattie said of teaming with Biffle, who has gone winless the past two seasons. "It's definitely a guy that you can't question how many times he's won. He's what, a 19-time race winner in the Cup series? He won a championship in (the XFINITY Series). The guy gets it done. I'm excited to be able to unload every week and know that we have a chance to win."
News of the change in leadership on Biffle's No. 16 team comes just two days after Roush Fenway announced the addition of new personnel for three "high-level roles" within the Concord, North Carolina-based organization.
Kurt Romberg, who spent the past 15 years as head of aerodynamics at Hendrick Motorsports, was named RFR's technical director of aerodynamics.
Assuming the role of manager of simulation is Dr. Kent Day, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Clemson University and has held technical director positions with Team Penske and Richard Childress Racing, and most recently specialized in vehicle dynamics at MWR.
Vojin Jaksic, who worked at RFR from 2005 through 2011, has returned as the research and development/special projects manager after holding similar positions at MWR and Joe Gibbs Racing.
Team co-owner Jack Roush expects the new hires to make a significant impact for the organization, which failed to win a race last season and failed to put a driver in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup for the first time in the 12-year history of NASCAR's playoff.
"It takes great talent to win in this sport and we are very pleased with the additions we have made on the competition front," Roush said. "We recognize the importance of putting the appropriate personnel into place, as we continue our relentless pursuit to put the best and most competitive race teams on the track."
Pattie, who has been at his new post for just a week, echoed the sentiments of his new boss regarding the new additions.
"Oh, it's going to help tremendously," Pattie told SiriusXM. "It's nice to have the step-up and the backing of Ford and everyone at Roush Fenway Racing because definitely we've invested in personnel to try to put the right people in the right places to make things happen, and I really think that we can."
"We have not been a fan of the high-downforce, high-drag package," Roush told FOXSports.com at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November. "I would like to think that given a set of rules if we had the same opportunity everyone else does we would find the same solutions but we have not progressed as rapidly as some of the other teams have. That has left us not having the year on the Cup side we would like to have.
"We had the two races with the low drag package and with the tires Goodyear brought those two times it sure looks like it is more lined up with the driving preference that our drivers have. I think that they will have more enthusiasm for it in 2016 than we have had in the last couple of years."
Biffle concurs.
"We think it's a number of small things that other teams are beating us at," Biffle told FOXSports.com in an exclusive interview at Kansas Speedway in October. "Our cars seemed to respond better when we ran the Kentucky race and the Darlington race, and it seems like every time we've tested the lower-downforce package we've been a bit better.
"So just going off of that, that package is going to be not remarkably different for us but probably a little bit better for us than everyone else, so to speak. We just feel like we're going to be a little bit better. We won't know that until we get into it and everybody's on the same downforce."
