04/12/2015
Stenhouse Jr. Battles Back To 15th-Place Finish To Lead Roush Fenway At Texas
- WORTH, Texas (April 11, 2015) – Ricky Stenhouse Jr. battled from multiple-pit road penalties and a three-lap deficient to finish 15th in Saturday night’s Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway; leading the Roush Fenway effort.
“I definitely thought we had a better car than what we ran all night,” said Stenhouse. “Obviously, I sped on pit road there and cost us a lap, and then we were just fighting back from way behind. The cautions fell our way and we got some good breaks towards the end and made some better adjustments, and was able to salvage a 15th, so that was good.”
“I think we’ve got some more speed in it,” added Stenhouse. “We still have a lot of work to do. I think it definitely showed that we still need to work on it, but I do think we had a little bit more speed. We’ve got to get the handling a little bit better. I think we missed it there, but there’s still more speed we need to bring in these race cars, but I think we’ve got a step in the right direction.”
Greg Biffle was 17th and Trevor Bayne finished 18th in the race.
“I think our whole weekend was an improvement,” said Bayne. “Other than not getting to practice the second practice, I think if we had that we had a top-15 opportunity this weekend. The whole race we managed to basically stay on the lead lap. We got the lucky dog twice fortunately, but we never had to take the wavearound or do anything like that. I felt like it was one of our better mile-and-a-half races we’ve had in a while.
“We finished 18th, but we were a couple adjustments away from being a top-15 car,” added Bayne. “To have the 17, the 16 and myself all in the top 18 I think the scoreboard shows it was an improvement in itself. Our qualifying effort was better this weekend. Obviously, we’re not gonna jump to the top of that pole in one weekend, so it’s gonna be small things. Honestly, I didn’t expect to see this big of a gain out of it, so I think it’s good.”
“You have to get that little momentum every now and then,” said Bayne. “Momentum isn’t gonna make faster race cars, but it just gives the guys that have been working their butts off for the last two years a little bit of hope. We need that, so it’s really good for us. AdvoCare was here this weekend, so they got to hang out with us and we had a decent run, so we’ll take it and work with it. Obviously, 18th isn’t where we want to be at this point in the season, but for where we’ve been it’s an improvement and we’ll keep getting better.”
