Roush puts Fords back on track

JOLIET, ILL. — A month ago, Ford seemed finished in NASCAR this season, with only one win in the first 14 Nextel Cup races, including 12 losses in a row.

Talk about a turnaround — at least for Ford’s flagship team, Roush Fenway Racing, which has won two of the last four Cup events and could easily have made it four in a row with a little luck.

Now, for today’s Sheetrock 400 at Chicagoland Speedway, the five Roush drivers are at the type of track where their team has always been strong. The 1.5-mile Joliet facility is a classic “intermediate” track.

“For the last month we’ve been strong and a contender to win, and that’s all you can ask for,” said Roush’s Jamie McMurray, winner of last week’s Pepsi 400 at Daytona. “If it’s your day, then it is, and if it’s not, then there’s not anything you can do about it.”

McMurray is the most significant Roush breakthrough, in that he broke a 166-race, nearly five-year losing streak last week.

Teammate Carl Edwards started the comeback on June 17 with a win at Michigan International Speedway. It was the first for Roush since senior driver Matt Kenseth won Feb. 25 at Fontana.

At the two races between Michigan and Daytona, “at Sonoma [Calif.] and Loudon [N.H.], Carl and I had a chance to win the race,” McMurray said.

NASCAR’s new Car of Tomorrow design, on which Roush had fallen behind earlier in the season, was used at the Sonoma road course and the tight, one-mile Loudon oval.

Traditional cars will be used at Chicagoland, and this “is the kind of track where I feel very comfortable about our program,” Edwards said. “At Michigan we were awesome, and this is a lot like that.

“I feel like these standard cars and downforce tracks are where we’re best right now, but New Hampshire was pretty awesome and Daytona [a restrictor-plate race with standard cars] was pretty good.”

McMurray led late in the Sonoma race, but ran out of gas just after being passed by Juan Pablo Montoya, who went on to win on fumes. Had luck been reversed, McMurray likely would have won.

Then in New Hampshire, Edwards was dominant before a fluke accident in the pits — his crew dropped his car off the jack before the tires were on — cost him the race.

Last week it all came together, with all five Roush finishing in the top 12. Edwards, who “pushed” McMurray to victory in the draft, wound up fourth. Greg Biffle was sixth, Matt Kenseth eighth and rookie David Ragan 12th.

Could this be the beginning of a streak, like the one in which NASCAR’s best Chevrolet team, Hendrick Motorsports, won 10 of the first 14 races this year?

“I don’t know if it can be the beginning of a streak; I hope it’s the beginning of us being competitive every week,” Edwards said. “I think to have a streak, you have to be really dominant. Up to this point the Hendrick cars have obviously been dominant.

“And if we can just match their effort right now and be on a level playing field for the Chase [the NASCAR playoffs which begin in September], Jack [team owner Jack Roush] has said over and over, ‘If we compete during the Chase and make sure those 10 races work, it’ll be an awesome season.’ ”

Of Roush suddenly challenging the Hendrick domination, “I can’t say that surprises me,” said Hendrick driver Jimmie Johnson, the reigning Nextel Cup champion who has four wins this season, tied with teammate Jeff Gordon for most on the tour.

“I’d been more surprised that they’d struggled,” Johnson continued. “I’ve been like, ‘What’s going on? Why haven’t they been up front fighting for wins?’ And now it looks like they’ve got themselves going in the right direction.”

Team owner Jack Roush acknowledges he got behind early on Car of Tomorrow development and was distracted trying to catch up.

“Those things really had me busy, so we kind of got behind,” Roush said. “We didn’t run as good at some of the mile-and-a-half tracks as we’d like to, and I think we’re back on track there. I was maybe complacent about the mile-and-a-half stuff we had in the past, thinking it was good enough….”

Plus, Roush had to dig out of a management mistake he acknowledges making last year. He’d mis-paired crew chiefs with drivers. He broke up Edwards and Bob Osborne, who’d won four races together in 2005, and sent Osborne to work for McMurray. But McMurray and Osborne didn’t click, so the switch was double trouble.

This year, Roush put Edwards and Osborne back together and brought in steady-nerved Larry Carter, a veteran of Penske Racing who’d worked with Rusty Wallace, for McMurray.

But it has taken this long into the season to get driver-crew chief communication precise again.

“Carl and Bob got put back together this year, [but] you’re not going to have just immediate success,” McMurray said. “And then Larry and I working together.”

The glitches gone, Roush Fords are factors again, “and we’ll be heard from more before the year is over,” Roush said.

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Ed Hinton covers auto racing for Tribune newspapers.