Kenseth’s Team Rode the Wheels of Fortune

When he met Robbie Reiser on Sunday morning, driver Matt Kenseth made one request.

Four tires.

No exceptions.

Every pit stop, change all four tires.

“We’ve been two-tiring it all season, trying to keep track position,” explained Reiser, the crew chief on Kenseth’s Ford, which finished third in the NAPA Auto Parts 500 at California Speedway after taking the lead on the 87th lap and dominating most of the race.

“I said, ‘OK, that’s what we’ll do.’ And I don’t second-guess that decision at all. . . . I still think it was the right decision.”

It takes about six more seconds to change four tires than it takes to change two. Kenseth finished 0.477 seconds behind Jeremy Mayfield, who won the race after changing only two tires on his final pit stop while Kenseth’s crew was changing four.

You do the math.

When Jimmy Spencer hit the fourth-turn wall with 30 laps to go, Kenseth came into his pit in first place but went out in sixth.

“Matt was the best car all day long,” said Bobby Labonte, whose Pontiac finished between the Fords of Mayfield and Kenseth. “That last caution flag [before a caution that came out with eight laps to go] didn’t do him any justice because he got caught up in some traffic and couldn’t get some track position.”

Staying in the pits longer than necessary will do that to you.

“When you’re dominating the race by four or five seconds with 20-some laps to go . . . why gamble with two tires when you’ve been putting on four tires all day long?” argued Kenseth, who led 119 of the race’s 250 laps, usually by those four or five seconds once pit-stop traffic was sorted out.

“Changing only two tires might dramatically change the balance of the car and we could have been junk. I don’t know. We never tried it all day . . . and it was a bigger gamble, getting two tires.”

It was a gamble a veteran team might make. Kenseth’s DeWalt team is 10 races old. Reiser, like Kenseth, came up through NASCAR’s Busch Grand National series, and a similar ploy with 25 laps to run on Saturday earned them a victory in the Auto Club 300.

But this isn’t Busch Grand National.

“This series has got Dale Jarrett, Mark Martin, I can’t even name all the great drivers,” said Reiser, who drove against Kenseth on Wisconsin’s bullrings before coming South to stock car racing’s big leagues.

“Not that I’m putting down the Busch series, but this is where the elite are and it makes it that much tougher.”

Too tough, as it turned out. For all of his talk of expecting something bad to happen as a bit of reverse psychology to ward off the euphoria of leading the race for so long, the sweetness of his best Winston Cup finish was bitter to Kenseth.

“It’s not my goal to run third. I want to win races,” he said.

“If we would have struggled from the back, run third or fourth all day long or second and finished third, I could take that.

“But when you lead almost the entire race and dominate the whole last half of the race and have the thing wrapped up and then lose the race at the end like that, that’s a tough one to swallow.”

Said Reiser: “This race team is 10 races old and two weeks ago we weren’t in a position to win a race. Over the [Easter] off, we had a team meeting and got everybody on the same page. We’re making progress and that’s the way we’ve got to look at it. We can’t look at it from a winning standpoint.”

You can if you’re a 28-year-old driver, pleased with the progress but impatient for racing’s ultimate reward.

“This might bring success closer, but I know people who have run second and third and they’ve run Winston Cup 15 years and never won,” Kenseth said. “After we win one of these things, then I can sit back and know what it’s like. Until I win one, I won’t know.”

If he’s in the same position next week at Richmond, Va., there’s a thought.

Four tires. Every time.

Except if you’re leading the race with 30 laps to go in a car that has been showing its rear bumper to the field all day long.

“It’s hard to say,” Kenseth said. “We’ll see.”