Tuesday

The Mixed Bag Of Roush’s Truck Exodus

With the word that Roush-Fenway Racing is quitting the Truck Series after 2009, the Truck Series sees another twist in a run of recent history where it has gone from playground of Winston Cup teams like Hendrick Motorsports and the above-mentioned Roush juggernaut to a series whose continuation no longer seems like a sure thing.

When the series began in 1995, Roush along with Rick Hendrick, Richard Childress, and Dale & Teresa Earnhardt entered a team as essentially a Triple-A training ground for his Winston Cup effort. It was a part-time effort until Joe Ruttman was signed to drive full-time in 1996. Ruttman, best remembered for the 1983 Daytona 500, was teamed with former Winston West ace Chuck Bown in a two-Truck effort, and in 1997 Ruttman exploded to five wins. In 1998 Roush hired Greg Biffle and Mike Bliss to drive as Ruttman’s teammate, and Biffle got into a memorable slugfest at New Hampshire the day after the Brickyard 400 with Mike Addington’s Chevy driven by Andy Houston; the two fused together on the last lap before Biffle cleared and then got booted out of the groove on the last lap.

Biffle, with Mike Bliss as his 1999 teammate, exploded in 1999, winning nine races but losing the championship on a rule violation that set Roush off on one of his frequent tangents about NASCAR rules enforcement. Despite that Biffle returned in 2000, this time with a new teammate in Kurt Busch. Their first race together was Daytona, and it became one of the most astonishing races in history – first the lead changed 32 times, a series record. Second Busch hooked several Trucks together in a crash that launched Geoff Bodine all but through Daytona’s frontstretch fencing and stopped everything for some two hours. Third Busch, racing Biffle for fifth, swerved Biffle hard into the wall off Four, costing Biffle a lap with flat tires.

With all that Busch won four times and Biffle won five races and the series championship, but after 2000 Roush’s Truck efforts got skimped badly – Modifed ace Chuck Hossfeld was teamed with fellow rookie Nathan Haseleu but the effort ran seemingly with only perfunctory effort by the larger organization. That changed in 2002 when Roush replaced them with rookie Jon Wood and in 2003 expanded it with rookie Carl Edwards. Edwards exploded into a star, winning Daytona in 2004 and adding five more wins before the effort dried up in 2005, other than a win by Ricky Craven, roughly a year before retiring from the sport to the ESPN booth.

Mark Martin, in his swan song from Roush in 2006, drove a Truck and won six times. Travis Kvapil and Erik Darnell also won in Roush Trucks, but the effort was almost the only force standing in the way of Toyota’s semi-monopoly on the series; after 2007 Roush’ Trucks managed two wins, and the costs of competing in the series had become preposterously high.

The resulting exodus by Roush thus does not qualify as surprising; the surprise is that Roush stuck it out as long as he did, as RCR, DEI, and Hendrick had quit long before Roush packed up his equipment from the series. In 707 races including the recent Las Vegas event the Roush juggernaut has won 50 times and led 6,055 laps. In contrast RCR won 20 races with 2,867 laps led, DEI won 25 with 4,815 laps led, and Hendrick won 25 races with 5,244 laps led.

What it means to the series is the mixed bag involved. Roush clearly was not up to beating the Toyota effort that debuted in 2004 and which took over the series seemingly overnight with a winning percentage that has often reached 50%. As virtually the only Ford effort in the series, Roush’s fleet certainly added a measure of competitive depth to a series that, for all the hype about how good the racing is, hasn’t shown as much competitive depth as one might expect – entering October the series has seen but nine winning drivers; five of the season’s first twenty races were won by Kyle Busch, a Winston Cup intruder of the kind that helped bankrupt BGN. Roush’s lone win this year is the only win by a make other than Toyota or Chevrolet.

But with all this, the Truck Series does have things going for it – the racing may be overhyped but there is some good competition, and while competitive depth leaves everything to be desired it is also a series that has gotten back to something close to the “everyman” team concept – Roush’s exodus sees what amounts to the last of the money guy teams vacating the series, something not to be mourned at all.

Yet the fact the series lacks much in the way of competitive depth, with a good chunk of a typical field consisting of start-and-park vehicles, makes Roush’s departure a mixed bag, and it raises the question of whether a racing series can have competitive depth without being swamped by teams like Roush – or to put it another way, is the presence of superteams like Roush the only thing standing in the way of a racing series being trapped in start-and-park status?

One hopes that is not the case, but it does illustrate the radically mixed nature of Roush’s departure from the series.