Kenseth "Fortunate" To Be At JGR
02/12/2014
Jim Fitzgerald
“Obviously
I was really, really fortunate, the situation that I got in with that whole
group over there and how good that stuff runs and how quickly we were able to
have some success, so I hope we can build on that this year and keep that up.”
That was Matt Kenseth’s response when he was asked if a driver changing teams can regularly expect the kind of success Kenseth enjoyed in the 2013 Sprint Cup Series Season. Kenseth moved from the No. 17 of the Roush-Fenway Racing team to the No. 20 prepared by Joe Gibbs Racing at the end of the 2012 season. In his freshman year with his new team, Kenseth ripped off a career high seven victories, led the Championship standings, and eventually finished second in points to Jimmie Johnson after the final race at Homestead.
Now in his second year with the team, Kenseth reflected back about his feelings and expectations when he first joined the Gibbs team, and what surprised him when he got there.
“I
didn't have a lot of preconceived notions ahead of time about what things would
really be like or not be like,” Kenseth said. “Anything that was really a
surprise at all was probably a pleasant surprise. Probably some of it that was a little bit of
a surprise to me was how hard Denny and Kyle, too, work,
work at it, and in meetings and everything.
Probably surprised me a little bit how much I had to talk at meetings
and how much people listened to me for some reason. But other than that, obviously I was
somewhat pleasantly surprised by our success and by winning right away and
doing all that stuff. But obviously it
was all really good.”
With other drivers like Kevin Harvick, Ryan Newman, Kurt Busch, and Martin Truex, Jr. all having moved from one team to another during the off-season, Kenseth was not too quick to ensure that everyone will have as successful a first season with a new team as he had with JGR.
“I
think it depends,” he said. There's a lot of different circumstances that go into play,
where you were racing, where you're going to race, who the people working on
your team are, what kind of equipment you have.
There's a lot to take into account there. But I think if you're going to an
organization you feel like is -- I think, first of all, a driver, if it's their
choice to make the change, they probably don't want to do that unless they
think it's going to be better. So in
that case I think probably more than half the time you
see success you probably see it run just as good or better. But if you're making a change and you didn't
want to make a change, that doesn't always mean that you're going to run
better.
Perhaps what made the Gibbs/Kenseth combination so successful was an amalgamation of Kenseth’s own statements. Kenseth was looking for a change from Roush-Fenway, and Joe Gibbs Racing had not found the success desired with driver Joey Logano, who eventually departed to drive for Team Penske. For Kenseth, he wanted to drive for Joe Gibbs Racing, and Joe Gibbs Racing wanted Kenseth on their team, and that may have been the key to the first season magic they enjoyed together.
Make no mistake, though, Kenseth is not going blindly into the 2014 season expecting that same level of success automatically. He knows his team has to keep moving forward if they hope to challenge for the Sprint Cup Series title again in 2014.
“Every
year is a little different with the rules changes. You have to stay at it all the time because
you just -- the sport moves really fast, and you can run real good one week and
maybe a month later go back to the same track and not run so good just because
everybody else got better. I think it's
a moving target, but I always feel like you never really just grab one or two
areas. I think you look at everything
and always try to improve an equal amount in all areas. Certainly there's things
if you look at that are more trouble spots than others, you're probably going
to put a little more emphasis on that. But
I think you try to look at everything you did and didn't do and just try to
improve.”
That sounds like a solid formula for success. After all, as the saying goes, “if you don’t make dust, you eat dust.” Kenseth is hoping his team will be making a lot of dust in the 2014 season. He reflected on his time at Joe Gibbs Racing, and is looking forward to getting back to racing to see how his season will go.
“I
felt like I really learned a lot last year from December all the way until the
season got over, and I'm honestly just as excited for this year as I was last
year, so I feel like we've got a lot of good things going on over there, and I
was really happy that Denny won at Homestead, as well, and I'm looking forward
to -- I'm glad he's healthy again and winning again. Although since we finished second, I would
have rather had him finish second so I could have won.”
“Anyway,
I'm looking forward to all three teams really being competitive this year and
one of the three hopefully being able to win a championship.”
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