This weekend it is a nice mid-70 degree weekend for racing at Daytona
International Speedway and the haulers rolled in on Thursday night to
start things off for the season. The teams began to unload their
equipment on Friday afternoon to begin preparation for Daytona
Speedweeks and there will be a big difference this season for Trevor
Bayne and his organization.
While the sport is taking a
major change in its sponsor, Roush Fenway Racing is as well and just
about everyone has heard it. For the first time in their career Trevor
Bayne and teammate Ricky Stenhouse Jr., will be a two-car operation
together. Roush and veteran Greg Biffle parted ways right before the
end of the 2016 season and it made many people wonder what would happen
with the team. For years there has been a veteran face among the
organization to build upon, now the two younger drivers are what is left
to to move forward into the future.
Bayne and Stenhouse worked together from September 2010-2012 in the NASCAR Xfinity Series
 |
| Bayne and Stenhouse worked together as a strong pair in 2011 |
and
even though Bayne missed most of the 2012 because of sponsorship
issues, the two drivers had immediate success in the series together.
The two won 9 races and Stenhouse won back to back championships when
the two were teammates in the series. So this isn't their first rodeo
working together as teammates in a two-car system. While neither driver
has yet to find full success in the upper level of NASCAR, there are
some pieces fans and the media have left out when discussing these two
drivers. They've not had top-notch cars since they've been running in
the series.
There is that lone
win between the two drivers in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series
that came from Trevor Bayne's win in the 2011 Daytona 500. So I go on
something that many people have tried to point on in the media. You
have to look at sponsorship dollars right now at Roush Fenway Racing and
in years passed, there just wasn't enough money and sponsors to fully
field three to four race cars and be competitively in the top circuit of
the sport. Right now Roush has two cars and enough sponsors to fully
spread the money around to make sure that they put it all in the right
places and there are a couple of other pieces to the puzzle that needs
to be talked about as well. Bayne and Stenhouse likely don't cost as
much on a monetary scale as say a Greg Biffle or Carl Edwards so it is a
lot easier to take the money from the sponsors and put it into finding
what else is going on in their race cars.
I think that
Roush made some key organizational moves in the off-season to put people
in other positions and remove certain people as well. Do I wish that
there would have been a lot more people hired from outside of this
organization to bring in new voices and ideas? You're darn right I do.
I think that this is a starting point, however, for this team to try
and find its grip.
When you shuffle a third car out of
the organization there is a big change. However, there is something
else that comes with this as well. I believe when Greg Biffle was
there, the possibility was higher say for the team to sit and take what
the veteran driver wanted over the other two drivers in the
organization. Now I think it is a pretty much even drawing board with
Bayne and Stenhouse in the Cup Series. In years passed, I somehow feel
the team was afraid to criticize the members and drivers and say they
were running terribly.
This season is a fresh start almost for an organization that truly needed it.
