Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
Coming off the victory at Bristol Motor Speedway, Matt Kenseth enters this weekend’s race at Richmond with momentum on his side. The victory has also given the team a boost in confidence and moral, since it’d been so long since their last win. Though more importantly, the 2003 Sprint Cup Champion is now locked into the Chase for the Championship.
Despite all these factors, he doesn’t feel it changes their approach moving forward as he says Richmond is one of those tracks that it’s very hard to predict how well you will do.
“Even after practice is over and qualifying is over, it’s still hard for me to predict,” he commented. “It seems like the track changes so much from practice here in the sun in the middle of the day to the race once you get going at night. It’s a tough one really until you get into the race.”
He added that while some say that it makes the season easier and it allows you to put a heavier on approach on winning, that’s something that’s already there for him and the No. 20 team.
“I think that every week you show up with the idea of trying to qualify the best you can and trying to win the race,” he said. :If you can’t win, you want to finish second. If you can’t finish second, you want to finish third. You always want to do the best you can. I’ve never been to the race track and not wanted to win to do my best or not wanted to finish the best I could. I just don’t feel like any of that changes. I know that where you are in the point standings doesn’t have a big effect to where the rack you up when September comes along, but, man, we’re only in April and we want to race hard every week and try to get the best results we can every week for our team and our sponsors and everybody involved.”
There is even a possible bigger curve ball to be thrown into the mix this weekend as the forecast doesn’t look promising with rain in the area, something the drivers faced last weekend at Bristol. For Kenseth, though, he says it doesn’t changes his approach, but it could affect how crew chief Jason Ratcliff plans their set-up for the race.
“For me I don’t have a really good handle or feel on how this track changes from day to night during a race and all that, so Jason probably does a lot better than me and probably Denny (Hamlin), but I really don’t,” he admitted. “For me, it’s always kind of a guess. I’m not sure what I’m going to get when the race starts. Whenever I’m pretty confident I know what the track is going to do, it seems like my car goes the other way. Just kind of leave that up to Jason and the guys to figure out.”
Leaving the thinking to the crew chief, Kenseth says he passes his time hanging out, watching a bit of TV and wait for it stop raining – just like everyone else would.
