NASCAR Cup

SIRIUS NASCAR radio Biffle interview

Today on "The Morning Drive" on SIRIUS NASCAR Radio / channel 128, hosts Marty Snider and David Poole spoke with Greg Biffle about the infraction found in his car during the post-race inspection Sunday at Bristol. Biffle's Ford was found to be too ...

Edited: Mar 30, 2007, 3:29 AM

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Today on "The Morning Drive" on SIRIUS NASCAR Radio / channel 128, hosts Marty Snider and David Poole spoke with Greg Biffle about the infraction found in his car during the post-race inspection Sunday at Bristol. Biffle's Ford was found to be too low.

Greg Biffle: "I'm excited to talk about it because it's really, really gotten way blown out of proportion. The car was a quarter of an inch low and so some facts that people have to understand - some fans and people that don't know a lot about the technical side of our sport -- [for] that race track, NASCAR allows you, gives you a variance to be a half an inch high if you want to on your rear quarter-panels because it's a short track, it's bumpy, we get six inches of travel. They allow you to be a half an inch high. That is so much of an advantage. When we're racing these cars any place other than Daytona or Talladega we run on the red line of being as high as we possibly can and in the race we'll turn the jack screws to raise the back of the car up but we know we have to pass post-race inspection, we can't be too high. To be too low, we're disappointed because we didn't take advantage of an obvious advantage for down-force. The other thing about it is we never put a jack screw in the rear window the entire race because NASCAR tech guys that are assigned to our pit boxes write that information down on paper so that's been documented, that we did not adjust the car during the race."

Host, David Poole: "So you're saying it passed pre-race inspection, it wasn't too low in pre-race and you didn't touch it in terms of adjusting the height. If it was too low then obviously it was something that happened during the race itself?"

Biffle: "Right. Exactly. And to be perfectly honest with you, Robbie Reiser's car was three-quarters of an inch lower than they started the race roughly. They've loaded it in the trailer and taken it home so it's not documented at the racetrack what they did but the team itself, and we've talked to the #99 team and they put four turns in the right rear of their car because they were too tight. They put four turns in the right rear, they're a quarter-inch lower than they started the race. So if they wouldn't have touched their car they would have been low. So we don't understand what's happened to our race cars. And rumor had it that the #5 was a little bit low so I think what's happened is, let's face it, there's a lot of unknowns with these new race cars. They're hitting the racetrack with the splitters. The exhaust is falling off of them, the exhaust is coming apart. The foam is melting out of the right side door. We've addressed that. The impact-resistant foam completely melted out."

Host, Marty Snider: "Out of your car?"

Biffle: "No, one of our cars in-house. Excuse me, three of our cars in-house. The foam's compromised."

"And they said you can't be on the racetrack in the drivers meeting without having that foam in the door panel. If that gets dislodged you must replace it. So technically three of our cars should have had to come to the garage and put new foam in halfway through the race or three-quarters of the way through because the foam had deteriorated. So the thing about it is there's a lot of things going on with this car and it's a work in progress. It's something that we all have to participate in and work through these details. And so NASCAR understands that now with all of the things that we've had go on, and I think that they kind of jumped to conclusions that we had figured out some way to beat the system. So we've been kind of accused by, let's say, the public, held in public court, that we cheated or whatnot and that's not the case and NASCAR knows that and I feel very strongly that we're not going to be penalized at all."

Snider: "When NASCAR gave the car back to you did they say, 'Here's what broke' or 'Here's what happened during the race'? Do you know exactly what happened?"

Biffle: "What has happened, what we've found with all three race cars that were lower than we thought they should have been was the springs, there's a tremendous amount of heat from these tailpipes, this different tailpipe configuration. It's melting the foam. It's doing things. We think there's enough heat there that it's compromising the right rear spring in the car and the car is sagging out on the right rear. One of our teams, the spring is definitely distorted and we have to throw the spring away. The spring is no good and that's why the car was low and the guy during the race said, 'Man, it felt like something broke.' He was running good, running good, running good and then fell back."

Snider: "That was Kenseth, right?"

Biffle: "Right. And believe it or not it needed eight or ten rounds in the rear to bring the thing back to where it should have been."

Snider: "So if we would have inspected 43 cars we would have seen a lot more than yours that were too low?"

Biffle: "I can't speak for others like the Hendrick cars or whoever else but I suspect that, just from what we've found after our first CoT race, I bet you that there were a tremendous amount of cars that were low."

"The Morning Drive" airs weekdays (7-11 am ET) exclusively on SIRIUS NASCAR Radio / Channel 128. The show will re-air tonight at 8:00pm ET on channel 128.

-credit: sirius

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