CONCORD, N.C. — Team owner Jack Roush and Ford Racing Technology Director Dan Davis both acknowledged during the 26th annual Sprint Cup Media Tour that the manufacturer was behind in its testing for the Car of Tomorrow last season and that contributed to Ford’s poor performance in CoT events.
However, both pointed the finger at NASCAR for inconsistent policing of its tire testing procedure, whereby it prevented teams from using Goodyear tires for testing. However, while other teams acquired tires from Hoosier and other companies to keep testing their CoTs, Roush Fenway Racing did not test until late May.
“The thing was that last year NASCAR decided that we couldn’t own the tires, and what they told me was the reason I couldn’t own the tires — for a $450 tire, if they dismounted it, if I gave it back to them and I hadn’t used it, I got $100 back, and I had to pay them $25 to take it off the wheel,” Roush said. “So it was really $75 I got for a tire I never used. That hurt a lot.  
“I believed that they were serious. I thought that they were going to stop us from testing. They said they were going to control the tests. We were all going to test the same place, and I figured it was a matter of time before the guillotine fell on the people that were testing the cars.  
“So, I wasn’t going to create a scenario initially where they said, ‘Well everybody is doing it.’ Well, everybody wasn’t doing it. We weren’t doing it. The Wood Brothers weren’t doing it. A number of the other small single-car teams that they say they want to protect were not doing it, and I thought it was going to go real bad for the people that were there.  
“I was wrong. I misread NASCAR. They wound up going with the flow of what the teams wanted to do. If I would have been at the front of that line, I don’t think it would have worked out that way.
“Dan, why didn’t you get after me sooner? Maybe it’s your fault, too.”
Davis responded quickly.
“At some point, you hear the words and music and you want to believe it and you want to do the right thing,” Davis said. “Obviously at Ford Motor Company, we’re very ethical and we want to do the right thing, so we held hands and said, ‘This is what we should be doing. This is what we’ve been asked to do.’ We’ve come under a lot of scrutiny to do the right thing and it turns out we misunderstood or someone changed their mind. Who knows? It happened. And the best thing we could do at that point was to regroup and just go like hell.  
“And, boy, I tell you what, in the last six months my view is that we’re really pushing it hard. We’re testing everywhere we can go. We’re testing all kinds of vehicles and I feel like we’ve caught up and sometimes you need to be a little bit behind and a little bit embarrassed to really get your s—- together and I guess I feel like that’s kind of where we’re at and it’s together. So look out this year.”