Going into Sunday’s race at Michigan International Speedway, Greg Biffle is on the outside looking in.
Biffle, who is winless so far in 2014, sits twelfth in the overall points standings. That, however, doesn’t guarantee him a spot in the revamped Chase for the Sprint Cup.
“We feel like we can win one of these last four races,” Biffle said Wednesday in a conference call with media members. “So what we’re focusing on is winning one of these last four races and getting our way into the Chase that way. But certainly, we’re hanging on to a shoestring to make it in on points if it comes down to that way.”
If the 10-race Chase started Sunday, the last spot would go to Clint Bowyer with Biffle being left out by just eight points.
It’s been an up-and-down spring for the 12-year Sprint Cup veteran. Biffle started the season with an eighth-place finish at the Daytona 500. He finished 40th at Fontana. He crossed the line sixth at Texas, fifth at Darlington and second at Talladega. Biffle was credited with a 38th-place finish at Dover. He closed the first half of the season at Daytona with a 29th-place finish.
“We can certainly admit it, that we’re off this season,” Biffle said. “We made some choices at the beginning of the season, which we went down a road engineering-wise and car-wise what we thought would be the best, and everybody put 100 percent effort, full focus on that direction, and it obviously turned out to be a little bit of the wrong direction.”
On top of that, Biffle and Roush Fenway Racing lost 3M as a main sponsor earlier this week to Jeff Gordon’s ride at Hendrick Motorsports. The sponsorship agreement with Gordon starts in 2015.
“Management changes, things change,” Biffle said Wednesday. “This sport is a business. We all know that in business there’s decisions to make, and so I’ve known for a while that they were not coming back to the 16 car, and so that’s obviously a business thing on their end, and we will miss them.”
Biffle, however, has been trending upward since that Saturday night race on the first weekend in July. He takes a streak of four straight top-15 finishes, including an eight-place finish last week at Watkins Glen International, into Sunday’s Pure Michigan 400.
Biffle has a great history at the two-mile D-oval.
In 23 Sprint Cup races at Michigan, Biffle has only three finishes outside the top 20. He has four wins, 10 top-five finishes and 14 top-10s. He pulled off back-to-back wins at the track twice in his career; getting the August-June sweep in the 2004 and 2005 seasons and again in 2012 and 2013.
“It’s just been one of those tracks, like Homestead or Darlington, for us that I really like,” Biffle said. “I like the layout. I love the way it races, and we’ve just been super successful there.”
In August 2013, Biffle had a fast car. His eyes were fixed on a three-peat. A run-in with Brad Keselowski on pit road changed the aerodynamics of the car, and Biffle left with ninth that day.
That string of strong runs came to a close in the race earlier this season. Biffle crossed the line 20th at the June race, leaving him with a sense of disappointment and frustration.
“We were looking forward to that,” Biffle said. “Here’s our spot. We’re going to be fast. And clearly we were not. We were off, and we recognized that.”
Biffle starts Sunday’s race in the 11th spot.