Kurt Busch says Roush-Yates engines contributing to Stewart-Haas’ fast start

Brad Keselowski (Ford) took pole Friday in Las Vegas

Ralph Garcia/AR1.com

Kurt Busch says he believes Roush-Yates engines are contributing to Stewart-Haas' fast start in 2017. He spoke to the media Friday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway:

Busch: "When we made the announcement that we were switching to Ford last year, it came with extra meetings and longer driver debriefs because we were looking at blueprints and different front-end geometry changes because of Doug Yates' engines and how they're built slightly different with where the pulleys are and the way the belt serpentine system works, as well as the pressurized system versus unpressurized, so a lot of extra work had to go into switching our cars over to Ford.

When you roll up your sleeves with a group of racers like we have at Stewart-Haas Racing, it allowed us to go over the car with a finer tooth comb and we looked at every area. When you're changing suspension components around and you've got great Haas CNC machines to make these pieces, you can go through versions A, B, and C and get a lot of work done quickly.

I'll tell you, though, it was a full-on effort to get these cars switched over, but I love the way we went over them in extra detail and Tony Gibson is a master at the restrictor-plate races, so his wisdom and expertise was distributed to the other teams. Rodney Childers is great at the mile-and-a-half tracks, so his lead for Atlanta and Vegas really kicked in.

The way that the rest of the group chipped in to find all these areas, it's like each team took care of one specific project and the four of us have worked together in a stronger fashion than we ever have before, but Doug Yates' power, I want to say, is slightly better than where we were, it just feels that way.

The aerodynamic balance of the Ford has more distribution on one region of the car than another and it feels better. Tony Stewart being a full-time owner. Clint Bowyer coming in with his ideas. We upgraded in all categories at Stewart-Haas, so it's really neat to see everything come out of the box strong." Ford Racing