[McFadin] Stenhouse's contract with RFR was apparently supposed to last through 2023
Posted Feb 20, 2023, 2:44 AM UTC
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I forgot about that, they resigned him in mid 2019 only for Roush to release him and sign Buescher away from them with some weird contract that they had from years ago which put him in the 17. Wonder if Roush is paying for that at all still.
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Technically Roush had Buescher on loan to JTG Daugherty as well as Front Row Motorsports the three previous years prior. They also sold their #16 Charter to JTG Daugherty and that was how they were able to place Buescher in the car.
How they were able to recall him was they had to make a decision to keep Buescher or Stenhouse as they were only planning to run two cars at the time. Buescher was the younger, cheaper option where Stenhouse for as good as he is, is pretty streaky as results go.
Stenhouse was benched during one point of his Xfinity career for wrecking too many cars. Roush-Fenway felt it was time to move on from him.
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Chris Buescher feels like the safer pick because Stenhouse has a tendency of overdriving cars and wrecking a lot as a result. Buescher also won just as many races since he swapped rides with Stenhouse, so it's hard to say Roush made a bad decision.
But yeah, many people don't know Buescher was never really a JTG Daugherty driver, in fact it surprised everyone including Buescher when he was called back to Roush. Kahne, Bowyer, and Byron have also been on loan to other teams before.
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I guess the fact that they essentially swapped teams went over my head in some respects. I know Roush had Buescher on loan to Front Row for 2016 and then the second JTG car came about and Roush sold JTG (and apparently Todd Braun, Justin Haley’s uncle) the old #16 charter after shutting that team down.
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Wait, Todd Braun is Justin Haley's uncle?
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When was Byron a loan driver? Was it pre or post JR Motorsports?
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I believe when he ran KBM trucks
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The story is that in 2016, there was no room at GMS for William Byron to run a truck season. So Rick Hendrick/JRM (the ones who were developing William in the Chevy pipeline) made a deal with Kyle Busch Motorsports in the truck series, so William was loaned to Toyota for one season to race in the truck series, he won 7 races, then he moved up to Xfinity in 2017 and raced for JR. Not sure why they didn’t put him in a different Chevy team for that truck season, maybe they wanted him in top equipment. Either way it worked out.
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He was benched before his two Xfinity titles. Yeah it happened but not necessarily relevant
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Worked out for everyone imo, Stenhouse at Roush had run its course anyway, that last year was brutal
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*last 2 years
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i always felt like roush racing and it’s demise was more around all the veteran guys left and jack runs such a tight ship they were able to produce the feedback the team was of custom to working around. i think over the last few years they were starting to adapt around the current sport. and i think Kes will get that ship turned around. i think they will be more on par with SHR this season and be the #2 ford team behind penske.
when you look at all the top teams only 2 (RCR, RFR) that stick out have owners who are both very involved with the race teams. and they were two top tier teams for each manufacture and really fell off. JGR, Hendrick, Penske are all great business men who don’t stick to “this is the way we used to do it” mentality and put the right people in place to be successful.
i remember back in the day roush was one of the last teams to have a 7post rig because they didn’t believe in it.
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The demise of RFR had more to do with how the organization was being run by Jack Roush and Robbie Reiser than Carl and Kenseth leaving. Roush and Reiser are old school guys and were pretty much refusing to change with the times and utilize the increase in technology and sim data to improve the cars like every other top team. Roush is also notoriously cheap, which goes hand in hand with they previous bit. The problem is that with the gen 6, once you fell behind in setups and other areas (like ways to trick the inspection process) it became very difficult for teams to catch up to be competitive. So RFR was stuck in this loop of starting the season significantly behind all of the other top teams, resulting in mediocre finishes with 1 or 2 really good races spread throughout. Then towards the end of the season they'd closed the gap some to the other teams, but then the next season would lose all that ground they made up because the other teams were using everything they could to get ahead, while Jack was being too cheap to do the same thing. Sure losing Carl and Kenseth didn't help, but things were already going downhill fast.
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Idk I always thought the timing was surprising. In 2019 there were some 550 races where he was really quick, he even battled for the lead late at Kansas in the spring. Just inconsistent compared to Newman's hard nosed season. The previous year in 2018 he was only the 2nd car out of the playoffs while the 6 was so bad that even with Matt Kenseth splitting it, it had 0 top 10s until the last two races.
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Whole tenure was brutal. As a Kenseth fan, I tried to enjoy Ricky but he left me with nothing other than "he's in bed with Danica, good for him."
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Id say this worked out, Christopher Buescher is improving and making that 17 more competitive and Ricky seems a bit less chaotic in the 47 than he was at Roush
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Very true. Ricky was at a point in his career where he badly needed a change of scenery. Chris is the better overall driver and RFK seems to be slowly improving with him, and Ricky can pop off some random good results to keep the sponsors happy.
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his 2nd at dover last year was impressive
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I think it worked out for the better for both parties
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I think so too. Ricky wasn’t going anywhere with the dead end that RFR was before Brad came in. Buescher seemed to run the same as Ricky (with less wrecks) until the end of 2022 when he started to break out
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Roush still won out, Buescher has proven that he can be competitive on different styles of tracks, while Stenhouse is only competitive on super speedways.
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Not true at all. Ricky's shown he's good at Richmond, Bristol (both pavement and dirt) and he's good at 1.5 mile tracks and the big 2 mile tracks (Michigan and Fontana.) Ricky's weak point is road courses and oddly enough Martinsville (though with Martinsville most of his starts were with RFR who've always been garbage at Martinsville.) The stats between Ricky and Buescher haven't been all that different, despite both never having been in good equipment with the exception of Ricky's rookie year but even then RFR was not a top team, it's just Carl was really good at dragging those cars to better finishes than they deserved. It's just that for the most part, Buescher and Ricky just have different driving styles. Buescher prefers a car that handles a bit tighter (kinda like Mark Martin and Kyle Busch), while Ricky prefers looser handing cars that slide around more. Buescher is generally less aggressive, while Ricky is generally more aggressive (though he's mostly turned that down while with JTGD.) Talent level Buescher and Ricky are pretty similar, they just have very different styles and approaches.
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I feel like if Iowa ever came to cup, Ricky would have great runs there lol. He about owned the place those two years.
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preach haha. very accurate write up. reason the books often offer stenhouse vs buescher for head to heads
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I mean he got second last year at Dover on long run speed so “only” is a stretch
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Sure. Buescher is still definitely the better driver.
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Wasn’t there a DJD recently that said that roush contracts were all 10 years with options? I feel biffles maybe?
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It was Biffles, but it was a five year contract. That was pretty much what Kurt was suckered into after 2002 and had to get out of it before going to Penske for 2006.
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Got it
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Think he’ll end up in the 4 next year?
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I think it’s more of a possibility than some people think it is.Ricky is a really talented driver and with the right equipment he could be Larson level competitive.
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When I say no chance, I mean no chance.
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Probably Riley Herbst, but if SHR deems him not ready then probably some stopgap driver for a year.
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Daniel McFadin's (@danielmcfadin) tweet from 9:10pm EST on Sunday, February 19th, 2023:
Stenhouse said one of the "crazy" things about his departure from Roush Fenway was that he thought he had a contract through 2023.
^(Support NASCARonReddit)^(, an) ^(automated bot) ^(maintained by) ^(XFile345)^(.)
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Much like the Busch/Reddick swap, I think Buescher still has more upside even with Ricky having more accomplishments currently.
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This is going to be a good year for RFK I think. The 17 and 6 were just starting to run well in the last 3rd of the season.
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What is the point of this though? Who cares? They let him go.
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I still think they got a better deal with Buescher
Agreed, Stenhouse is a better superspeedway driver, but Buescher is younger and overall better imo.
Plus Buescher is really good at bringing good equipment home unscathed
I forgot how old Stenhouse is. It makes me feel old when I remember him racing part time for Roush over 10 years ago.
He's 3 years older (35) than Logano (32). I was thinking he was the same age as Joey or younger.
He’s four years younger lol
That’s a lot.
It's almost 5!
Agreed