No joke: McMurray staying at Roush Fenway for now

LONG POND, Pa. -- Friday at Pocono Raceway, Jamie McMurray adamantly took himself out of the Silly Season mix -- at least for the rest of this season.

Last weekend as the Sprint Cup Series competed at Dover International Speedway, published reports citing unidentified sources had McMurray, one of five Cup drivers at Roush Fenway Racing, either opting out of his contract or that it would be discontinued.

Asked what he'd be doing next season, McMurray said, "the same thing that I'm doing this year -- the Crown Royal No. 26 with Roush Fenway."

Before Friday's qualifying session for Sunday's Pocono 500 (12:30 p.m. ET, TNT), McMurray -- who has two victories, one in 85 starts for owner Jack Roush which came in the 2007 Pepsi 400 -- said that after the story broke last week, he met with Roush and Roush Fenway president Geoff Smith.

Bowyer's option exercised at RCR

Richard Childress Racing's Clint Bowyer also said Friday morning that the owner exercised his option on Bowyer's contract for 2009.

"We are just working on a long-term deal right now," Bowyer said, saying in his opinion sponsors were driving a nearly year-round Silly Season. "Everybody wants to know where you are going to be as soon as they can. I think the sponsors are paying a lot of money to be able to know where they are going to be and want to be there for a long time.

"It just takes so long to get a team put in place, [to] get the right driver, right crew chief -- all that stuff in place. You need to get started as soon as you can."

"Well, when all of it came up, we just all talked and I never asked to get out of my contract and they never said that they were going to release me from my contract -- there was never any discussion of any of that," McMurray said. "So we just were all trying to figure out where it came from."

McMurray wouldn't speculate about why the stories were written and that neither he nor anyone affiliated with him had made inquiries to other teams about driving opportunities.

He didn't want to talk about any of it.

"It's hard to answer questions because anything I answer will lead to the next question, and there's not really anything to talk about," McMurray said, adding he didn't know where the reporter in question "got his story."

"I don't know how you can say it. It's like whenever there's not anything to talk about, and you tell the truth, you feel like you need to add to the story so you can make people believe you. But there's not anything to talk about."

McMurray said he wanted to remain at Roush Fenway and was mostly happy, and improving his results would be the biggest aid to getting happier. In the eight races since Martinsville, McMurray has four top-15 starts and four top-15 finishes and he's improved from 36th to 22nd in the standings.

"Certainly, we want to run better," McMurray said. "I'm at an incredible organization, and we have all the cars and people that are capable of running to win every weekend.

"So the move from Ganassi to here I really hoped was going to be able to put me in the Chase every year, and that we'd contend to win races on a regular basis. Our performance hasn't been as good as what's expected -- whether it's from me, the race team or the sponsor. So you want to continue to get better, and the [new] car has brought some new challenges.

"The first four or five races we didn't run bad, but we just seemed to have bad luck or freaky things would happen to us, and it just put us in a really bad position. But the last four or five weeks have been pretty good, and you just try to continue and build on that."

After five races, McMurray was 36th in the driver standings. He said he understood the resulting process.

"The thing about racing is that if you run well for four weeks everything's great, and if you run bad for two it seems like you need to go find somewhere else to drive, they say," McMurray said. "Everything is fine here. I don't really know what the basis of the story was."

On Friday, McMurray qualified 22nd.

"Our cars have been really good, and our qualifying has gotten a little bit better," McMurray said. "It's just that you always have the teams every year -- certainly [teammate Greg Biffle] and [Kyle Busch] have been incredible this season, and it seems like every year you have a few guys that hit on something that seems like it wants to work for them at all the tracks.

"But I think with Sonoma coming up, and certainly Daytona, those are places that I feel that I can win every time that I go to, and that's the ones that we're focused on right now."

McMurray's Pocono 500 will be his 200th start in the Cup Series.

"Well, I turned 32 [June 3], felt a little bit old and 200 starts, that seems like a lot," McMurray said. "I look at that and it seems like it would take a lot of years to make that happen. It just doesn't seem like I've been here that long.

"It has gone by really fast, yeah. It just doesn't seem like that long ago when I was getting in the [Ganassi Racing] 40 car [in the fall of 2002], even running Busch races, so it went by really fast."