DOVER, Del. -- Drew Blickensderfer burst into laughter Sunday evening in Dover International Speedway's garage area when he was asked if breaking up his team and reorganizing it had been discussed by Roush Fenway Racing.

"No, no talk of that," said Blickensderfer, crew chief of the No. 17. "We need to go win a race or two and make sure there's no talk of that."

“

We have a list of ideas of what we think we're getting beat by that's a mile long, but if you unload 35th you're scrambling just to try to salvage the weekend and you can't get ahead.

”

-- DREW BLICKENSDERFER

Driver Matt Kenseth's strong third-place finish in the AAA 400 enabled Blickensderfer to laugh, rather than swing at the questioner, swear or even cry, given the absolutely cryptically imperfect season he and his team had endured.

"This is very good," Blickensderfer said.

The question came because not only had Kenseth's team missed the playoffs for the first time in the Chase's six years, but Sunday was only their second top-five finish in the past 15 races. Ironically enough, their last had come at Dover in June, when Kenseth finished fourth.

"I kind of had a conversation, about this time last year with a couple other managers in the shop, that if we could put morale or good spirits in a syringe and inject some of our guys with it, it would be big," Blickensderfer said. "Because you can only [so often] give them the line, 'You know, everything's getting better and we're working hard.' I mean, people bust their butts seven days a week and they want to see something happen.

"And they haven't seen it in so long, so to be able to get a good finish it'll be easier to go to work [Monday] for everybody, I'm sure."

Kenseth was one of only two non-Chase drivers -- along with A.J. Allmendinger in seventh -- to finish in the top 10 on Sunday. The ubiquity of the Chase was proven by the fact that all the questions Kenseth was asked, save one, dealt with his opinions of the Chase.

But he knew what his finish meant.

"It ended up being really good," Kenseth said of his run, the best of the seven Fords in the field. "We didn't qualify very good [23rd] but we were really happy with our car. When the race started I didn't think we were quite as good as we were [in practice on Saturday], but we were able to have really good pit stops."

Blickensderfer said having the car close when it came out of the transporter on Friday was a key.

"Oh yeah, that was obviously what we'd missed the last few weeks, is that we unloaded close enough to where you could try things and do things you think you're getting beat by," Blickensderfer said. "We have a list of ideas of what we think we're getting beat by that's a mile long, but if you unload 35th you're scrambling just to try to salvage the weekend and you can't get ahead.

"And this week we got to try different things and always knew we could go back to 'Oh, that was pretty good and we can go back to that if we don't excel.' " (Continued)