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Media Tour Day 3: Roush vows to improve in 2015

Greg Biffle and Carl Edwards made the Chase for Roush Fenway Racing in 2014. Edwards won two races. However, you weren't going out on much of a limb if you thought that the Roush cars wouldn't be championship threats before the Chase began.

And you would have been right. Biffle was eliminated after the first round of the Chase. He ended up 14th in the standings. Edwards made it into the third round of the Chase but didn't go any further after finishing 20th at Martinsville and 15th at Phoenix.

The team's other driver, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., flat struggled. He finished 27th in the standings.

On Wednesday, improving the team's performance was the big theme during the third day of the Sprint Cup Series media tour.

“Although we put two cars in the Chase and had three in the top-10 in the XFINITY Series we didn’t perform to our expectations,” Roush president Steve Newmark said. “If you had walked through the halls of Roush Fenway during the latter part of last season, there would have been a high level of dissatisfaction. We set goals for ourselves and didn’t meet them.

“We spent a lot of time in the off-season doing some soul searching to figure out what we need to do to get back on top. I think we realize that sports are cyclical and teams go up and down but you don’t get back to the top just by waiting for inertia to take you there. We were looking at the changes we needed to make and are pretty fortunate that we have a good guide post in Jack Roush, doing this for over 25 years at the top level.”

While Newmark hailed the team owner as a good guide post for improvement, the team will be embarking on its venture to escape a dreadful 2014 without Edwards. He's at Joe Gibbs Racing now and Trevor Bayne is essentially taking his place, though he's driving the No. 6 car instead of the No. 99.

The 2011 Daytona 500 winner has three top-10 finishes in 58 Cup races. Edwards has 187 in 373.

The team hopes that any change in drivers is mitigated by an improved performance on the type of tracks that dominate the Sprint Cup Series schedule. High hopes? Possibly. It's easier to get behind in the Cup Series than it is to get ahead. But you can't fault Roush for finding its weakness and attempting to address it.

“The hole in our performance was in the 1.5-mile race tracks, which have typically been our strength,” Roush said. “There are a lot of things involved. There is the aero map, the ride map, the analysis of the tire data that flows from NASCAR and we had to make sure we considered those things to not screw up the things that were adequate or strong as we went after the areas we showed some weakness. I characterize our changes as tweaks.

“We looked at a number of things on the 1.5-mile cars and [new hires] Mark McCardell and Kevin Kidd have given us some new perspective on some things that have gone on in the industry beyond the vision of myself and Robbie Reiser.”

• You know who didn't have to talk about a porous 2014? Team Penske. Joey Logano made the final round of the Chase and Brad Keselowski just missed it. Plus, the team won the owner's title in the now-Xfinity Series and Will Power won the IndyCar Series title. Not terrible.

Keselowski, the 2012 Sprint Cup Series champion (and the only driver to win a Cup title for Roger Penske) said he wasn't taught anything by the way the events of the Chase unfolded. At Charlotte, he drew the ire of Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin, and then there was Texas, where Jeff Gordon, knowing 2014 might have been his last best shot at a Cup title, went after him after contact on the track.

Keselowski also had an interesting analogy about how he sees his role in the Sprint Cup Series. Do you agree with it?

"With the lack of turnover (among drivers) in our sport in the last decade, even though I may be a champion, I'm still a ninth-grader," he said via USA Today. "I'm still the freshman in high school until that turnover comes. And in that sense, no high school football player likes to get beat off the varsity team by a freshman. That's where I'm at, and I understand that."

• Richard Petty Motorsports has added employees and moved to a new shop for 2015. And it has a new driver, too. As Marcos Ambrose is back in Australia driving V8 Supercars, Sam Hornish is the new pilot of the No. 9. The team is committed to running Hornish the full season even though the No. 9 only has sponsorship for 10 of the 36 races on the Cup schedule.

Aric Almirola is back in the No. 43 and even used the term "breakout year" on Wednesday. You'll remember that Almirola won a race and made the Chase in 2014. He doesn't feel that's the team's ceiling. While he may be right, we do wonder, given the level of competition at the top of the Cup Series, just how much higher that ceiling is.

"We went out and set some pretty lofty goals for ourselves to get the 43 car back to victory lane and make the Chase and we were able to do both those things,” Almirola said. “I think we surprised some people and I think we had a really good year.  We want to grow from that.  We want to be able to take everything that we’re doing with the new shop and be able to take even more resources that Smithfield is putting into the race team this year, and the additional help we’re getting from Ford and everybody at STP and the Air Force and Fresh From Florida.  I think 2015 is going to be a breakout year for us."

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!