Your Source for all the Latest News in Real World and Virtual Motor Sports

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — It has been nearly a year since Matt Kenseth passed Elliott Sadler on lap 146 of the Daytona 500 mere seconds before rain handed him the biggest victory of his racing career.

A lot has changed for Kenseth since that faithful day at Daytona Int’l Speedway. Gone are the familiar black and yellow of former sponsor DeWalt, replaced by the purple and gold of new sponsor Crown Royal.

Behind Kenseth is a season that started off better than he could have hoped — two straight victories at Daytona and Auto Club Speedway in California — but ended with a spit and a sputter at Florida’s Homestead-Miami Speedway in November after Kenseth missed The Chase for the first time.

“To be able to come out of the box and win the first two, and one of them being a plate race, I wasn’t even really considering we were gonna fall out of the top 12 in points with as consistent as we usually are,” said Kenseth, the 2003 series champion. “Then to go to Vegas and break on the first lap and finish last, that was really kind of a reality check to say the least.

“It was just really difficult from there on out. We could never really get everything to go exactly right,” Kenseth said.

Kenseth is the first to admit that the last two years have been a struggle for him. Prior to missing The Chase in 2009, Kenseth failed to visit victory lane in 2008 despite making The Chase.

“Really, 2008 and 2009 have probably been two of the most frustrating years of my career, and last year was really frustrating,” said Kenseth. “Even though we started off so good, it was really just a weird year because we were just brimming with confidence after California, obviously, and then about two or three months in we just couldn’t get anything to go right.”

With Crown Royal on board to sponsor him in 35 races this season and a new year ahead of him, Kenseth hopes that his Roush Fenway Racing team can shuffle the deck and return Kenseth to Chase contention.

“We’ve changed a lot of things, so if we don’t run better it’s not from a lack of trying,” Kenseth said. “We’ve tried to look over everything and make it better for everybody, but, to be honest, you don’t really know where you’re at until you get four or five weeks into the season. With no off-season testing and with these cars as tight as all the tolerances and rules are, we don’t really know where we’re going to be at until we get into the meat of the season.”