Roush Fenway Racing announced Monday afternoon that they had parted ways with longtime driver Greg Biffle, ending a 19-year tenure.
Biffle, who drove the #16 Ford for RFR since 2003, finished Sunday’s season-ending race at Homestead with a 17th-place finish. The oldest full-time driver in the Cup Series at 46 years of age, he and RFR struggled in recent years as the team was unable to successfully adapt to the Generation-6 body; RFR’s last win came in 2014 with Carl Edwards, while Biffle last won at Michigan in 2013. Biffle finished 23rd in points in 2016 with only three top-ten finishes, although he won the pole at the July Daytona race, his first pole since 2012.
“It’s been a great 19 years at Roush Fenway Racing,” Biffle tweeted. “It was a mutual agreement we started working on many months ago for a departure after 2016.”
Biffle departs RFR with 19 career Cup wins, 13 poles and a runner-up finish in the championship in 2005. He had been with the organization since 1998, first running in the Truck Series and winning the series championship in 2000. He later moved up to the team’s Busch (now Xfinity) Series team, winning that series title in 2002. As a result, he became the second driver in NASCAR history to win two of the three national series championships after Bobby Labonte and the first of three to win Xfinity and Truck titles.
At the age of 33, Biffle began competing full-time in the Cup Series in 2003. That year, although he failed to qualify for the Las Vegas race, he won his first Cup race at Daytona’s Pepsi 400.
It has not been announced as to whether RFR will field a third car for 2017. The team is expected to continue fielding the #6 for Trevor Bayne and the #17 for Ricky Stenhouse Jr. full-time in 2017.
Featured image courtesy of the Associated Press
