Biffle to remain with Roush Fenway

   NASCAR veteran Greg Biffle has agreed to a contract extension with Roush Fenway Racing, the Observer and ThatsRacin.com have learned.

   An official announcement of Biffle's extension could come as early as this weekend at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway, sources said.

   As recently as April 1, Biffle said he was "90 percent sure" he would re-sign with Roush and hoped to have a new deal completed by midseason.

   Biffle said he's not had an overwhelming interest to test the free-agent market, in part because of the economy, but also because of how far Roush Fenway Racing has come from this time last year.

   While Biffle is currently 18th in Sprint Cup Series points, his teammates Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth have already won races this season.

   During his career with Roush, Biffle has won the Truck and Nationwide series championships and finished as high as second in Cup standings in 2005. He has 16 Cup wins, 20 in Nationwide and 16 in Trucks.

   A team spokesperson on Wednesday said she could not confirm Biffle had agreed to an extension.

It's time to speed this process up

   It’s way past time for NASCAR to clear up the controversy about its method of patrolling speeding on pit road.

   NASCAR uses an electronic monitoring system on pit road consisting of scoring “loops” to determine average speed between spots on the track. If a driver exceeds the announced pit road speed plus a 4.99 mph tolerance, a computer flags the driver for speeding.

   The problem has been that no one other than NASCAR officials in race control are allowed to see the computer results in real time, all the time. Competitors are shown read outs after the fact if requested.

   In order to help squelch an uproar started by driver Jimmie Johnson’s complaints, NASCAR allowed a Fox TV camera in race control last weekend at Texas to show video of a speeder getting caught (in this instance Tony Stewart).

   In addition, earlier in the weekend, a NASCAR official posted a picture on his Twitter account of the pit road speeding monitor screen.

   Yet still NASCAR refuses to allow media or fans the ability to see every driver’s speed every time in real time.

   In its effort this past week to try to defuse the controversy, NASCAR only made the situation worse. By officials posting pictures on Twitter of the screen and allowing Fox to video an instance of speeding, all NASCAR did was show it has the capability to show the results all the time.

   In turn, that just begs the question: If NASCAR can show the speeding results occasionally, why can it not show them regularly?

   Some sort of competitive advantage has been the usual reason cited, but NASCAR itself trounced that excuse by making exceptions to its long-standing policy this week of not showing the speeds.

   The simple answer here is NASCAR doesn’t want to show the speeds.

   What is still lacking is a legitimate explanation as to why.