A well-tuned engine is music to Jack Roush’s ears.

“I enjoy listening because engines will talk to you,” Roush says. “I enjoy being in concert with all of the things going on in an engine and the condition of the parts, the things that fatigue and have a finite life.

Jack Roush owns racing teams in NASCAR, the International Motor Sports Assn. and Sports Car Club of America.

“It’s a concert; it’s like a bunch of musical instruments all playing in the right key with the right cadence.”

In many ways, Roush’s challenge as the owner of four Winston Cup race teams is very much like the challenge of making all of the parts and pieces of one of his engines work in harmony. And so far in the 2002 season, the engine that is Roush Racing has been running quite nicely.

Matt Kenseth won at Rockingham and Texas and Kurt Busch won at Bristol, and both of their teams are off to solid overall starts this year. So, too, are veterans Mark Martin and Jeff Burton. That’s in marked contrast to the 2001 season, when Roush’s teams sputtered badly early in the season and never fully recovered.

Over a lifetime of experience in business and in racing, Roush has learned that there’s only so much he can do to help turn things around when they don’t go as planned.

“At my best, I think I can manage a dozen people pretty well,” Roush says. “My challenge is to manage my 12 people so I can understand how much of the complete job they can do.

“If they can do 60 percent of it, then I have to be there … in some way to get somebody to finish the other 40 percent. The hardest problem I’ve had is people who can do 95 percent of what I need them to do and a lot of times will conceal from you or you will misjudge and you will miss that last 5 percent.”

Roush’s mind has always worked a little differently, ever since he started tinkering with lawn mower engines at age 8. He was always working on something.

“My dad had issues with me taking stuff apart and putting it back together, fixing things he thought didn’t need to be fixed,” Roush says. “He told me when I was 17 he’d be glad when I went off to school because everything he had had ‘tinkeritis.'”

Roush built his first complete auto engine out of parts from a junkyard when he was 14. He worked two or three part-time jobs and saved enough money to pay for a college education and buy himself a new car upon graduation.

Roush majored in mathematics and minored in physics at Berea College and got his degree in 1964. He then bought himself that new car, but found out he wasn’t quite as happy with it as he thought he might be.

“I figured that every day I drove it, it was going to be diminished somewhat from the day before,” Roush says. “Until that time, everything I had, a bicycle or whatever it was, was always better the next day. I would grease it, oil it, paint it or shine it up. I did whatever I could to make it better.”

Boiled down to its essence, that’s what Roush is still trying to do on a much grander scale. Roush Industries has nearly 2,000 employees working in nearly 60 locations around the world. On the track, Roush-owned teams have won more than 250 events in NASCAR, Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) competition, with 24 national championships and 10 class victories in the prestigious 24-hour endurance race at Daytona.

“Jack just wants to win,” Jeff Burton says. “Some people get into motorsports because they think it’s cool or it’s fashionable or they don’t have enough money to own the Charlotte Hornets. The reason he has the business he has now is because of racing.

“Racing put him in that position and he knows that. He wants to win and to compete at a high level. He wants to do it with you. He’s not an owner who wants to step back and just let his people do it; he wants to be in there fighting with you.”

Building an empire like the one Roush now has is only part of the equation, he says.

“Most of the challenges we face require maintenance,” Roush says. “You can’t fix it so you’re never going to miss a set-up or never have a wreck. All you can do is maintain, do the maintenance and fend off the devils.”