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EARNHARDT (ON WHAT HE LEARNED LAST TIME IN TALLADEGA.): “Well, we were sort of having a good old time. It gets a little crazy in the middle of the pack there. The best place for me to be is ahead of the field. In the top five is the best and safest place to be. We kind of slid back and got scrambling around back there around 15th and banged around with a couple guys and that really hurt our chances. It’s tough. The cars are more equal now. The COT makes it much more of a level playing field.”
EARNHARDT (ON THE “RIDE WITH DALE JR.” PAINT SCHEME.): “We are giving fans the opportunity to be involved in the event and what we do. It’s a pretty unique looking race car so hopefully the fans will enjoy it. I think I will. Also, my fire suit is going to be cool—it’s all white. A change of pace is always fun.”
TONY EURY JR., CREW CHIEF OF THE NO. 88 AMP ENERGY “RIDE WITH DALE JR."/NATIONAL GUARD IMPALA SS (ON GOING TO TALLADEGA.): ”I love Talladega. It’s a great place, but you have to have a guy who’s a great drafter. You have to have a really good car with a lot of horsepower and teammates to help you out. Teammates are going to play a big, big role down there. In the first race (at Talladega) we were really good. We got into an accident with 15 to go, went to 32nd and came back to the 10th in three laps. I’m really looking forward to getting down there and seeing what we’ve got.”
EURY (ON WHY RESTRICTOR-PLATE RACING SUITS EARNHARDT.): “He’s very smart as far as anticipating things happening. He watches the cars, and he knows where the momentum is going just because of the other drivers’ reactions. He has a very good way of carrying that momentum once he gets it. If he gets a draft and he gets to do a ‘slingshot,’ he’ll carry that for several laps because he knows what to do with it. It’s a pleasure to watch him race because he’s probably one of the best out there. But because these cars are so equal, it’s going to come down to teammates helping teammates, and that’s the only way this Hendrick bunch is going to win.”
EURY (ON RESTRICTOR-PLATE TRACKS.): “I’ve had a lot of success at Talladega, but it takes three times the work to have that car perform nowadays. We log lots of hours in the wind tunnel. There are all kinds of things that you have to have that car do. That car takes a special attention, and it takes three times as long to build as any other car. Restrictor-plate racing, used to be that was all you lived for, but now it’s like there’s four races there and it pays the same amount of points but you don’t want to spend too much time on it because it’s still four races and you’ve got 32 of the other ones, and we’d like to spend our time and be more competitive on them. It’s one of those deals where it takes a big part of your calendar, because you’ve got to sacrifice so much.”
EURY (ON WHAT IT MEANS TO SEE THE NO. 88 CAR WITH 70,000 NAMES ON IT.): ”It’s pretty overwhelming. We know that Junior’s fan base is huge and to see that many people who have their name on his car, it’s awesome. You’d love to have a Victory Lane with all those people in it. It’s cool. For them to show their support for our team shows a lot of pride.”
EURY (ON COMPETING AGAINST HENDRICK DRIVERS IN THE CHASE.): ”You can’t let it get too involved. Everybody here is going after the same goal, and you’ve got three teams that want to win the championship, but you can’t let it break up your team. We’re still Hendrick Motorsports, and we’ve got to work together. You’re not going to do anything to jeopardize that. You’re going to work with these guys at the beginning of next year. It’s what I told Chad (Knaus, No. 48 crew chief) and Steve (Letarte, No. 24 crew chief) both—it’s my job to build the best team possible. I’ve got the same amount of tools they’ve got, and their job is to build the best team possible. Whichever one performs the best on race day and on pit road is going to be the one that’s going to walk away with the ring. But company-wide it would be a big celebration if we could have them one-two-three.”
EURY (ON HOW THREE CHASE TEAMS CAN COEXIST.): “It’s great. Our information is an open book, and we learn so much from each other every week. One might understand it a little more than the other, but it comes down to performance.”
KURT ROMBERG, CHIEF AERODYNAMICIST FOR HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS (ON HOW THE WIND TUNNEL WORKS.): “The wind tunnel is a tool. It’s a large building that we can put a full-sized car—a regular race car—into, and we can blow air over the car and measure the forces that the air produces on the car. One of the things that makes a car go around a racetrack faster is grip in the tires, and we can increase grip in the tires by using air to push down on the car, thereby making the car go around the corners faster.”
ROMBERG (ON HOW HELPFUL THE WIND TUNNEL IS.): “It’s less helpful now because the Car of Tomorrow is such a smaller box. There’s a lot less latitude to change the body on the Car of Tomorrow, but there’s still some competitive advantages to be had. It’s important because the car goes nominally 180 mph, and there are tremendous aerodynamic forces pushing on the car at that speed. If you’ve ever stuck your hand out the window of a car going 60 mph and felt that force pushing your hand back, well at 180, that force is 10 times what you feel at 60 mph. It’s a tremendous force on the car—a car going to the middle of the corner is like a car on ice. It’s right on the edge of adhesion. If you could magically stand out there and push on the back of the car just a little bit with five or 10 pounds of force, you could spin the car out because it’s right on the edge of adhesion. Well, you can imagine that if we can take the air and push on it to the tune of 50 or 100 pounds, what kind of effect that might have.”
ROMBERG (ON WHY HENDRICK TESTS THE SPEEDWAY CARS IN PARTICULAR.): “In speedway mode, when we’re dealing with 400 horsepower rather than 800 horsepower, we need to reduce the drag as much as possible so we take the cars in the tunnel, and we work in very, very fine increments. If we can realize a one-percent change in drag, that equates to about a tenth of a second qualifying at Daytona or Talladega. Which if you look at some of the qualifying results, a tenth of a second is easily 10 spots on the grid. That one-percent change is very significant and very difficult to find sometimes. We have had many times we’ll take a car to the tunnel for nine or 10 hours and literally find nothing. It’s a game of very small numbers. When I say one percent, we’re talking about portions of one percent. But we’ll work real hard at finding those itty bitty things because if you can find two or three of them, it’s a very significant difference, particularly during qualifying.”
