ALAN GUSTAFSON, CREW CHIEF, NO. 5 POP-TARTS/CARQUEST CHEVROLET (ON LOOKING FORWARD TO TALLADEGA.): “I look forward to every race. It’s another opportunity to run well. Talladega is a track that can very easily end really good or really bad. I think it’s a track we could potentially win on. It’s a place where things can go your way. If we can get the right help at the right time, we can put ourselves in position to potentially win. We’ve got really good cars, really good speedway engines. I’m looking forward to it. At the same time at Talladega, you’ve always got in the back of your head the opportunity for a big accident, which nobody likes to be involved in. It’s a little bit of mixed emotions, but it will be exciting. Talladega has a lot of opportunity to be good for us.”
GUSTAFSON (ON RESTRICTOR PLATE TRACKS.): “I think restrictor plates are a necessary evil. You can’t race those tracks unrestricted—you’ll go too fast. I think initially, and probably from the outside looking in, the fans might say there’s not as much driver skill involved—that there’s a lot of luck involved and a lot of circumstance involved. I think initially you can make that point and from the outside looking in that may be the truth. But if you really go back and look, the same drivers consistently finish well. The same teams consistently finish well. There’s obviously some skill involved. Although it’s a different discipline that still takes a lot of talent to do. I like them. They’re a necessary evil, but I think NASCAR does a good job of making those races fun.”
GUSTAFSON (ON WHAT A CREW CHIEF CAN DO TO HELP HIS DRIVER DURING RESTRICTOR PLATE RACES.): “Obviously you can give your driver a fast car. If you have a fast car, that will put you in an advantageous spot where other drivers want to help you. People are going to go with the fast car. Sure, there are drivers who have had a lot of success like Dale (Earnhardt) Jr., who people will tend to help a little bit more because of his track record. But if you have a fast car, you’ll be able to get some drafting partners. Strategy—putting yourself in a good position getting on and off pit road—is also important. I’ve seen a lot of races won and lost on pit road. It’s really similar to any other race; you’ve just got to factor in the strategy of not being in the middle of the ‘big one.’ You can do that, too. Last race, we hung out in the back and tried to bide our time to the end and then go instead of being in that chaos all race long. So there are a lot of things you can do as a crew chief.”
GUSTAFSON (ON THE BEST QUALITY A DRIVER CAN HAVE AT RESTRICTOR PLATE RACES.): “Intelligence. Those are races that may not necessarily be as much about feeling or hand-eye coordination or the ability to react quickly, but more about being calculated. You’ve got to be smart, know when to go, know when to not go and put yourself in the right position. Your drafting partner is such a big part, too. You’ve had to, over time, build that relationship with certain people or put yourself in that position where, when they make that decision in a split second of ‘Are they going with x car or y car?,’ they’re going to go with your car. I think smart drivers do a good job of that.”
GUSTAFSON (ON THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY TIRE TEST.): “That’s a really great opportunity for us. Jimmie (Johnson) really ran well and won the race so we can take that information. We know that he was successful with that, so we’ll get feedback on it. We’ve got a really good baseline to start with. Getting on the track at Indy is always a good thing. It’s not a track that’s easy to get on so if you’ve got the opportunity to do that, it’s great. And then, working with Goodyear, we get a little bit of a headstart on what direction they might be going in and what you can do to help tire life and gather a lot of information. That’s a neat deal for three days. You don’t usually get to go test for three days so we’re excited about doing that.”
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 that we have the Car of Tomorrow 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.): “We take the speedway cars to the wind tunnel in particular to reduce the drag of the cars. I spoke earlier of putting downforce on the tires to make the cars turn faster. Well 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.”
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