This weekend’s Coca-Cola 600 is one of the more challenging races the teams face the entire season.
It’s a very tough race to win for a lot of reasons. You are asking 100 more miles out of everything you have on that race car — especially the engine.
Even more so than normal, the engine guys keep precise notes of how many miles are on those powerplants leading up to the race. When it comes to final practice on Saturday, you can find yourself between a rock and a hard place because you need to make another run or two but the engine guys are standing there giving you fair warning of how many miles are already on the engine.
The next major transition is when the sun goes completely down and the track cools way down. Through these two major changes is where the crew chief, engineer and driver with his feedback have all got to be pretty aggressive with adjustments on that car. You’ve basically got to try and stay a step ahead of the racetrack. It’s easy to get behind trying to keep up with the track.
In the mid to late ‘90s, the two guys who did the best job of that — and their record speaks for itself — is Jeff Gordon and Ray Evernham. When you look back over the last few years, the combo that’s probably done the best job of keeping up with the track and making the right changes is Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus.
The biggest thing they have done is building their notebook about this race track with the transitions it goes through. The other thing to remember is that this will only be the second Coca-Cola 600 for this new car. Even though the track will go through its normal changes, this car acts a little different. There are a lot of places we go where this car actually seems to get looser at night when the track cools down.
One of the constants about the 600 and the changing tracks is the different teams you will end up seeing up front. It never fails that when the green flag drops there are teams that are up front and very strong. Then as the transitions hit and these same teams fail to keep up with the changes, they basically disappear off the radar.
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