Q:We have Ryan Newman with us. Ryan, let me try this. The No. 39 U.S. Army Toronado/Haas Automation Chevrolet. Did I get it right?
RYAN NEWMAN: It’s actually Tornados.
Q. That may be the only time I halfway get it right all season. Back to work, 2010 is not too far away, back in front of the fans tonight. Give us a little bit of what I did on my winter vacation.
RYAN NEWMAN: What I did, it sounds like I’m writing a journal or something. What I did on my vacation, 2009/10. I shouldn’t say I, we, Krissie and I, each year we go out to Utah with some friends, it’s either Utah or Idaho depending on where we want to go, and go snowmobiling.
This year we stayed in our little cabin, which has very little running water and a generator, and we kind of rough it, which was a lot of fun. I enjoy that.
I did that for four days, and I went down to the U.S. Army All-American Bowl down in Texas, and that was pretty cool, got to meet a lot of distinguished military personnel, which was good for me personally, but very cool because not many people get to do that.
Just recently I went to—it’s called Pike County, Illinois, which is like the place to go to for deer hunting in Illinois or in the United States, white tail deer hunting. My dad and Tony Gibson and my wife’s uncle who works for us, we all went up there and spent three days hunting up there. Literally, I would have been just walking out of the deer stand central time yesterday at this time, so sat in a tree from about 11:30 until 5:45, and they’re an hour behind. I was a lot colder yesterday right now than I am today. (Laughter.)
But in general it’s been a really good off-season and got to do some work around the shop with the race car, doing some new seat stuff and talking to Tony Gibson about some of the car things and that we can do to make the U.S. Army and Tornados and Haas Automation faster, and that’s about it.
Q. When you look at what you guys achieved last year, is it a challenge to continue and expand on that? What exactly do you want to do to make sure you don’t regress and that you keep moving forward as you look at 2010 compared to the good start you guys had?
RYAN NEWMAN: That’s one of the things that I’ve personally made a challenge for myself is to make sure that we improve, because in so many people’s eyes we weren’t supposed to do what we did last year.
From a team standpoint, from a performance standpoint, it’s important that we move forward and progress, like you said. How we do that is honestly a people thing. It’s teamwork. It’s building better race cars, communicating, all those things that the 48 team has done for the last four years straight. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to get to that point, but I think that our organization has done a lot of great things in the off-season for our people and for our race cars to be stronger, and we’ll prove that. We’ll try to prove that.
Q. NASCAR sent out a memo today saying there’s going to be an open test at Charlotte in March for the spoiler in place of the wing, speculation is it could be on the car as soon as Martinsville. Any reaction to that?
RYAN NEWMAN: Kind of numb right now in respect to it. I always said personally I like the looks of the spoiler over the wing. I think that the wing has had some benefits and it’s had some drawbacks. The benefits, I think, were the way the cars race side by side together, I think the side force, what we see with the—the biggest problem with the Truck Series in my opinion is when a truck gets inside another truck, it gets really loose, and I think that the wing made our side-by-side racing better. But I think with our problems that we’ve seen at the fast racetracks, and fortunately we haven’t seen it outside the racetracks at the restrictor plate tracks, when a car gets spun around, it’s typically going to go for a ride. At places like Texas and Atlanta and Charlotte, I don’t remember seeing a car getting spun around to the point that it could get airborne, so I think that that wing that creates that downforce going forward also creates lift going backwards.
And I think that secondly, it also blocks some of the air basically, and in layman’s terms from the roof flaps, which in turn are designed to keep the car down. I don’t know how much testing was done when the wing was put in place in respect to all these things, but I think in the end NASCAR is doing a lot of work and doing a lot of great things to do what’s best, and I think having a test like that is great for—I’ve been a very big advocate of no testing, but I think this is a good thing for the sport, and I think it’s a great racetrack to test at in respect to what we can learn with a spoiler versus a wing for all racetracks.
Obviously the faster you go, the more it has an effect from an aerodynamic standpoint. A spoiler at Martinsville is going to mean a lot less versus a wing than going to Atlanta or Texas.
Q. The Daytona 500 has always been at times—can be a very strange race the way some of these things turn out. You’ve got guys like Rusty Wallace who’s never won one, and yet you’ve had a lot of surprise guys. What does it take to win the Daytona 500, and why are there so many unusual winners?
RYAN NEWMAN: I’m not real sure. I mean, I think going back to when we won in 2008 that it was purely a team effort, an organizational effort with the two cars obviously. We did have the fastest cars all day long, but when we put our two Dodges together at the time, they beat the one Toyota that we needed to beat.
You honestly never know what’s going to happen. It seems like the race, especially when it was a day-to-night race, it took on a lot of transitions, and you just never knew what was going to happen. And I think that’s a lot of—I guess maybe the first race of the season type of situation where you just don’t know what to expect, you don’t know—and in respect to who has won, it’s a different list, I guess you could say, than some other racetracks. That’s maybe coincidental. I don’t know. It’s a great racetrack. I enjoy it. I think that Daytona is entirely different from Talladega in respect to how you drive it, how you race it, and obviously the glory that comes along with it. But I really look forward to this year’s Daytona 500.
Q. You’ve had the U.S. Army as a sponsor for about a year now. Can you compare the expectations that you had and what you’ve learned and all the things that you’ve done that you never thought you’d be doing?
RYAN NEWMAN: I don’t think that there is any true expectations of myself and other people on me. I think that in respect to having the U.S. Army as a sponsor, I’ve learned that racing, as many other businesses, is a people business, and working with people instead of, per se, a product has really opened my eyes to what the U.S. Army does for each and every person in the United States and each and every person in the world for that matter.
For instance, going to the U.S. Army All-American Bowl and meeting several very distinguished generals and meeting the Secretary of the Army John McHugh, few people get to do that, get to shake his hand in the first place, and get to stand side by side with him and watch a quarter of football and talk about things outside of the army or racing or football.
I think that the people part of it is something that’s really opened my eyes, having that affiliation with the U.S. Army, and what a people business it really is here in NASCAR.
Q. I apologize if you’ve already addressed this, but on the Yellow-Line Rule and the possibility of this going away, when drivers were asked about it last week in Nashville, they were pretty unanimous that they didn’t want it taken away. I know you’ve, however, said that any racetrack with out of bounds line isn’t a racetrack. Do you still agree with that? Are you in favor getting rid of it because that would making racing more real?
RYAN NEWMAN: I think that the out of bounds line has turned into a bit of good because I think it’s taught the drivers to respect each other a little bit more.
The second part of that is back when I first said that, when the first out of bounds line was made, we still had a ton of grass on the edge of the asphalt. And now at a lot of racetrack, Talladega, Daytona, places like that, which we don’t need to talk about with the out of bounds line, there’s so much asphalt that’s been paved in order to keep the cars from catching that grass or catching some air that an out of bounds line would mean literally racing from here to Lakeland to clear out. That’s not racing because I think you’re going to run into situations with blocking, and blocking has been a big, bad part of IndyCar racing for the last few years, with their speeds with their cars and the fact that they don’t have an out of bounds line in respect to that.
If you give us, which there is, plenty of room to race above the yellow line, then there’s plenty of room to race. If you give us room, that whole room, then I think there’s more room for us to block so to speak.
| 
|