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AT WATKINS GLEN: In eight NASCAR Sprint Cup Series starts at Watkins Glen International, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has scored two top-five finishes and three top-10s. Earnhardt, driver of the No. 88 National Guard/AMP Energy Chevrolet, has led 13 laps overall—his most at any road course. On Aug. 10, 2003, he led 11 laps en route to posting his best start and finish—third—at the track.
DOUBLE DUTY: Earnhardt will drive the No. 5 Chevrolet in Saturday’s NASCAR Nationwide Series event at Watkins Glen to garner more experience for Sunday’s Sprint Cup event. This will mark the eighth weekend in which Earnhardt has competed in both series. In three Nationwide Series starts at Watkins Glen, Earnhardt has recorded one win, one top-five finish and two top-10s.
TOP FLIGHT: Earnhardt has led at least one lap in 15 of the 21 Sprint Cup Series events this season. Last week, Earnhardt led once and was racing in the top five before running out of fuel and taking 12th at Pocono Raceway. Overall this season, he has led 630 laps, while recording one win, seven top-five finishes and 12 top-10s.
BACKWARD PIT STOPS: Earnhardt will have to adjust to making right turns, while his No. 88 team will have to adjust to fixing the car backward during pit stops. During Sunday’s event, the pit crews will work on the car from the opposite side, which reverses the crew members’ approaches. The No. 88 team has devoted practice time during the last four weeks to prepare for the 220-mile event. (Quotes from pit crew coach Mark Mauldin below.)
HENDRICK AT WATKINS GLEN: In 22 events at Watkins Glen, Hendrick Motorsports has posted six wins, 17 top-five finishes and 29 top-10s. Two Hendrick drivers—Tim Richmond in 1986 and Jeff Gordon in 1998—won the race from the pole position.
CHASSIS CHOICE: Crew chief Tony Eury Jr. and the No. 88 National Guard/AMP Energy Chevrolet engineers chose Chassis No. 88-514 for Sunday’s event at Watkins Glen. This is a brand new car for the road course. It has not been tested or used during a race.
QUOTES
DALE EARNHARDT JR., DRIVER OF THE NO. 88 NATIONAL GUARD/AMP ENERGY IMPALA SS (ON WATKINS GLEN.): “It’s no secret that I really don’t like road courses. Watkins Glen is a little faster and flatter than Infineon Raceway, but I grew up watching racing on ovals and not road courses. I’ve had a good run or two at the Glen, and I’m running the Nationwide race there to get some extra seat time, but I just generally don’t like road course racing. We just want to run well, get through it and get on with oval track racing at Michigan.”
TONY EURY JR., CREW CHIEF OF THE NO. 88 NATIONAL GUARD/AMP ENERGY IMPALA SS (ON EARNHARDT’S ROAD COURSE SUCCESS.): “Dale Jr. usually runs pretty good there. We’ve had a lot of success there. The biggest key there is you have to get wide open through the esses. All the passing will happen in Turns 1 and 9, so you really have to have your car dialed in for those two places. It’s pretty much an open road course. You can use it like an oval and set it up to go to the right. It’s a lot of fun to go to Watkins Glen. It’s a lot different than Infineon.”
EURY (ON WHY WATKINS GLEN SUITS EARNHARDT’S STYLE.): ”The way the track is set up and the corners are scattered out, you can pick certain parts of the track to work on. That kind of suits his style of driving. Infineon is a rhythm track. You get off on one place, and it’s hard to recover. Watkins Glen is a lot more forgiving.”
EURY (ON HIS PIT STRATEGY.): “You’re going to pit twice. It’s kind of the same scenario as you have at Infineon, but tires can make a difference because the racetrack is a lot faster than Infineon. The race is 90 laps so you get to that second stop, and you play it from the end of the race back. Some people will be pitting real early, some will be pitting real late. You can get caught real easy by being on pit road or not being on pit road at any time so you have to really be up on what is happening.”
EURY (ON PREPARING FOR PIT ROAD.): “The guys gotta get used to it. Some teams will take the front-tire changer and put him on the back, the back-tire changer and put him on the front just because they’re used to running in that direction. But the whole pit crew has to adjust to doing a reversal. And if you get from pit stall 15 down to zero, it is on an incline. You have to make sure the driver keeps his foot on the brakes so the car doesn’t roll out of the stall.”
EURY (ON THE STRATEGY FOR PIT PRACTICE.): “You really make sure that the guys are comfortable running in that direction. That’s about all you can do. Sometimes the jackman will pull the front tire instead of the rear—whatever feels comfortable to them. I think everybody’s pit stops will be off by about a second from their normal deal because it’s such an odd pit road.”
MARK MAULDIN, PIT CREW COACH FOR THE NOS. 5 AND 88 TEAMS (ON PREPARING FOR PIT ROAD.): “What we do is we actually start preparing four weeks out, and we break the pit stop into segments so everybody gets comfortable with each segment. We start on approaches—getting to the car from a different point of view, a different angle—and we work on that the first week. Then the second week we work on our transitions from left to right. A lot of external factors affect the pit stop—hoses lay differently, people behind the wall are positioned differently. We take those two weeks and work those logistics out. The third week, we actually start doing live Watkins Glen pit stops at the first part of our practice. And then we prepare for the upcoming race back around the normal way so we feel like the week of Watkins Glen we have all the bugs worked out and all the logistics worked out so that we can actually get down to servicing the car in a reasonable amount of time.”
MAULDIN (ON HIS APPROACH AND WHY HE DOESN’T FLIP THE TIRE CHANGERS/CARRIERS.): “We stay the same. We’ve tried that in the past and some guys adapt easier to doing that than others. And some guys feel more comfortable staying in their normal positions. We’ve found out that to cut down another change, we leave them the way they are.”
MAULDIN (ON MENTALLY PREPARING HIS PIT CREWS FOR THE RACE.): “They really look forward to it because at this point in time in the season everybody is kind of tired. A change now is good, even with the Chase coming up and the excitement surrounding that. Right now the routine needs to be broken. NASCAR did a pretty good job of getting this thing scheduled in the middle of the season so the monotony of the week in, week out racing has been broken. Everybody complains about Watkins Glen and doing it backwards and doing it differently, but at practice you can see a little bit of enthusiasm. If you ate ice cream every day all day long, you’d get tired of it. And not that we’re tired of racing or doing pit stops the way we do, but it just spices things up a bit.”
MAULDIN (ON HIS FAVORITE MOMENT IN 12 YEARS OF RACING AT WATKINS GLEN.): “My favorite moment would have to be two years ago when the No. 5 car wrecked, and we were the lucky dog five times in a row and were the best-finishing car on the Hendrick complex. It was a neat, neat deal. We never expected, after all the adversity we went through with that No. 5 car, that we would even think about having a decent finish. But we lucky-dogged them to death that week.”
