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Ready to roll DEI looking for breakthrough year after reorganizationPosted: Thursday February 06, 2003 1:02 PMUpdated: Friday February 14, 2003 10:41 AM
By Denise N. Maloof, CNNSI.com If this winter's crop of reality flicks, awards shows and Oscar debates hasn't wowed you, better tune up that remote. Exercise that mouse. Sharpen your eyes and ears. The Winston Cup season is back -- well, almost. Eleven days hence, the green flag drops on the 2003 Daytona 500, which means 10 straight months of rumors, he-saids, they-saids, firings, hirings -- all the delicious, maddening, off-track stuff that swirls around what actually happens in 3,400-pound stock cars. So pick your favorite storyline. Pop a tab or a tabloid. Debate whether Tony Stewart will repeat, how Rusty Wallace or Ryan Newman will do in a Dodge. But keep your eye on Dale Earnhardt Inc. "We'd love for all three cars to be in the top 10 in points like what Jack Roush did last year," said Steve Hmiel, DEI's director of motorsports. Two years after its founder's death, the organization is in shipshape form again, according to some of those inside it. Management roles have been redefined, pit and shop crews upgraded and drivers settled into new contracts. It's a statement season for one of NASCAR's biggest entities, and no team will endure hotter spotlights than those on Steve Park, Michael Waltrip or Dale Earnhardt Jr. "What we feel personally is that the whole world looks at it and goes, 'OK, Dale's not there anymore. Can those guys do it?'" Hmiel said. "This year, we feel as though we need to show them that we can do it." Everybody thought that might happen in 2002.
Earnhardt Jr. expected to contend for a title, but finished out of the top 10. Waltrip excelled at Daytona and Talladega but almost nowhere else. Park's year was memorable for its wretchedness. He returned in April after recuperating from a serious head injury and struggled all season, losing his crew chief, Paul Andrews, to Jeff Burton along the way. A year after his father died, Earnhardt Jr. finished 11th in points. Waltrip was 14th. Park plummeted to 33rd following what was to be DEI's back-to-business campaign, and in a racing outfit that wants for nothing -- the employee cafeteria boasts a chef -- no one was very satisfied. "It really weighs on you, really puts your shoulders down," Park said about his 2002 saga, which included contract negotiations. "We had some rough times and some tough times," Earnhardt Jr. said. Now all three teams -- plus a new Busch Series team -- have new pit crews. All are attempting to master a new Monte Carlo, just like other Chevrolet teams. DEI's teams are doing some perhaps unprecedented data-pooling, not only from January's combined Daytona tests, but Park's recent test at Las Vegas, Earnhardt Jr.'s at Rockingham and, eventually, Waltrip's late February test at Atlanta. Of nine new downforce cars built over the winter, all have been cut up and refashioned thanks to test and research results, according to Richard "Slugger" Labbe, Waltrip's crew chief. "DEI as a whole is trying to hit the first four races, be prepared and get all the information that we can so we have a good start in 2003," Labbe said. "We want to be a factor," Hmiel said. "One of our teams needs to be a factor in every race." Preparation runs deeper than data for Park. He ended 2002 with new crew chief Tony Gibson, a much-needed head start for both men, and now Park has DEI's undivided attention. All the top engineering, engine, chassis and testing resources have been dedicated to Park because he's so low in owner points [read: provisionals], plus, he's fighting for primary sponsorship. Pennzoil's contract ends after this season. "I'm confident that this team we have now is the best team we've had in two years," said Park, who seemed headed for top-10 status before suffering the head injury in a late August 2001 Busch Series wreck at Darlington. "I'm looking forward to this year putting that Pennzoil car back up front because the whole story of being hurt, negotiating contracts, is all going to end when I'm standing in Victory Lane." "We are not planning on Steve not succeeding," Hmiel said. "We've got no backup plan or anything like that. Steve's going to succeed, and the way he does that is we support the heck out of him so he has the best people working on his stuff all the time." Park's working on himself, too. He says all the controversy surrounding whether he returned too soon after suffering a brain bruise is moot. "That motivation leads me to running almost every day and being in the gym lifting weights," Park said. "I'm probably the strongest and probably have the best cardiovascular health, that I've had in a long time. I feel great." Waltrip, who finished fifth in last year's Daytona 500, will be asked for consistency. A tepid first half in 2002 was followed by a mid-season surge and his second career Cup win -- the Pepsi 400 in July back at Daytona. He finished second behind Earnhardt in the spring race at Talladega and eighth in the fall event. But niche racing, and a sometimes-wayward attention span -- "Dad was always around to keep him straight before," Earnhardt Jr. said -- doesn't equal constancy. "Michael is more dedicated to myself and the team," Labbe said. "His focus is there. He's lost a lot of weight from working out. He understands that with this new car that we have, and the team that's behind [him] 100 percent, he knows that he's got to get after it." Then there's Earnhardt Jr., who started strong in 2002, only to see a high-profile second-half slump linked to a violent May crash at California in which he said he suffered concussion after-effects. There was also communication fine-tuning -- some of it painful -- with his car chief, Tony Eury Jr., and crew chief Tony Eury Sr. The latter is allowing the two younger men to work closer together, and Earnhardt Jr. said what was last season's experiment will be this season's norm. "That started working really good," he said of his decision to talk more exclusively about setups and car behavior with Eury Jr. "We started making some big gains and started running better. The communication was better." "Dale Jr. needs to be a threat to win the championship," Hmiel said. Management is doing its part, Hmiel added. According to him, discussions that began last October and continued through the offseason cleared the air and delineated responsibilities. Instead of those in charge sometimes overlapping each other -- Hmiel, DEI vice president Ty Norris, head engine builder Richie Gilmore and owner Teresa Earnhardt, among others -- they debated who should do what and why. Hmiel called it an evolution, not a revolution. "Maybe we didn't understand each other's strengths and weaknesses enough, and we didn't parlay that into what we needed to be doing," he said. Norris, who Hmiel said "is terrific at organizing people, getting money, keeping the money people happy," fashioned all the new pit crews. Hmiel and Gilmore will concentrate on the cars, with Hmiel overseeing DEI's engineers and Gilmore overseeing the engine shop. "We lived on emotion in 2001," Hmiel said. "The trick is not to just live on emotion, but to do the right things, do the things that Dale put you in place to do. And we stumbled a little bit in 2002."
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Name: Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Name: Steve Park
Name: Michael Waltrip
