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Charlotte Things will go bump in the nightPosted: Tuesday May 20, 2003 11:09 PM
Ricky Rudd has made 53 consecutive races at the Concord, N.C., track, dating back to Oct. 1976. Although a trip to victory lane has eluded the Chesapeake, Va., driver, he has recorded nine top-fives and 25 top-10s at Lowe's Motor Speedway, and has started from the pole once, in October 1995. Charlotte is one of the most difficult tracks on the circuit. It's bumpy. It's gotten rough over the years and they haven't repaved it in quite a while, so that tends to create some of the difficulties. You leave pit road and enter the backstretch up to speed. Arcing it into Turn 3 you have a real fine line. If you stay out a little too long and arc it in late in that corner you have a hard time getting the left front tire down to the inside of the race track. That is where you want to be. You want that left front tire right down on the apron in the middle of the corner. The longer you stay out and the wider entry you make, it allows for more speed in the corner. But, again, it is a fine line. If you wait too long, it won't turn, and it will upset your laps times. It's a pretty tricky track. You have to hit your marks in Turn 3, the left front tire down on the apron. It's not really a trick. It's not a secret, but you want to keep your momentum going through that corner and bleed off the least amount of speed that you possibly can, being careful not to have the front end or the back end slide up the race track. If you get a little greedy for that extra tenth of a mile an hour, you will pay the price and ruin your entire lap time. Again, you have to use your head and not get too aggressive. You keep your speed out of Turn 4, keep it rolling. You want to come out of the exit of 4 and just about touch the fence with your right-rear quarter panel. Coming out of 4, you want to turn the steering wheel one time and draw a straight line through the double dogleg and try to get the steering wheel to turn straight as soon as you possibly can. The motor tends to build RPMs quicker as soon as the tires get straight. Always keep aggressive in trying to get the wheel turned straight and not continue to turn on the front straightaway. You want to run that in a straight line. You want to be right on the edge of that first dogleg. You don't want to get that left-front tire down in the dirt, but you want to be down low. By not turning the steering wheel that will put you about in the middle of the track at the start/finish line at the flag stand. And again, that should work out with the left-front tire just barely clips the inside of the second dogleg. If you do all that just right, if you do that correctly, you will come out of that arc on the front straightaway lined up to enter Turn 1. Turn 1, when you are driving a qualifying lap, you drive it over the bump and down into the bottom of the corner. There is a bad bump down in Turn 1 that creates a big challenge for the all the chassis guys to make sure that the bumps don't upset the car. Then you are out of the throttle for no more than maybe just a second and then right back in it wide open, carrying as much momentum as you possibly can going into the backstretch. And then you are back to where you started in Turn 3. It's not too difficult to race. The groove usually moves up in Turns 3 and 4. One and 2 tends to stay on the bottom. It is bumpy and going down the backstretch the inside guy really has to pinch his car tight entering Turn 3. That's where you usually see action, when one guy who is trying to pass and you get those two cars side-by-side, the inside guy loses the air on his rear spoiler and the back end breaks loose. So you have to be careful on how to pass somebody at Charlotte. A lot of thinking goes in to it so that you're not completely square with the guy. If I'm passing, I like to be able to take advantage of the momentum that I have so that you're not sitting there side-by-side for a long period of time through the corner. If you are on the inside and have a run at the guy, you want to make pass pretty fast and clean. The longer you hang on the inside the more your car tends to slow down. And a lot of that is because the car on the inside has to lift the throttle a little bit because the air is being taken off the rear spoiler and the rear end tends to get loose. It's definitely a track where you have to think all the time when you run laps there. During the 600 everyone races hard. During the middle of the race, you race the racetrack, not each other. And it seems like three and a half hours later it is time to get serious because the race laps wind down. Usually, that race runs at least four hours. The trick there is not to abuse your equipment. It's a long race and you want to have a racecar left that you can challenge with. Ricky Rudd drives the No. 21 Motorcraft Racing Ford Taurus owned by Wood Brothers Racing. |
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