Riding in fast company

New pavement talk of drivers at Texas Motor Speedway

Ricky Rudd, who qualified third for Sunday's race, compared TMS to a roller-coaster ride. Chris Stanford/Getty Images

By Denise N. Maloof, CNNSI.com

FORT WORTH, Texas -- They’re 3,400-pound bullets greased by new pavement, launched from a running start. And their path around Texas Motor Speedway is likely to be unlike any they’ve traveled this season.

"It’s a real interesting place," Ricky Craven said following Friday’s qualifying for Sunday’s Samsung-Radio Shack 500. "And I don’t know what to expect on Sunday."

How about strained tachometers, thousands of suspended breaths on any collision? Speed is this week’s byword -- destined to be ever since recent tests for Sunday’s Winston Cup event flirted with the track qualifying mark of 192.137 mph.

"Fast is fast," Johnny Benson said. "It doesn’t matter if you hit it at 180 or 190."

"Speed is kind of a relative thing," Matt Kenseth said. "The more you do it, and you’re all going in the same direction, it’s kind of all relative. It doesn’t necessarily feel fast going 200 here than it does going 150 at Dover."

But it is different. Dover Downs’ high-banked, one-mile concrete surface is renowned for its inherent physical stress. Texas’ 1.5-mile oval is more deceptive; length, combined with a new surface, and the yearly incremental speed gains by Cup teams have given the six-year-old complex the NASCAR equivalent of black ice.

"Think of the baddest, meanest roller coaster that you’ve never ridden in your life," said Ricky Rudd, who qualified third Friday at 193.016 mph. "With the lowest seating you can imagine -- no vertical load, all side load."

"We had to put extra padding in my seat," said Elliott Sadler, who qualified second Friday, of his recent Texas test. "We run 20 laps here and I felt like my head was going to fall off. I can run 500 laps at Bristol (a high-banked, half-miler) and it doesn’t bother me."

So how fast is too fast, in a racer’s mind? The eighth Cup driver to take the track Friday bested the qualifying record -- Steve Park at 192.342 mph. Ultimately, 12 drivers broke Terry Labonte’s March, 2000 mark. Bill Elliott’s pole-winning speed was 194.224 mph.

"It's very, very smooth," said Craven, who qualified 10th at 192.438 mph. "It's smooth as glass and the fact that the cars are stiff makes it very difficult to feel the race track, but the faster you go, the more you get down in the race track."

"The drivers can go as fast as they want," said Jerry Nadeau, who qualified 39th at 189.647 mph. "The cars, it’s whether they can make it or not. That’s the biggest deal. We don’t have a problem going fast, but our worries as a driver is, can the car handle it? That’s the only thing that we worry about."

"For us, what I’ve always considered too fast was, it’s not how fast you go, it’s how fast you stop," said Kyle Petty, who qualified 14th. "And we’re going so incredibly fast getting into the corners and in the center, if something happens you’re going to hit hard. And that’s where you say, okay, maybe we’re going too fast. Because you don’t have time to recover, you don’t have time to compensate for what the car does when the car steps out on you a little bit."

What happens can be disastrous. Two incidents marred Friday’s qualifying -- Robby Gordon and Frank Kimmel slamming backward into a wall during their runs. Neither driver was hurt, but both wrecks magnified the possibility.

"They are fun to drive around here," Rudd said of the Cup cars. "Don’t get me wrong because they stick and go in the right direction. But everybody has a flat tire every now and then, or gets in some oil."

And the other main gripe? The new surface means a one-groove race with very little passing. Drivers say with only one good grip line, flirting with 195 mph means more of a reluctance to freelance slingshot straightaways and deep corners.

"Everything’s in control," Kenseth said. "The track’s real smooth. It don’t feel bad running that fast out there. It’s just if something happens or if you get knocked out of the groove, or you blow a tire or something like that, then you’re running awfully fast."

"When we came out here and tested, we saw some problems with right front tires," Nadeau said. "These cars can only take so much. They weigh 3400 pounds and when you put that much force at 190 miles an hour in these turns, it tends to put a lot of heat in that right front tire, and we’ve seen a couple of them blow out here."

Yet, hovering near the 200-mph range doesn’t trouble Cup drivers like it did the CART contingent last May. CART canceled its Texas event after drivers complained of dizziness and vertigo after practic speeds over 230 mph, but Cup guys say the weight of their vehicles outweighs such G-force effects.

"You’re not getting any vertigo, your eyes aren’t blurred out," Nadeau said. "When I first came on the race track, you were breathing really heavy after a few laps because you weren’t used to it. But after a day of testing your body got really used to the speeds."

"The only thing is sometimes your nerves get going," Kenseth said. "And you may be hanging on to the steering wheel trying to brace yourself more or something because you’re running through that corner so fast. But at these big tracks you don’t have to turn the steering wheel a whole bunch and it’s not real physical on you, usually."

"The human mind is very good at changing that speed and putting it into perspective," Robby Gordon said, giving the example of speeding down an interstate at 85 mph, and slamming on the brakes at the sight of a state trooper.

"And it feels like you’re absolutely crawling," Gordon added. "But if you were just to go and drive 55, you wouldn’t realize that speed difference. So the brain slows everything down and it adjusts everything for you."

 

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