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The new frontier Engineers bring high-tech to the sport of high-octanePosted: Monday July 29, 2002 3:26 PM
By Denise N. Maloof, CNNSI.com In most NASCAR race shops, you no longer just throw the toolbox at a problem. You also hurl the pi system, research data, and people who understand both subjects at the source of your bedevilment. Which means bowing to NASCAR's latest trend: Engineering. "We just call 'em atom smashers," points leader Sterling Marlin says of his Chip Ganassi Racing engineers. Indeed, the folks who spout physics terms are the sport's hottest hires. Long an open-wheel necessity, engineers are suddenly a stock car staple. Increased reliance on electronic data banks, computer simulation, and research and development has expanded many teams' payrolls and horizons. And while the on-track product remains faithful to its 1949 origins, it's all 21st century off the track. "It's like the Internet today," says Roger Penske, who owns the cars driven by Rusty Wallace and Ryan Newman. "If you're a modern person, you've got to look at technology as the driver. And the ones that grab onto to it are going to be the winners."
Exhibit A: The aerodynamic advances -- some say bane -- of the last few years are largely engineering-driven. With engines and chassis developed to their hilt, team engineers -- particularly the aerodynamicists -- have honed the surface of nearly every millimeter of sheet metal. The controversial byproduct is too much downforce, also known as the dreaded "aero push." "It's the newest frontier that the teams have been able to travel down," Winston Cup director John Darby says of aerodynamics. "The undesirable side of that is that some of the gains they're making, are things that we don't know if they truly enhance our sport or not. And sometimes the answer to that is a pretty obvious, no, it doesn't." When engineers strike non-controversial gold, results can be just as provocative. Marlin and crew chief Lee McCall credit their "atom-smashers," particularly race engineer Steve Boyer, with some informational nuggets that allowed them to make winning changes to Marlin's car at Las Vegas. Ricky Craven's race engineer, Roy McCauley, has mined data tidbits that helped Craven grab a pole at Michigan last summer, and at Rockingham this spring. "It's the technical side of the business where you can actually merge fact and fiction," says Craven. And it's quickly becoming indispensable. Owner Richard Childress, who's in the process of installing his engineers in a building all their own, recalled a conversation hours before Kevin Harvick's victory at Chicago. "David Holden runs our engineering group," notes Childress. "And I was talking to him about some things we've gotta go back and work on before we even won the race." "We've got to understand the vehicle dynamics, the aerodynamics, and certainly the engine technology," says Penske, also a longtime open-wheel owner. "And what that does, you're able to go out and get many young people interested. I get many resumes from all types of people. They don't want to work at Detroit Diesel. They want to work on a NASCAR team."
Taking time to 'turn over the stones'Why have engineers become so essential? Well, someone has to write complicated math equations and computer codes, interpret research data, run simulation and telemetry test systems, and communicate it all to driver, crew chief, shop and track personnel. Non-degree engineers still thrive in NASCAR -- they have associate's degrees, or have absorbed their knowledge from experience -- but increasingly, it's the guys toting diplomas who are staffing departments and counseling crew chiefs. "We try to turn over the stones that they just don't have time to get to," says Rex Stump of Hendrick Motorsports, where no engineer has a title, but each has a specialty. According to Stump, each of Rick Hendrick's four teams has two engineers at its disposal (Brian Whitesell, Jeff Gordon's team manager, may be the best known). Approximately five engineers work in the chassis department, and five more in the engine department. When Stump, a chassis specialist, arrived at Hendrick in January 1996, he worked mostly on R&D projects. Now, he's a nerve center; chairs a crew chief roundtable each week to discuss upcoming setups. At the track, he troubleshoots. "Everybody's in search of where's that next little section of knowledge that we can get an advantage," offers Stump. "And you just sprinkle money on it." Competition leads to some amazing stuff. Boyer and Greg Erwin, Jimmy Spencer's race engineers, document every shred of data and its use during a weekend. Back at the shop, they download it from a mainframe on the team haulers directly onto the shop's computer mainframe, making it available to anyone at the track or the shop. "By now I guess we have a year and a half's worth of documentation, and that's kind of been helpful to go back on," says Boyer Erwin. "Traditionally, the only documentation anybody ever has is the notes that the crew chief carries in his notebook with him."
Another Hendrick engineer, Jim Wall, has designed a hand-held version of the computer screens you see atop Cup haulers -- the ones that chart lap times and speeds -- so Hendrick can monitor the same information at-a-glance away from his haulers. "He has done so many things, it's been unbelievable," Hendrick says of Wall, his longest-tenured engineer along with Stump. "Very smart. I marvel at those guys, how smart they are and what they can do." What engineers can do, however, is limited by NASCAR's ban on telemetry. Test sessions and wind tunnel visits are the only occasions where cars can be computer-outfitted, and it's just the opposite in open-wheel racing, In CART, Formula One and the IRL, engineers run the show. Cars are tricked out with every permissible electronic gadget, and race setups are dictated by engineers who decipher the data. In NASCAR, it's crew chiefs who make the very uncomputerized calls. That's been a big adjustment for Robby Gordon, a former CART regular who has had to wean himself from going straight from the cockpit to the computer. "They can pull the whole thing up on a laptop, exactly what the steering wheel did in the middle of the corner," Gordon says of open-wheel engineers. "You can see where I did this when I tried to save it, and all those types of things. And you can't do that here [NASCAR] because it all has to be seat-of-the-pants. So the biggest thing for me has been working with a crew chief, finding out the set-up, 'OK, yeah, that's what's the car is doing.'" But even if NASCAR engineers aren't calling the shots, they're affecting the way those shots are called on some teams. Many Cup organizations now have a race engineer assigned to their teams, a guy who sits next to the crew chief on the pit box and feeds him real-time calculations on tire wear and fuel loads. The chief is still the authority, but now he has someone to share strategy and decision-making roles. "They're battlefield commanders, that's what you need," Hendrick says of crew chiefs. "And then you got the engineers to sit back and analyze. You don't have time to analyze when you're on that box. You got to make that gut call." Most multi-car organizations also have engineers at the helm of their engine, chassis and R&D departments -- expertise available to all teams. At Joe Gibbs Racing, that's been a staple for several years now, according to Jimmy Makar, Bobby Labonte's crew chief. A race engineer floats between Labonte's and Tony Stewart's teams at the track, but for overwhelmed crew chiefs, having someone who can do research is a boon. "With engineers in the shop now, a lot of the guys will just spend 30 minutes in the engineers' office and say, 'What about this?'" says Makar. "And sometimes the idea flies and sometimes it doesn't. But it's neat to have people there that can take those ideas and run with them, and see if they will work or not." Owner Jack Roush says engineering saves time and waste. "In the past, sometimes you'd cut the body off a car over and over to get that magic feel a driver wanted, to no avail," says Roush. "Now, you can do it through simulation and R&D. You can only do it one time -- if you're right." Engineering's impact also means research and development is no longer a luxury. And neither are status quo job descriptions. Owner Ray Evernham's recent re-organization of Jeremy Mayfield's team was prompted by just such a feeling of necessity. As the person responsible for Dodge's NASCAR R&D, Evernham felt he couldn't afford to allow Sammy Johns, whom he'd originally hired to oversee the R&D program, to continue as Mayfield's stopgap crew chief, a pairing that apparently didn't work. Mayfield was floundering in the points race, which made the decision easier, but Evernham was also eager to investigate a new team hierarchy, one that has former car chief Dave Skog in the team manager role, Mike Kelley as chief mechanic, and group of people -- including Evernham, Dr. Eric Warren and Josh Brown -- helping team engineers Derek Jones and Kenny Francis. "Two things made it happen," says Evernham. "We were getting behind with our testing and developing, and Jeremy and Sammy really weren't clicking. And I didn't bring Sammy in to be crew chief, and I had been wanting to try this new system. This is what I see the teams being 10 years from now." The other reason engineers have become a necessity? People now get excited about a .10 second gain in speed. "What we're doing is very, very subtle differences, because the level of competition is so high," says Terry Satchell, head engineer for Roush Racing. "And engineers have a process for learning," adds Evernham. "They're taught that when they go to school, to solve problems. And all we do, really, to make cars go around in circles, is solve problems."
Engineering inroads within NASCARSo if engineering is such a panacea, why is it a relatively recent NASCAR phenomenon? Part of the answer is technology. As our lives and society have become more electronic-dependant, so has a very mechanical sport. But only since the early 1990s. NASCAR's anti-telemetry stance, coupled with hard-to-staunch attitudes, limited engineering's inroads during previous decades. "Used to, we'd just go with nothing but a stopwatch," Marlin recalls of test sessions.
And while garage lore says the manufacturers have always made their engineers available to race teams, it wasn't until 1991 -- according to Roush -- when Penske acquired Wallace's team and began the cross-pollination of engineering from his open-wheel ventures, that other owners began to consider it. "I've been in the sport for 15 years and for the first 10 years it was by and large rejected," Roush said. "The impact of it wasn't great enough to offset the combined knowledge of the driver and crew chief, and they didn't want it." A former Ford employee, Roush contends he tried to introduce his organization to engineering when he entered NASCAR, but suffered "a host rejection." Hendrick, another of the first NASCAR owners to realize in-house advice was a better idea than continuously calling Detroit, also began to hire engineers. Roush's second attempt at establishing an engineering presence, on the heels of Hendrick's endeavor, finally took in the mid-1990s; today, approximately 20 Roush engineers are busy on some project. More recent crossover owners like Ganassi and Cal Wells have set precedents, too. From the start, both imbued their Cup efforts with engineering, treating it as standard. Hendrick maintains the concept only needed racetrack validation. "Somebody had one and they were successful -- everybody needed one," he says. "It's amazing that you can be running good, and you can put something on a car that's totally in left field and people will go do the same thing." "That's another reason that I think engineers have stepped up from being on the scene, to being used on the scene," Stump says of the current engineering climate. "Because they're going back and they're finding those little tenths and finding those little things for speed, so they've kind of commanded a little bit more respect or a little bit more attention than they may have in the past." "Times change," says Childress, whose first engineering hire, Bobby Hutchens, is now director of competition of Richard Childress Racing (and the namesake of the Hutchens safety device). "Today with the sport like it's changed, and the growth of it, we have to welcome it." And don't overlook Generations X,Y or Z. Modernization -- both in attitude and technology -- has greased the wheels of acceptance. For example, Newman, a Cup rookie, is a Purdue graduate -- and a full-fledged engineer. His crew chief, Matt Borland, also holds an engineering degree. Are they exceptions? Perhaps. But their age groups aren't. "Young drivers have grown up with computers and science," says Satchell. "And they're more knowledgeable just coming in from the beginning. So it's easier. They want to rely on the science. They'll accept it, where the old school guys might resist it a little bit."
"You can't walk in and blow smoke up somebody's pants and get anywhere," says McCauley, Craven's engineer. "You've got to have some ability and make it work, because the one thing this series does not do, it does not suffer fools."
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