Beat the geeks

Engineers will become staples for Winston Cup teams

Purdue-educated Ryan Newman is quickly becoming the new face of Winston Cup's engineering drivers. Chris Stanford/Getty Images

By Denise N. Maloof, CNNSI.com

To some in the Winston Cup garage, the future of engineering in the sport already occupies the pit box and the driver's seat of Penske Racing South's No. 12 Ford.

Both rookie driver Ryan Newman and his rookie crew chief, Matt Borland, have degrees to support their engineering backgrounds -- Newman's from Purdue, Borland's from the former General Motors Institute, now Kettering University, in Michigan. Operating amid NASCAR's grass-roots culture and telemetry ban, they seem foreigners in a foreign land, buttressed by even more engineers from owner Roger Penske's automotive empire.

"A bunch of geeks," is Borland's good-natured, self-effacing characterization of the team.

But their results have been anything but a joke. Halfway through the 2002 season, Newman is 12th in the Cup points standings. He's logged eight top-five finishes, 11 top-10s. Has won NASCAR's non-points all-star race, The Winston, and continues to pressure fellow first-year star Jimmie Johnson in the rookie-of-the-year battle.

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And although they can discuss things in mathematical dialect, Borland and Newman haven't acted like sore thumbs, produced like them, or trumpeted any open-wheel leanings (Borland was a engineer for a CART team before joining Penske). They've simply gone about their business, accepted learning curves, and let nuts and bolts fall where they may.

"It helps in every way, I think," Newman says of his vehicle structural engineering degree. "It's created a common language for me and the crew because there's at least three other guys on our travel team that are engineers alongside of the engineers that we have in a group back in the shop. So we have that common language."

They also have perspective.

"There's a lot of basic things that both Ryan and Matt are learning from the base part of the business," says Penske. "And you can't go get that out of a textbook. You've got to get it from pure experience."

Originally hired as a shop engineer for Newman's teammate, Rusty Wallace, in November 1999, Borland found himself in charge of Newman's still-formative team in April 2000. The two negotiated last season's Cup-prep schedule of other series races before embarking on this season's rookie run, and Borland's transition including forgetting all the computer crutches he relied on in CART.

"During the race, you can be watching the gauges, you can write math channels that come [back] to you so that you know what the car's doing in the corners," he says of open-wheel engineering. "You can rely a lot more on that. I think the driver can focus a little more on driving and not having to worry as much about watching gauges and telling you what's going on because you can see most of it."

A number of Cup teams now employ race engineers -- "geeks" as Borland calls them -- who function as crew chiefs' aide-de-camps and data sources. Among them: Greg Erwin on Jimmy Spencer's team, Steve Boyer on Sterling Marlin's team, Roy McCauley on Ricky Craven's team, and Brian Whitesell on Jeff Gordon's team.

At least one other current crew chief also sports an engineering degree: Brandon Thomas, a former Joe Gibbs Racing employee who recently was hired by Petty Enterprises to oversee John Andretti's team.

But the Newman-Borland combination may be the most obvious barometer of whether engineers can succeed in NASCAR's principal roles.

"People in the garage area will be watching that," admits Boyer. "And if all of the sudden week in and week out those cars start winning, I think it'll come faster than folks think."

"I think what we'll ultimately see is NASCAR will be looking to the engineer, the Roy McCauleys," says Cal Wells, who owns Craven's team. "Over time, the next five years, you'll see a big transition. And I think the crew chief and the engineer will become symbiotic. One name will be synonymous with the other."

If so, it'll be worlds removed from NASCAR's longtime tradition of drivers working beside crew chiefs and other crew members to turn wrenches, build bodies and mandate changes.

Car owner Jack Roush cites a number of current veterans -- including his drivers Jeff Burton and Mark Martin, and others like Wallace -- as the last of that hands-on group. Less than a decade ago, such an experience bank was enough to hold engineering's influence in NASCAR at bay.

"All those guys had in their background first-hand knowledge of things they'd done themselves," says Roush. "And [they] were exposed to the senior guys that ran the shops, and that was both necessary and sufficient to have an adequate sense of what was right or wrong, good or bad, what should be done in adjusting the car."

"It's getting grayer, and it's melding together," says Terry Satchell, Roush Racing's head engineer, of the possible future duality of crew chief and engineer. "There are people supporting those crew chiefs -- other general managers that are doing a lot for them that they didn't have to do, and the engineers are helping them technically. So it's getting more spread out and grayer -- more specialization."

Don't expect the crew chief to vanish, however. Team owner Ray Evernham, a former crew chief who relies both on his own cadre of engineers -- "I don't know how many thousand more that I just pick up the phone at Dodge and say help." -- says crew chiefs will remain a vital part of the sport regardless of whether they're engineers.

"The crew chief's going to be more of a team manager, a leader guy," contends Evernham. "There's still gotta be a crew chief, head-coach guy. You've gotta have somebody that can put all that stuff together on Sunday and make it work."

 

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