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Good times, bad times Can't count on recent luck when approaching Talladega
Posted: Wednesday April 12, 2000 07:16 PM
We’re feeling pretty good right now. Three straight top 10 finishes will usually put a smile on your face. With a little bit of better luck, that could easily have been six straight top 10 finishes and maybe even better. You try not to look back, but a lot of times it’s hard. When we look at what the rain cost us at Las Vegas, what a small part on the transmission cost us at Atlanta and what somebody else’s wreck at Darlington did to us, you can’t help but think "What if?" We could easily be sitting here in the thick of the championship battle and with at least one win and a couple of top fives under our belt. We were good at Martinsville last week, and we feel pretty confident about how we’re going to feel at Talladega this week. The first thing is to forget the good stuff for the last three weeks, forget the bad stuff for the three weeks before that, and focus on what’s coming up at the "World’s Fastest Speedway." You have to go into Talladega looking at it from two different angles. Friday is a day into itself. Saturday and Sunday are like two totally different days. The deal is, Friday can play a really big role in how you do on Sunday. Talladega is like two different races. Qualifying is the first race, and the race itself is the second one. Qualifying is a horsepower deal. You need a great engine, a really slick body and a driver who can point the thing where it needs to go. From our standpoint, though, qualifying is strictly a "Friday" thing. No matter what, we start working on race setup in Saturday morning’s practice. Once qualifying is over Friday, whether you’re on the pole or you’re 30th, you have to start looking at race setup and going to work on that. In fact, unless they’re inspecting us, we’ll probably start going from qualifying setup to race setup almost as soon as we can get it back to the garage after qualifying. We’ll change just about everything on the car but the paint. Pretty much every single chassis component in the car gets changed. We put a new engine in the car. Shoot, I’ll even have a different uniform. The second race starts about the time your qualifying run ends Friday. Everything is aerodynamics, from the front end of your car to the rear end of the car 20 cars behind you. It all comes down to that. You have to cut through the air there. The guys who can do that the best are the ones who are going to run up front. Even a little bit of sheet metal damage can hurt you a bunch at Talladega. You always want your car to look really good, no matter what track you’re at. You want that thing so shiny and smooth you can barely see that red Mobil 1 Pegasus on the quarterpanels if the sun hits it right. That’s more important at Talledega and Daytona than any place we run. Once you get some body damage there, you’re done. Holding onto the draft is the first step in the race, and you just can’t do it if you have any kind of body damage. Cutting through the air the best doesn’t always mean having the best aero package, even though that sure helps a lot. It means being able to line up with the right cars and draft with the right people. You have to make good choices, and you have to make good choices consistently. I work pretty closely with Marty Gaunt, Penske-Kranefuss Racing’s General Manager, who also serves as spotter the whole day, but it goes a lot further than just getting through wrecks and finding trouble. He is working to figure the fastest line all day long. You do a lot of two and three-wide racing at Talladega. It seems like there is always somebody beside you, and sometimes somebody on each side of you. Sometimes it seems like you’re in with a pack of wild dogs, everybody chasing the same thing. Half your time is spent trying to get to the front and half of your time is spent trying to hold on -- hold on to your car, your position and everything else. This is a track where the slightest dent can really hurt you but you can spend a whole lot of the day running three-wide, trying your best not to touch anybody else and hoping everybody else is doing their best not to touch you. Luck. Horsepower. Aerodynamics. Get all of those working for you and it can be a good day. That’s what we’re looking at continuing with this Mobil 1 Taurus team.
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