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Hot Daytona nights Final practice will be crucial at Daytona this weekend
Posted: Monday June 26, 2000 10:37 AM
The race at Sonoma wasn’t our best of the year but it does show how far we’ve come over the past few years. I don’t claim to be a great road course racer -- even though it’s something the whole Mobil 1 team is working on -- but we were able to jump from 37th to into the top 20 before we had some problems that saw us drop back. Not a great finish, but not a bad run for us. At least, not a bad road course run. That’s an area we have to keep working on. We’re glad to be getting off the road courses and heading to the ovals again, though. Daytona is a good place for this Mobil 1 team. Daytona is a great place to start each season, but it’s a great place to start the second half of each year too. There is just something about the place. For a stock car racer, it’s kind of where you go to ‘renew’ yourself. That’s kind of the way we’re looking at Daytona. This race starts a brand-new season for us. Whatever happened in the first half of the year is behind us now. The good stuff, the bad stuff. . . we’re forgetting all of that and moving ahead. Our goal is to win the second half of the season. We’d like to be at a point come Atlanta (in November) where we point back to this race and can say, “Hey, the last half of the season, we had more points and more wins than anybody else.” We’re capable of that. This team has come a long way this year. We’ve been able to win a pole, to win a race and we think we can make a run for the ‘second half championship.’ The tracks where we’ve run well in the past, we ran even better this year. The types of tracks where we had some work to do, we ran better this year. We’re going to carry that improvement on into the second half of the year and really show people what we’re made of. Daytona has been a good track for me and for this race team over the years. We’ve been able to run pretty well in the 500 and in the July race too. Being able to run well in both says something about a race team because the races are just totally different. It goes further than just the distance. From a driving standpoint, there really isn’t that much difference in 400 miles and 500 miles. It’s not something you feel or something you think, ‘Man, that extra 100 miles is tough.’ If anything, it’s the fact that you have less time to get things done. If you’re leading the race, 400 miles is plenty. If you’re trying to run somebody down for a position, 400 miles isn’t nearly enough and, sometimes, neither is 500 miles. The sunlight factor is probably the biggest difference. Temperature-wise, there isn’t a whole lot of difference usually between the two races. It’s warm but usually not too hot in February. In July, the temperature is usually the same since we’re running at night. The humidity gets a little tougher on you in July, which can affect your engine a good bit. But the lack of sunshine on the race track helps keep the track more consistent, which can help your car some. For the most part, the differences end up being a wash. You have to use your practice time wisely. I’d say that’s the biggest deal with the night race. The Thursday and Friday practices are set up in the afternoons, when the sun is out and the temperatures are really hot. You have to be able to take the information from those two practice sessions and translate them into something you can use on the car. You have to make some educated guesses on what the car is going to do when the sun is gone and what the track is going to do. The Friday night practice is probably going to be the most crucial of the week. Happy Hour is usually the most important practice but it is really going to important this week. That Friday night practice is when you’ll end up making almost all of your decisions regarding setup for Saturday night. You make some decisions before you get there, and one or two as the weekend moves along, but that final practice is where everything gets done. Want to know who’s going to run up front Saturday? Then take a hard look at what happens Friday night. We think we’re going to have a pretty good Friday night and a really good Saturday night at Daytona. This is the first race of the rest of the season, and this Mobil 1 Taurus bunch is ready for it. Jeremy Mayfield is in his third season driving the Penske-Kranefess Mobil 1 Taurus on the Winston Cup circuit. His diary appears weekly on CNNSI.com.
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