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Uncharted territory New rules at Talladega should make for better race
Sometimes it’s hard to figure which is tougher to take -- falling out early or coming so close to winning, like we did Sunday at Charlotte. OK, honestly? I’ll take second place any day of the week over falling out of a race early but, man! It was disappointing too to get so close to winning a race and not winning it. Bobby Labonte and those guys did a great job. They had a great car and obviously deserved to win it. But we felt we did too. We worked all day to get the car better and better, but we had started off with a pretty good car to begin with. (Crew chief) Peter Sospenzo and the guys did a great job, and gave me a great car. We’re getting closer and closer to doing some great things -- great things on a very consistent basis -- and it’s going to start anytime now. Maybe this time next year, people will point back to the second-place finish at Charlotte as our watershed race. We’re definitely headed in the right direction. It’s a different kind of situation for us over the next couple of weeks. I think it’s pretty cool that we’re running a World Series car and that we’re associated with Major League Baseball. I guess there are some teams that run different paint schemes a lot but we’ve been pretty conservative with them, and I think that’s good. This will just be the third time we’ve run one, and everything has been in conjunction with a real first-class deal. We ran the Kentucky Derby car last year, spent some time at Churchill Downs and it was first class all the way. At the end of the year, we ran a Mobil 1 125th anniversary car. It’s tough to find anything more first-class than Mobil 1 and the people at ExxonMobil. Now we’re running a World Series car. How do you top something like that? I’m pretty excited about it. We have some players who are going to play a part in this deal, some pretty big names. I’m going to be at a World Series game, guest of the Commissioner. Pretty big deal from that standpoint. Right now, I’m not sure who to pull for. Growing up in Owensboro, I kept an eye on the (Cincinnati) Reds but they didn’t make it this year. It will be a lot of fun, regardless of who it ends up being. What we’d really like to do is give the guys in the World Series something to watch too. A strong run at Talladega would certainly do that. We’re going into it looking to qualify really well again, work the draft well and win the race. 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 (pole) 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. The new rules are going to be something we have to watch closely and pay a lot of attention to. We’ve been working on our cars, trying to figure what we can expect once we get the cars cranked at Talladega. I personally think it’s going to be a better deal all the way around. Anything that gives us more throttle response and allows us to open the engines up more is going to be good. Keep in mind that with these cars 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 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. Jeremy Mayfield, a four-time winner in the Winston Cup Series, is in his third season driving the Mobil 1 Ford Taurus for Penske-Kranefuss. His diary appears weekly on CNNSI.com.
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