| | By Larry McReynolds
Special to ESPN.com
Editor's note: Veteran crew chief Larry McReynolds will provide a weekly column on ESPN.com, taking you inside the garage for Mike Skinner and the Lowe's No. 31 Chevrolet team.
Introducing car No. 69 -- a brand new Lowe's No. 31 Chevrolet built just for Indy.
We tested this new car a couple of weeks ago, comparing it against a current car and also had it in the wind tunnel. If all goes well on Saturday, we plan to run it at Michigan and many other tracks over the course of the second half of the season.
Even without a new car, we're looking forward to the Brickyard 400. It's hard to believe that this will be the seventh race at Indianapolis. It just seems like yesterday that I was fortunate enough to be a part of the original Goodyear tire test at the Brickyard in 1992.
I have one of the neatest pictures at home of that two-day test session in June with Davey Allison and the 28 car. We were one of nine cars chosen to test the Goodyear tires at the speedway. That was, obviously, the only time Davey got to run Indianapolis.
I remember we had a run Michigan the day before, and went straight down to Indianapolis to do that Monday-Tuesday test. It was unfortunate that Davey got to run there, but never got to race there.
The Brickyard 400 is kinda like the Daytona 500 of the second half of the
season. It's one of the best paying races that we encounter. It's very
prestigious. Everybody, I think, wants to add winning at Indianapolis to
their credentials. I know it's certainly something I want to do.
I'm a big believer that race tracks don't owe anybody a thing, but there's a
part of me that feels like Indianapolis owes Larry something. At the
inaugural race in 1994 with Ernie (Irvan), we lead it, and lead it, and lead
it, and then had a tire come apart with about five laps to go, allowing Jeff Gordon to win the race. I don't think Jeff was going to beat us that day.
Jeff and Ernie had passed the lead back and forth between each other, but
Jeff was very loose with Ernie stuck up behind him. Ernie realized that, and
I do believe, at the end of the day, we were going to beat Jeff. But we didn't.
The 1996 Brickyard 400 is probably something I will never forget -- Dale
Jarrett and the 88 car winning the race, and Ernie in the 28 car
finishing second. They swapped the lead back and forth I don't know how many
times over the last 30 laps.
I remember looking at Robert (Yates) with about 10 to go, when it was pretty much down to those two unless a caution came out, and saying, "Is this not the greatest problem you could ever imagine having?"
DJ beat us, but that was a real team concept that day. Both of those cars
were prepared in the same shop by the same people. It's pretty neat to have
your two team cars run 1-2, but to have them do it at the Brickyard 400
is pretty phenomenal. It would be like doing it at the Daytona 500.
We've talked in the past couple of weeks about getting into this 12-week
stretch. Maybe not the toughest stretch, but certainly the longest stretch.
The word on the street is we better be getting used to these long stretches because next year -- if the schedule comes out like anticipated -- it's going to be about 22 in a row at one point. So, we need to get used racing week-in and week-out.
The 2000 season is almost gone. It's just hard to believe that it has zipped
by as it has. Obviously, aside from winning the first race with this Lowe's
team, this point situation is becoming a little bit of an issue.
We made some ground up at Pocono, but the 10 teams in the top 10 don't bobble very often so we're going to have to make sure we dot every "i" and cross every
"t" in these final 15 races, and particularly in this 12-week stretch.
I thoroughly enjoyed the off-weekend, a pretty unique off-weekend. We took a
five-day weekend, as it turned out. We went to the Bandalero Nationals at
Atlanta Motor Speedway. I was just thrilled to make the nationals in Brandon
's first try.
He finished 11th at the end of Saturday night, but getting there was quite a journey. We had probably one of the few Bandaleros in the three-year history of the car that has flipped, and Brandon flipped three times down the backstretch Thursday night. But, thanks to the help of a lot of people, especially our coach driver Tim Rubarts, we were able to get it back together and make the race, and have a lot of fun doing it.
We've got three more summer shootout races with Brandon in the Bandalero. It
's been really neat having Kobalt Tools as a sponsor. I know Brandon has big
plans about all the races we're going to run and everything we're going to
do but, I think, once we get through these last three races at Lowe's Motor
Speedway, we're going to stop and regroup for a few months before we go back
after Bandalero racing again.
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