| | 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.
I've been in NASCAR for 20 years and a crew chief for 15. Sunday was tough, but I've come a lot closer and not won than Sunday in Atlanta.
1988, Phoenix, Ariz., with Ricky Rudd. I think we were leading with 10 or 11 laps to go and lost an engine.
1988, Martinsville, Va., again with Rudd. Just two months before Phoenix, leading with less than 15 to go, and we lost an engine.
So, the Cracker Barrel 500 wasn't the first -- and I guarantee, if I do this much longer -- hopefully, it won't be the last. The reason I say hopefully is I hope we'll continue to be leading races near the end.
The one at Phoenix was close but it's been a long time since I've been a part of having a car as dominant we had at Atlanta. The last time remember having something quite that dominant was probably Ernie Irvan in the No. 28 car at the fall Charlotte race of '93. We led 328 of 334 laps. And it's a good feeling.
Since the car went to the wind tunnel right after the race, we didn't get the car back until Tuesday morning so we don't know what exactly happened to the engine. The engine guys were anxiously awaiting for us to get that motor to them. We had some guys here at 6 this morning to pull it out because they and everyone else wants to know what happened. And we want to make sure
there's not something going on that's sitting in our Darlington, Bristol and Fort Worth race motors, because they're already done.
The worst case is that they find a defective part, whether it's a wrist pin, a rod or whatever. It was in the bottom end and, if that's the case, they've got some serious work to do in a hurry. It was a major explosion in the bottom end and that's just something that doesn't happen.
Normally, the failures people have today is in the valve train. You just don't see many
people lose bottom ends anymore. I don't anticipate it was something we did
or Mike did because we didn't turn a lot of RPMs all day long by pulling a
real low gear. Mike (Skinner) seemed fairly conservative on leaving the pits and on
restarts and it didn't appear that he missed a shift, but until they get it
apart and analyze it, it's going to be hard to say.
The greatest problem in the world as a crew chief is trying to slow your
driver down. You don't do that very often. I was trying to do it for several
reasons.
I thought it was really important the first five or 10 laps of a run with the tires at low pressure to take care of them. That's when you damage a tire. The fans see tires blow out on guys 50 laps into a run, but they were damaged when they were at low pressure, probably on lap 1 to 5 of a run. So I thought it was important and just tried to save our equipment and our tires.
When you're driving away from somebody two- or three-tenths a lap, you want
to get as many cars lapped down as you can because the one that you don't
will be the very one that comes back to haunt you.
An example of that is when Bill Davis came to me one time during the race and said, "If we have a caution and you help us out, it will help you out somewhere in the future."
And I said, "Bill, I'd do anything in the world for you, but one thing I'm not gonna do today is make the wrong move to keep us from winning this race, and that includes letting the 22 get back on the lead lap." The 22 car was definitely a candidate to come back and bite us.
If we had won three, four or five races, maybe it would be a consideration. But something about Sunday, being on the brink of winning the first race with this race team, for Mike and for Lowe's, and for team 31, I just wasn't going to make no moves to help nobody. Not Dale Earnhardt and the 3 team, not any Chevrolet team, not any Ford. All we saw were 42 other blank cars and
that's how it was going to be.
I think that was the mindset of Mike. That might have bit us down the road if the 22 was leading and we was trying to get a lap back, but so be it. That's just the way it had to be. These deals will beat you to death. They'll beat you up and spit you out and forget about you.
I walked up on a really interesting conversation Saturday between Ray Evernham and Robbie Loomis. My joke to them was, "Ray, it looks like to me you picked a pretty good year to sit out." My comment to Robbie was, "Robbie, you picked a helluva year to swap."
Ray said it was funny I mentioned that. He said that as long as every day, whether it's qualifying day, practice day or race day, or at the end of the day at the shop, if you
walk out of that garage and you know in your heart, not what everybody else
thinks, but you know in your heart that you did everything you could do,
regardless of the results, what the rest of the world thinks doesn't matter.
I couldn't have said it any better because that's the way I feel. I'm not
going to worry about what other people think as long as I know I did my job.
I'm proud of this race team because of coming off three very weak races, particularly Las Vegas where we went there with all the confidence in the world and left doubting our engines, doubting our cars, doubting ourselves, doubting Mike, doubting everything going on. But that's what happens when you get in that deep of a hole. You have to look at every element that
exists.
We left Las Vegas doubting all those things on Sunday night but we bounced into Atlanta on Friday morning and unloaded a car that had been to no wind tunnel, no race track. It had only been chassis dynoed and set the second-fastest time that stood up the entire practice. Qualifying didn't quite go a we would have liked, but we knew in our heart we still had a good
package.
We treated Saturday morning like Happy Hour because we knew by virtue of watching the weather that it was Happy Hour. We were smart in our practice Saturday morning. We made three long runs with three different sets of fresh tires, making car changes between each set. So we had a lot of
information when that morning practice was over but we had a sneaky feeling it was going to be all the information we was going to get.
I think, even though the results were not good from the Busch race, Mike learned some things during it. And we learned about what the race track did going from practicing in weather that you only needed a short-sleeved shirt Saturday morning to weather on Sunday where you needed two coats. But I think Mike running that Busch race helped us understand that a little better. That allowed us to make a few more adjustments Sunday morning, not major adjustments but just tweaks based on what we thought the race track was going to be like.
We put the race engine in with no practice like a lot of teams had to do. We could have opted to treat the engine like Happy Hour and put it in for Saturday morning but I just knew we were going to run a lot of laps Saturday morning. We ended up running a hundred and something miles and just didn't want to stack that many miles up on our race motor. But we had all the confidence in the world that Mike Hawkins could tune that thing based on what he knew, where he'd been and what he'd learned. And he did a whale of a job tuning it because if tuning is the problem, it don't happen 470 miles into the race.
I can't say enough about Mike Skinner on Sunday. He was the most focused
than I believe maybe I've ever seen him in a race car. When you give him a
good piece to drive, maybe that helps. But like I told him, whether we have
good cars, bad cars, fair cars, or terrible cars in the future, if he gives
us that Mike Skinner every Sunday he gave us on Sunday, we might be
surprised how we can make terrible cars OK; OK cars good; and good cars
awesome. I think it will move the outcome one notch.
One of the big issues over the weekend was the changes in the Monte Carlo
and what it meant for us. Based on what we saw and some wind tunnel stuff
after Atlanta, it hasn't jumped us above these guys but I think it's put us
a lot closer. I still hold my ground that it's not the long-term fix for the
car because we still got to come up with something to reduce the drag on
this car with Talladega only a month away. Pulling the valance out hasn't
done that. It didn't hurt the drag but it didn't help it none. So we still
got work to do there.
The other big issue is Mike Skinner versus Dale Earnhardt. Is that going to
be an on-going deal?
Richard (Childress) has pretty much dumped it in their hands and I think that's what he needed to do. You can't make two grown men work with each other. Richard has told each of them to race each other, race each other hard, just don't wreck each other and don't help somebody else
win a race by pushing them past one of his cars. Then there would be
problems. And I think he's probably doing exactly what he needs to do right
there.
I don't expect Mike and Dale to battle each other but I'm not sure they'll ever help each other. I just think it's oil and water. But as long as they just don't battle each other, I think that's going to be the main thing because that's not healthy for RCR.
I could tell the 3 guys were very disappointed for the 31 guys and I think
there is no problem with the race teams. There's good harmony with the race
teams and I know we were awfully proud of the 3 car when we couldn't win.
But we can't dwell on Atlanta. We log everything about it because we have to go back there again in eight months. Darlington is this week and we're carrying that very same car to Darlington.
I've been asked a couple of times, even by some people on the race team, about saving that car for Texas. We ain't saving a car for nothing. Our next race is our most
important race. That's the one we gotta go after with guns ablazing.
We have already used our mulligans. We used them all up on the first three holes so we've got to start hitting some birdies if we want to get back in the points race.
We're 23rd but I still think we're less than 100 ponts out of 10th (Skinner has 385 points to 471 for Ken Schrader in 10th). We're a long way out of first, but we have to set reasonable goals here. We need to look at the top 15, then the top 10 and then see where we're at after another four or five races. Maybe then we'll have reeled in the top five but right now we need to
get into the top 15.
But we can't dwell on the points deal. If we go to Darlington and do what we're supposed to do, go to Bristol, Texas, Martinsville and Talladega, and do
our job well each week, all of a sudden we'll look up, see we're eighth in
points and now we're only 250 out of first.
So we just have to take that one-week-at-a-time approach, because it's way too early to get caught up in points. Everybody looks at points, and besides winning races, that's what this whole
deal is about. But we are what we are today: We're 23rd and we're not going
to wake up in the morning and be 22nd.
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