| | 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.
The first six races have been filled with good news, and bad news. We ran awfully good at Atlanta, but right now our top finish is the 13th that we had Sunday at Bristol. I'm a little bewildered. A little disappointed. A little aggravated by that.
Mike Skinner and I talked (Tuesday) morning and sometimes this happens when you're not running like you feel like you ought to -- you start trying to hard in
other areas. I'll be candid -- I made a pit call Sunday that I regret. I felt like we should have stayed out near the end when we were running seventh.
Like I told Mike, I'm making bad calls right now and that bothers me because
one thing I've prided myself on is making good calls.
Yeah, you'll always make bad calls because you can't stand on top of a pit box and have 30 seconds or less to make a decision and have them all be right or perfect. But, people have categorized me over the years as being a pretty good strategist, making the right calls and the right moves and even winning some races by doing that. And I think by virtue of us being not being where we want to be, I'm maybe grabbing at the air making some bad calls.
You respect everybody's opinion, that's why we're a team. I've always been a big believer that nobody knows more about what they think they need, or what that car's doing, or what they feel is best for them, than the man behind the wheel of that race car. But I'm also letting Mike have some persuasion on me to make calls that I know in my heart is not right. You've got to run your own ball game.
If you're at Darlington and you've run 20 laps and everybody pits and you
stay out, that's not a good call. That's wrong. At Bristol, Tenn., with 75
laps to go and you don't have a tremendous amount of laps on your tires, the
best place you can be is on the race track. If you gain one position, it's
two positions gained because you have that lapped aggravating traffic to
deal with. For every position you lose on the race track by pitting, you've
actually lost double that because of the double-file restarts.
Sunday, we lost four positions. But in the real world we lost eight. My driver panicked on me just a little bit because he saw the 1 car coming to pit road and I panicked with him. I said, "OK, pit." Once we were on pit road, it was like, do something here to make up for this. Let's go with just two (tires). I still don't
necessarily regret making that call. The call I regret is just pitting in
general. The two cars that were right behind us -- the 10 and 24 -- didn't pit. The 10 car finished second, while the 24 car finished seventh.
We can't go back and redo Bristol, but I told Mike I have got to get back on my
game. I respect his input, and want his input, but he's got to take what we give him and say I'm going to be just fine. He can't lose his confidence because of what he sees going on around him, especially at the Martinsvilles, Loudons, and Bristols -- where track position is so critical. I'm disappointed in myself over that call.
We've also got to quit beating ourselves on some stuff. If I just take the racing
aspect out of it, we're terrible on pit road right now. Mike's not doing a
good job getting in and out of the pits. Yeah, Bristol's hard and tough, but you know what, it's hard and tough for everybody.
It's easy to pit like we pitted at Atlanta, leading the race every time we came in to those big pit boxes. Most people can do a good job at that. It's when you've got to be on top of your game and do you best job when you're dealing with a situation like Bristol when the crowd is turned every which direction. You've got to be on top of your game and that's something Mike's got to work on and something we talked about Tuesday morning.
We just have to put the first six races behind us. The season's not totally lost by no means. The points gained in position don't reflect some of the ground we
made up on a lot of people last Sunday. We fell way back after Atlanta. That
was a big hit and, as I've said before, it takes one week to lose it and six
to make it back.
Even though the finishes and Darlington and Bristol were not good, they took a big chunk out of the people we lost so much ground to at Atlanta and Las Vegas, because I can't blame it all on Atlanta. Las Vegas was a hard hit.
We've got a pretty busy three weeks. Forth Worth, Martinsville and Talladega. Those three tracks are a pretty big variety before we finally get our first off week for Easter weekend. We're going to be in the wind tunnel this
Wednesday with a brand new speedway car and then its straight from Fort Worth to Talladega for testing next Tuesday and Wednesday.
We'll be testing the same car that we ran in the Daytona 500 and the newest and latest innovation that Jack Lewis and the guys here in the 31 shop has built over the last few weeks. They are trying to get the drag reduction down in the new Monte Carlo.
A few rule changes have come our way, but we were going to test at Talladega anyhow. Now that NASCAR has come up with a couple of rules changes, that gives us even more of a reason to be going. They're reducing the size of the
restrictor plate by 1/32nd of an inch. I know that don't sound like much, but
it's about 25 to 30 horsepower lost right off the top, so that's a big hit.
NASCAR has also opened up the front shocks back to the competitors. They're
still going to regulate the rear springs and rear shocks, and no rear bars, but we can pretty much run what we want to run as far as the front springs
and shocks. I think that's going to be more to help us tune the car to race
than it is a qualifying deal.
Texas has not been good to Mike Skinner and the 31 team. I don't know
that we have actually finished a race at Texas. So we go there with that
vendetta in our pocket, and at the same time, go there with a high confidence
level because of how we ran in Atlanta with this car. I know the engine guys
are just as excited about the power of the race motor. But they're
obviously on pins and needles hoping that this rod bolt problem (the engine
part that broke to end the team's day at Atlanta) doesn't crop up somewhere
else. They don't anticipate that it will.
We didn't qualify that well for last year's race in Texas (23rd) which, by
our standards, especially during the first part of last year, was not good.
We had made a couple of long runs on Saturday morning that was almost like
déjà vu from Atlanta three weeks ago. We knew rain was in the forecast for
Saturday afternoon so we treated Saturday morning like Happy Hour. And sure
enough, we did not get a Happy Hour in Texas.
We knew we were awfully good Saturday morning, so we were almost happy they didn't have Happy Hour. When they dropped the green flag, we were on a steady march to the front and were running in the top five when the tire created a problem.
We went to Fort Worth and helped Goodyear to the tire test back in late
November. I think they did that purposely. It's like, why come here and test
with somebody who hasn't had a tire problem? Using a person or team that's
had a problem will give them more of a benchmark and they cured it. It's the
same type of tire that we ran in Atlanta so there's a little bit more
confidence to put in our corner. We left the tire test feeling pretty good
that maybe they have a handle on what that race track's looking for as far
as construction of the tire.
Texas and Atlanta have a lot of similar characteristics so that gives us
definitely a vote of confidence going to Texas with the car we ran so well
with at Atlanta three weeks ago.
Mike has kinda been deemed a short-track racer, but the more I work with him and the further we go, it just appears that the Texas/Charlotte/Atlanta type of race tracks are more his forte. You drive one off in the corner just as far as your heart can stand it, let off the throttle and let it roll, then dive back in as hard as you can is definitely his style of driving and I think that more suits those types of
race tracks.
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McReynolds: Darn that Darlington
McReynolds Diary: I've been close before and lost
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