Start your engines!
Play RPM.ESPN Stock Car Challenge!
Win a Honda S2000!
Play The CART Challenge powered by Honda!
|
|
Tuesday, March 27
Bristol is tight and frustrating
By Royce McGee
Special to ESPN.com
One of the most grueling races of the season is behind us. It's funny how one of the toughest tracks can also be the favorite of most of the guys on the Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse team, including Mike Skinner. Bristol dealt us several different situations Sunday and we learned from all of them.
Passing was very difficult Sunday but not impossible. It was hard to pass on the outside line but nearly impossible to pass on the inside. Mike and a few other drivers were able to pass a few cars on the outside line.
|  | | Mike Skinner and the Lowe's Chevrolet didn't test at Texas this year, but they're still expecting to run well. |
A few people have said that Bristol was a one-groove track Sunday, but I wouldn't say that. Actually, it looked that way because the tires that Goodyear provided us were good and they stayed under the car a lot longer than the tires we'd had there in the past.
Tires used to be a big issue at Bristol. In the past, you had to come down pit road for new tires every time the caution flag came out because the tires' grip went away and they wore out. This time, the new tire stayed under the car a lot more and didn't wear out.
The race cars were more equal to each other because the tires didn't fall off as badly. That's why passing was more limited -- a lot of the cars could run neck-in-neck all day long and the tires didn't upset their car's handling.
In past years, if a race car was a little loose, it would become very loose when the tire wore out. But Sunday, if the car was a little loose, it remained that way for the length of that run. The drivers could slowly creep through the field like Mike and the Lowe's Chevy did.
Obviously, there were some cars that started behind us that finished better than we did. I think that was due to the fact that if you were involved in an accident, you had to come in and pull the sheet metal away from the tires, which made the pit stop longer. Other cars bumped and banged into the Lowe's Chevy several times during the race and we had to tug on the sheet metal a few times.
Lapped traffic is so prevalent at Bristol that it's often difficult to see how good a car really is because it's stuck behind slower traffic. But when all the cars lined up on the restarts and the lapped cars drove to the inside, it was easy to see if a car was fast or not.
During on one restart, Mike drove to the inside lane because we were a lap down and were fighting to get it back. When NASCAR gave the restart, the Lowe's Chevy was essentially the third car in line on the track and quickly moved into the second spot. The Lowe's Chevy was as good, if not better, than any of the other cars -- that was evident because all the traffic was not in front of us slowing us down. At that time, Mike could drive the Lowe's Chevrolet the way he wanted to and run the line he wanted to run, and the car was really fast.
Our car's strength paid off and we were able to get our lap back. We probably would've finished better if we'd gotten our lap back earlier because we would've been able to race the lead lap cars earlier. The No. 31 Chevrolet was pretty good Sunday and was just as fast as the other cars on the track. We just got a lap down that took us a while to get back.
One of the reasons we went down that lap was because of the bad situation we had in the pits. Pitting on the backstretch at Bristol is a big enough disadvantage in itself, but the team that pitted in front of us on pit road made it even worse for us.
The driver wedged the Lowe's Chevy in our pit stall several times because he had the rear of his car in our stall. The pit stalls are 29-feet long and the team pitting in front of us decided to use four feet of our box as their own when he came into the pits. He did that more than once and wedged the Lowe's Chevy in every time -- forcing Skinner to throw the car in reverse and slowly squeeze back onto pit road after our pit stop.
There's a fine line between giving the competitors room to do their jobs and not making it difficult to get into your own pit box. You've got to be careful. Yeah, that other car did cost us some spots on the race track several times. The pit boxes are pretty small. It's just Bristol -- it's tight and frustrating.
Some guys get pretty aggressive and drive through other teams' pit boxes, which they're not supposed to do. That other car was being too aggressive getting in and out of his box -- he even ran into one of our tire carriers midway through the race, knocking him and his tire to the ground.
If we'd had 100 laps more, I'm not sure what I could have done to make the car better during the race. If we'd had another practice, we could've made the car better. We ran some shocks that we thought were pretty good, but throughout the race, we saw they were a disadvantage. Even though we ran 80 laps on the same set of tires in practice, the "bounciness" of the shocks didn't seem to show up like it did in race traffic.
I don't think there was much more that we could've done to help the Lowe's Chevy during the race, but we've got good notes for when we go back in the fall. We're implementing those ideas now and we'll run some different shocks next time and see where that puts us.
We're headed to Texas this week and tires are again a hot topic. Tires have always been a big deal at Texas because we've seen a bunch of blown right-front tires there in the past. It's happened to Mike twice. The right-front tire on the Lowe's Chevy went down in the 1998 and '99 races and sent Mike crashing into the wall. He broke his shoulder both times.
|
“ |
With Mike having some laps on the track, it can only help both the Lowe's team and the Rockwell team. Hopefully, Mike can put two Richard Childress Racing teams in Victory Lane this weekend.” |
|
|
—McGee |
We didn't test the Lowe's Chevy at Texas this year, but I talked to two guys who did. They said the tires were comparable to the one we had at Atlanta. We felt like we had a good run at Atlanta and we'll take some of that information and put it toward our Texas set-up. We've shown the capability of running well at Texas but have had a few altercations with tire failure. We couldn't pinpoint what happened those two years, but Goodyear said they had some problems to work out. Goodyear has been working hard on improving their tires this year and a lot of drivers have complimented the tires. I think the new tire suits Mike a little better because it's got a little freer set-up and we can run the car a little freer without relying on major air pressure adjustments to make the car turn.
The Lowe's team has qualified well at Texas. Last year, we ran in the top-10 for a long time but got a little tight in the end and finished 12th. We can use some of the information we gathered in last fall's race at Lowe's Motor Speedway because Goodyear began conceiving this tire there. Mike does well at Texas. His talent combined with the new tire should help the Lowe's team tremendously. I think we'll do well this weekend.
Mike has a little more than the Lowe's Chevy on his mind this weekend. He will be filling in for our teammate Mike Dillon in the No. 21 Rockwell Automation Chevrolet in Saturday's Busch race at Texas. Dillon is still recovering from an accident he suffered last Saturday at Bristol.
That extra seat time is going to be great for Mike and this Lowe's team. We see that with Kevin Harvick every week. He drives that Busch car for a few hours or a day before he gets in the Goodwrench car, so he's already got a feel for what he wants. He knows how the tires are going to respond, if they're going to be tight or loose, and what air pressures to run. That kind of information carries over pretty well from the Busch cars to the Winston Cup cars. We'll get that jumpstart on setting up our car after seeing how the Busch practice goes. Gil Martin is the crew chief of the No. 21 Rockwell Chevy and he's a smart guy with a good race team. Hopefully, I can sit with him a bit and get a good feel for the situation on the track and take some information back to the Lowe's team.
With Mike having some laps on the track, it can only help both the Lowe's team and the Rockwell team. Hopefully, Mike can put two Richard Childress Racing teams in Victory Lane this weekend.
Royce McGee is the crew chief for Mike Skinner and the No. 31 Lowe's Chevrolet on the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. He will be providing a weekly diary to ESPN.com throughout the season. Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
|
|
|
|
