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Tuesday, May 22  Team aims to make sponsor proud By Royce McGee Special to ESPN.com The NASCAR Winston Cup Series teams are in the middle of some of the most prestigious and exciting racing of the season right now. We had The Winston Open and The Winston at Lowe's Motor Speedway last weekend and we're returning to the track for this weekend's Coca-Cola 600. Mike Skinner and the No. 31 Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse team visited Victory Lane here in qualifying for The Winston Open in 1999 and we are eager to get back there this week. I think the Lowe's team had a pretty good car for last weekend's Winston Open. It's hard to start 12th in a 30-lap race and gain enough positions to be in a place to advance to The Winston. The better you qualify; the better off you'll be once the race starts. I would have loved to qualify 30 minutes later than we did, but we drew a really early qualifying number. The cars that went out after the Lowe's Chevy ran progressively faster than we did, but that's the way Lowe's Motor Speedway has always been and it was nothing unexpected. The same will be true when we go back for the Coca-Cola 600 this week. The teams that draw later have a better chance of running faster. The track changes a bit, especially when the skies cloud up or when the sun starts setting. When we used to qualify during the day at Charlotte, we could pick up two- or three-tenths of a second on our lap time if a cloud passed over the sun and shaded the track for a moment. We were pretty confident about the Lowe's Chevy heading into the qualifying session. We thought our car was strong, but we also knew we'd have to contend with an early qualifying draw. When Mike took the Lowe's Chevy on the track for his qualifying run, a little after seven o'clock, the sun had not yet started setting and was still shining on parts of the track. At that time of day, Turns 1 and 2 are shaded, while Turns 3 and 4 still have the sun beating down on them. The track is in transition. The frontstretch turns are shaded while the backstretch turns are still sunny. There is a lot of grip in Turns 1 and 2 but when the driver gets down in Turns 3 and 4, the track has very little grip. They can drive into 1 and 2 and stuff the car in there and it will grip the track and hold. But when they get to Turn 3, they've got to back out of the throttle a little early and get turned down in the center of the corner and get back in the gas. If they overdrive their car in that corner, it will shove the nose and push the car up the track -- and a lot of time is lot on the lap. I was pretty pleased with the car we took to The Winston Open. It's the same car we ran last month at Fontana, Calif., but we cut the entire body off of it and re-configured the car after that race. We changed the body style and got pretty aggressive on the body configuration. Our changes still met all the NASCAR rules and requirements but it is possible to move things a half-inch here and there to make a big difference. The Lowe's team has learned that during wind tunnel testing the past few weeks. That re-configuration made the Lowe's Chevy much better but it took a different set-up to make the car work. Mike lost a lot of track position in the 16-lap sprint when he and another car got side-by-side. These Winston Cup cars are so aero-dependent that when two cars are side-by-side, it creates a bigger hole in the air, just like at a superspeedway. The Lowe's Chevy lost a little bit of air and got loose. If the other car hadn't been there, Mike would have probably been OK. But he made a miraculous save with the Lowe's Chevy. We were sure the car was going into the wall and we were going to have to build another car but Mike kept it out of the fence. The Lowe's Chevy was in the fourth position at the time and was heading for the front. Considering the fact we had a new body on the car and didn't have much practice with it, I think we had a pretty decent night. It wasn't nearly what we wanted for our sponsor, especially at their home track. But I think we learned some things we can take back to the Coca-Cola 600 and make some gains with. We like to look at The Winston Open as a great practice for the Coca-Cola 600. Although our final practice was cancelled, we still learned quite a few things in The Winston Open that we can apply to this week's event at Lowe's Motor Speedway. I definitely think we have a head start on Thursday's qualifying because it's in direct relation to last week's qualifying. We can transfer some of the information we learned in the Open such as the track conditions, aerodynamics of the Lowe's Chevy, and shocks and springs. We had the chance to change the springs on the Lowe's Chevy and we have a pretty good handle on what springs we'll run in the Coca-Cola 600. The Winston Open gave us a short run to make some valuable discoveries. Even if the temperature is a little different on Thursday, we can still correlate some of that information. The Coca-Cola 600 is the longest race of the season and one of the most stressful for the teams. This race used to be one of the ones that got the entire engine department panicked a few years ago. We had to take gear out because the motors wouldn't last that extra 100 miles. In the 500-mile range, the engines would be fine. Once we hit 550 miles, some of the teams would have trouble, although the better-funded ones would still be OK. But in those last 50 miles, all the gremlins would appear and shake up the apple cart. Rocker arms that had been run hard in previous races would get beat up in the 600. The valves also took a beating. You'd hear drivers radioing their crew about all the moans, groans and creaks they heard coming from the engines and they'd ask their engine tuners if the motors were going to blow up before they crossed the finish line. The threat of engine or parts failure was pretty high in the Coca-Cola 600 a few years ago and I'm not so sure that we haven't gotten back to that stage. When you look at all the horsepower the teams strive for nowadays, we're pushing the pieces to their limits in search of more horsepower. As a result, I think we may see more engine failures in the next couple of years because all the teams are leaning on their equipment so hard in an attempt to make enough horsepower to keep up with the competition. As far as durability of the engines and their parts are concerned, Winston Cup engine builders have gone 180 degrees from where they were 10 years ago when the parts weren't good enough to always last an entire race. Now the equipment is so good and reliable that we take advantage of it, max it out and end up beating it up so bad that it won't last. Take last month's race at Fontana for instance. California Speedway is pretty tough on motors and some teams' engines didn't even make the 500 miles. If you can't make 500 miles, how can you make 600? The Lowe's team has to have faith in our engine department and trust that they've done their job properly. It's up to us who build and set up the cars to make the Lowe's Chevy run the best we can. But we're focusing our efforts on more than engines this weekend. We want to make an all-around great showing this weekend at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Royce McGee is the crew chief for Mike Skinner and the No. 31 Lowe's Chevrolet on the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. He is providing a weekly diary to ESPN.com throughout the season.  Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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