Pit vipers

Las Vegas' own Brendan Gaughan leads new crop of NASCAR teams

By Newt Briggs

Stock car racing got started...right after the war, and it was immediately regarded as some kind of manifestation of the animal irresponsibility of the lower orders. It had a truly terrible reputation. It was--well, it looked rowdy or something. The cars were likely to be used cars, the tracks were dirt, the stands were rickety wood, the drivers were country boys, and they had regular feuds out there, putting each other "up against the wall" and "cutting tires" and everything else.

--Tom Wolfe, "The Last American Hero"

Once upon a time, stock car racing was a simple sport--an elemental battle of man and machine, guts and glory. Back then, no one worried about vehicle dynamics, research data or the pi system; the sport was so primitive that the only way to give a car a chassis adjustment during a race was to jam a block of wood in its springs, thereby changing the car's weight distribution. And in the pits, tire changers clenched lug nuts in their teeth, and gas men literally dumped buckets of gasoline into cars through wide-mouthed funnels.

But that was back in the day when rubbing really was racing and the only restrictor plates were the walls surrounding the racetracks. As stock car legend Dale Earnhardt once summarized, "You win some, lose some and wreck some," and for a while, it was just that easy. In fact, there are still those who believe that winning stock car races is as simple as what some salty veterans call "pure racin'."

Welcome to the speedway of the real.

Although NASCAR's on-track racing has remained consistent with its post-World War II origins, the demands on contemporary NASCAR crews have increased exponentially. Nowadays, fabricators spend as much time in the wind tunnel as they do pounding on sheet metal, many mechanics have backgrounds in engineering and crew chiefs rattle off physics calculations like they're old hat. And everyone talks aerodynamics, downforce and telemetry as if they were as essential as nuts and bolts.

This is the new NASCAR--the collision of high-tech and high-octane. With Fortune 500 companies pouring money into the sport (primary sponsorships can cost more than $20 million per year) and television audiences watching in unprecedented numbers (during the 2002-03 season, NASCAR's average Neilsen rating was superior to that of the NCAA Tournament, the NBA playoffs, PGA Golf and the Stanley Cup Finals), NASCAR has evolved into one of America's most state-of-the-art sports leagues.

According to Shane Wilson--crew chief for Brendan Gaughan, driver of the No. 77 Kodak Dodge and the son of Las Vegas casino mogul Michael Gaughan--one consequence of this technological windfall is that races can be decided before tires even hit the track.

"Take this year's Rockingham race, for instance," says Wilson. "Matt Kenseth won and Brendan finished 20th, but Tony Stewart--who was the Winston Cup champion the year before--finished around 27th. There was obviously something wrong with his car. He just didn't have a good setup that day."

While some old-school crews continue to rely solely on the tried-and-true method of tweaking and testing, Wilson says modern crews increasingly depend on simulations and computer modeling to prepare their cars for race day. Still, the primary challenge is putting together a race car that's fast enough to win, but not so fast that it unexpectedly takes flight.

"Basically, stock cars are over-horsepowered and under-tired," Wilson explains. "Indy cars, on the other hand, have maybe a hundred or two more horsepower, but they have 15-inch tires and wings that give them 10 times the downforce. In other words, it's a lot easier to keep them stuck to the ground."

All of which means that Wilson and his crew have to do whatever they can to squeeze every ounce of working power out of Gaughan's car. In a sport in which finishes can be decided by a tenth of a second, pit crews have to analyze, check and recheck everything--engine, transmission, shocks, pins, springs, brakes, cables, track bar, sway bars, tires, tire camber, tire pressure and even the actual shape of the car's body.

"I've spent thousands and thousands of hours in wind tunnels learning the intricacies of the Dodge bodies," says Ken Simonson--a fabricator/mechanic who worked with Gaughan in Las Vegas and then reunited with him on the Kodak team. "You have to go over every part and analyze different shapes of everything to try and determine where you can negate the drag and make the car quicker."

But nowhere is time more of a factor than in the pits on race day. At its very best, a good pit crew can change four 75-pound tires and fill the car with 22 gallons of 110-octane fuel in just under 14 seconds. To expedite this process, air guns are powered by nitrogen, lug nuts are glued to the rims of the wheels and the first inch of the studs are threadless so the tires slide onto the car easily. As long as the crew can avoid penalties, Wilson says, good tires and efficient changes can help teams pick up positions--especially in the newly revamped Nextel Cup.

"This year, NASCAR has taken away more downforce and softened up the tires so that they wear out a lot quicker," says Wilson, who estimates that Gaughan goes through nine or 10 $1,300 sets of tires during an average race. "It puts a lot of pressure on the crew, but it makes for better racing and helps string the field out, because if you go too hard at the beginning, you'll have less tire at the end."

This also makes the work on pit road during a race as essential as anything the crews can do to prepare for an event. "NASCAR realizes that a lot of fans come to watch the pit crews and the pit strategy," Wilson says, "and now they're showcasing the work in the pit more than they have in the past. Pretty much, you've got to get four tires every time. You might be able to get away with two, but there'll be no more no tires and just fuel. The tires are only designed to run a fuel load, and it's even hard to get them to run that far."

At the Penske-Jasper Racing shop in Morrisville, N.C., the responsibility for tires falls on the shoulders of tire specialist Ken Dixon. A graduate of Valley High School and longtime union plumber in Las Vegas, Dixon got into stock car racing by volunteering with Gaughan's Orleans Racing team at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. According to Dixon, race-day pressure adjustments can make a big difference in how the car performs.

"A half a pound or a pound here and there can tweak the handling on the car a good bit," says Dixon. "Depending on what the crew chief wants to do, we can also add a round of wedge or mess around with the track bar. There's a lot that can be done during a race to make the car run better."

And the balance of the responsibility rests with the 28-year-old Gaughan, one of NASCAR's new breed of stock car racers. Certainly, drivers must still have physical courage--sliding out of a curve at 160 mph has never been for the meek of heart--but brains have become as important as brawn in the race toward victory lane. No longer is NASCAR a sport dominated by moonshine-running good old boys, it has become the dominion of the best and the brightest--college-educated driver-athletes like Gaughan.

"Racing requires a huge amount of mental endurance," says Gaughan. "Your brain is always working on something, whether it's passing somebody or figuring out what the race car's doing so that the crew can make it faster. There's never any rest in a race car. Caution flags aren't a timeout. Caution flags are when it becomes twice as important to think and follow procedures and convey as much information as possible to the crew chief."

Of course, when a 700-horsepower car gets loose at 200 mph, no amount of mental preparation will help get it back under control. "It's an instinct thing," Gaughan says. "If there was a textbook answer to those things, then everybody'd read a book and go do it. A lot of it is just been there and done that. It all depends on the degree of the slide. There's throttle, there's steering, there's all sorts of ways to help control the slide. If you're not at full throttle, you can just give it a little gas and steer out of it. It all depends on your position on the race track and your proximity to the wall. You've got to trust your instincts to guide you through it."

So far, Gaughan's instincts have yet to steer him wrong, and his rookie season in NASCAR's top league has gone reasonably well. Unlike his Penske teammates--Ryan Newman and Rusty Wallace--Gaughan has managed to stay out of the wrecks, but his best finish has only been a mid-pack 19th at the Daytona 500. Still, Wilson has high hopes for their return to Las Vegas.

"We feel pretty confident going in," Wilson says. "We're racing at a whole different level now, but we feel we can tune the car better in Vegas, where we're all pretty familiar with the track. I'm not saying we're going to win the race, but we've certainly got a better chance there than we did at Rockingham."