Many Cup drivers seek special tutoring, and some see a road course school as the answer to road course rage, while others disagree. "I've been to road course school four times and all they've done is screw me up," says Hamilton Sr. "I had to go back and do it the way I knew to do it. It's probably not the proper way to do it, but there's too many variables in the equipment. I never ran good on road courses at all until I drove for Larry McClure and we almost won Sears Point (in '98). It came down to me and (Jeff) Gordon, and ever since then I've grown sort of fond of 'em a little bit. The thing about road courses is it's all about the equipment, I think, more than it is the driver anymore."
A look at road course winners from the previous five seasons supports Hamilton's observation, as the last 10 winners have come from four of the sport's premier teams. Jeff Gordon has seven road course victories in his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet from '97-'01. The other three road event winners during that time are Steve Park, from Dale Earnhardt Inc., Tony Stewart, from Joe Gibbs Racing, and Mark Martin of Roush Racing.
What, exactly, do those statistics tell us, though? Do the big teams have the resources to put emphasis on road courses, or is it that other teams merely see the events as no more than necessary evils, blowing them off as Bobby Hamilton Jr. does?
The elder Hamilton says his employer, Andy Petree Racing, prefers to focus energy and resources on the tour's four restrictor-plate races rather than the two road races. Both types of tracks require special cars. The restrictor-plate strategy paid off with Hamilton winning last season at Talladega and finishing fifth in the other Talladega race. He also finished eighth in the 2001 Daytona 500. Meanwhile, Hamilton was 36th at Watkins Glen and 15th at Sears Point last year.
"You've got people like Roush or Hendrick who have good road race connections," says Hamilton. "They get the advantage on you because somebody like Petree or Larry (McClure) or somebody like that doesn't spend their time on road race stuff. They just say, 'OK, let's see what we have to do to get through this and just go do it.' Some people have more connection with that kind of stuff than probably 80 percent of the teams do. I'm not saying that as a cop-out. Like Andy Petree, he's got good road race cars, but we just don't spend a lot of time going and testing.
"We'll never test one thing before we show up at a road race. Where a lot of guys are down at Road Atlanta or down (at Kershaw) in South Carolina testing, we just show up to race."
A Master At WorkWatch Ricky Rudd at work on a road course and it's a thing of beauty, a poetic display of one man's hand-eye-foot coordination working to tame a 3,400-pound machine and a two-mile ribbon of asphalt.
Burton likens it to ballet. "It takes a lot of finesse," he says. "We've all seen from an in-car camera how Ricky Rudd does it, when he's doing his heel and toe (shifting, braking, and accelerating) with his feet, and what he's doing with his eyes and hands. He's really good and smooth and definitely one you can learn from. He's just got a real good feel for it. It comes natural to him where some of the rest of us have had to work hard to become competitive."