Racing Fabricators - Crunch Time!

CONCORD, NC - It is the Monday morning after a race. Pick any race and any Monday. For Bill Bisnett, Mondays are all pretty much the same.

The door on the Grainger Racing transporter rolls up, and the crew pushes what is left of Greg Biffle's No. 16 car onto the trailer's elevator platform. Bisnett rolls his eyes as he surveys the damage. At least it pushes. "Anytime it comes home with all the corners attached, it is a good thing," Bisnett says. Bisnett is Biffle's "Monday Morning Man." He and a team of 30 craftsmen at Roush Racing's headquarters turn wrecks back into race cars.

The Roush shop is a few miles from Lowe's Motor Speedway. From the outside, the buildings look like they could be home to any high-tech business on any industrial campus in America. The offices and showrooms are out front, but the real business of racing goes on out back.

Every race shop has a Bisnett. It is their job to put a rolling metal "Humpty Dumpty" back together again using body saws, welding torches, sheetmetal, and rack upon rack of suspension arms, brake calipers, and a little body filler.

Sometimes it can't be done. Every season, a few cars return DOA. "Oh, you can fix anything," Bisnett says. "But sometimes it isn't worth it. If the car is a driver's absolute favorite, we'll make the extra effort to get it back together."

As long as the tough centersection remains undamaged, the front and rear clips-generally the pieces in front of the windshield or behind the rear window-can be cut and replaced crash after crash. "But after a while, there isn't much left of the original," he says.

It is easy for the crew to figure out just how badly a chassis suffered in Sunday's melee. Critical measurements are taken from each car before it leaves the shop, so the crew knows exactly how the twisted wreck it gets back started life. Every change is recorded during testing, practice, and even the race, and the data comes back with the car on Monday morning.

"If it has been really hammered, we put it on a measuring platform to see how badly it is bent, and what we need to do," Bisnett says. "If all we have is sheetmetal damage, we just clean it up, cut off the bent bodywork, and begin stripping the car for re-assembly."

The disassembly and cleanup jobs often are the first ones assigned to young crewmembers who hope to make a career on a NASCAR team. It allows them to see first-hand how cars are built and how critical it is to do everything right. Unlike drivers and team members, few cars ever do back-to-back weekends.

"If it isn't hurt too badly, we can turn it around in three or four days, but we really don't like to push that hard if we don't have to," he adds. "We prefer to take our time so we don't overlook something or have to compromise."

A steel rack behind the shop holds unwanted, bent body parts. There are fenders, roofs, hoods, and trunks all twisted beyond repair at racing speeds. Some parts are donated to charity auctions, and the rest sold to fans looking for something special to put in a den or hang on their shop wall. At the farthest corner of the fenced compound sits last year's body shells, taken off the cars when new template rules went into effect.

Bisnett's crew not only repairs the damage, it builds all the cars that Biffle, Mark Martin, and Jeff Burton race from the ground up. Cars are conceived in a chassis fabrication shop, where they start out as framerails set onto an assembly jig. It's a no-cameras area and considered off limits to most visitors. Other teams on the circuit buy ready-made chassis from outside suppliers.

The frame is where the cars begin life. The first two pieces of metal welded together can determine the car's racing DNA. In theory, they should all be the same. "But you can change the whole personality of a car based on how it is welded, who welds it, or even which pieces are joined first," Bisnett says. "If I could just figure out which way was best, we could eliminate a lot of problems.

"Every now and again we get one that just simply works right. It is better than all the others, right from the beginning. You can tell it just by rolling it out the shop door. For some reason, they even roll better. We look at it, and look at it, and measure every bit of it, but never can figure out what makes it different." Randy Goss, Biffle's former crewchief says the cars " . . . are like twins. Even identical twins are different. The driver can tell, even if we can't."

When things go according to schedule, each car is tested before it shows up at a track to race. But in racing, things seldom go according to schedule. "We really began the season behind," Bisnett says. "While other teams were building cars for 2003, we were fixing Busch cars so Greg could win the '02 championship."