Breaking A Race Team Losing Streak - Lost Highway

The last thing teams should change is the personnel, he feels.

"I've seen teams we race against all season long. They'll be in a really bad stretch where nothing goes right and in midseason they change the driver, and it really doesn't change anything. They still aren't winning."

His advice?

"Ignore everyone who wants to give you advice," Triplett says. "Don't start going up and down the pits to see what everyone else is doing and try to copy them. And don't listen to what everyone says you should be doing, because no two drivers are alike and no two cars are identical.

"Go back to the basics. Go back to how the car was set up when it was competitive. Use that as the foundation. If you made one bad decision with the car and then changed a bunch of other things to compensate for it, you are still working around that original bad setup.

"It is easy at that point to get so far off that a team heads down the wrong path and can't recover on its own. Nothing [team members] do works and the level of frustration just gets higher and higher.

"And then it becomes no fun at all."

At that point, Triplett recommends stepping back, regrouping, and then focusing on the things that team members know will work. "Once everyone on the team is headed in the same direction," he adds, "it is much easier to get it to move forward."

One of the keys to getting back on track is to admit you made a mistake, says New Englander Mike Olsen, 2006 Busch North champion. Olsen had been a very successful short track driver in that series, and then he got enough sponsorship to move his program up a notch.

"It was a disaster," he says. "Little Trees came on board as a sponsor and the first thing we did was to go south and buy a couple new cars. I wanted the best stuff available.

"We spent all winter getting the cars ready to race, and then discovered we couldn't get them to work. We had a lot of money and a whole lot of time into these new cars-and a sponsor that was looking for results-and we didn't have a clue what we were doing wrong."

Meanwhile, the team was becoming discouraged by the lack of results.

"We could bring the old car out and it always ran well," Olsen remembers, "so we knew we had the performance baseline, and we knew we could still be competitive."

Olsen and his team threw away the first part of the race season before finally admitting the new cars were a poor fit for them.

"It was kind of hard to do," he says. "We had a lot invested in those cars and we ended up selling them and building duplicates of the old car."

When problems like those occur, it is up to the driver or team owner to be sure frustrations don't boil into conflicts, he says.

"The worse thing you can do is ignore it," Olsen says. "Things can fester and become real problems. Sometime before things get too bad you have to get everyone around the same table at the same time and just let it all out.

"And then you get back to work."

Olsen says that approach has allowed Little Trees Racing to be spared the serious conflicts he has seen pollute other teams.

"Most of the issues really begin with a mechanical problem," he says. "Folks try things on their car because the guy next to them is using it, but it doesn't work as well. You can't stay with something just because everyone else has it.

"You have to be willing to try those things, but you have to be willing to admit it when they don't work out."

Olsen says the Busch North teams see a lot of technology trickling into the series from Nextel Cup.

"People try stuff they hear about, and maybe they shouldn't," he says. "The latest thing from Cup is soft springs and big bars, but just because they work on a Cup car doesn't mean it will work on your car. Cup guys don't talk about everything else they do to the car when they make the change.

"So you end up with guys who are running at the local track slapping on big bars and soft springs and trying to make them work. And when it doesn't, they get frustrated."

When all else fails, find an owner, driver, or crew chief who is respected and trusted by the team and ask for advice. Bringing in someone from the outside for a few races creates an opportunity to get fresh ideas and different approaches to problem solving without having to move people around or let team members go.

His philosophy has been to keep the car as simple as possible.

"We try some fancy stuff-we have to in order to keep up-but our car is really pretty basic," he says.

"We keep good notes on everything we try, everything we change, and we keep them all," he adds. "We record each change we make, what track we were at, and what it did to lap times. And we never throw them away. We still have notes for tracks I don't even race at anymore, because you never know when they may come in handy.

"When we start heading off in the wrong direction, we can pull out the notes and get back to where we were when we were successful.

"That usually works," he says. "And when it does, one good night can erase 10 bad ones."

Jerry F. Boone can be reached at jfboone@ aol.com.

Here are a few ways to get a team back on track or help ensure it won't lose its way when things begin to go wrong:

Get back to basics. When nothing seems to be working, use your team notes to return the car to the way it was when it was running well. Then, begin rebuilding from a successful, known platform.

Concentrate on what, not on who. Everyone makes mistakes. When one happens, develop a plan to ensure it won't happen again. Most mistakes occur because team members are rushed, lack experience, are distracted, or don't get proper instruction. Emphasize what went wrong and don't focus on who was at fault.

Who is in charge? Be sure that everyone knows who is responsible for each part of the team effort. Someone has to make the decisions, but a driver or crew chief doesn't have to make all of them. Team members who have a sense of responsibility share in both its success and failure.

Communicate. Drivers and teams who discuss problems are more likely to solve them than those who hold grudges or snipe at one another.

When all else fails, ask for help. While it is probably not a good idea to troll the pits looking for guidance, there is some merit in asking an experienced driver or crew chief whom you respect to spend some time troubleshooting with your team or on your car.