Rock Harris - Front Of The Pack

Third In A Series
Editor's Note: Magazine deadlines and race schedules sometimes prevent us from running on all cylinders. For that reason, we're recapping the first race of the season for Rock Harris, as last month's installment ran head-on into a deadline, leaving us short on details from the opening race.

Rock Harris' hard work and preparation over the winter and throughout the early season has paid off at Friendship Motor Speedway. It was evident that Harris was ready to race when the team arrived at the 4/10-mile track on a Friday night in late April.

As his volunteer crew unloaded the trailer, it was apparent that the car was in immaculate condition. That's not a surprise to the people who know Harris. The days that Harris spends at the Busch Series shop for Carl A. Haas Motorsports spills over to Harris' own shop, where everything is clean and sparkling.

"When you work in the upper levels of NASCAR," Harris says, "you learn that everything you do reflects back on the team and its sponsors. The shop has to be clean and orderly because you can't waste time looking for tools or parts. Any junk on the floor is a time stealer because you have to go around it or search through it for what you need.

"It's the same thing with the car itself. When it leaves the shop it has to look good as well as run good. I carry that over to my shop. If you look and act professional when you get to the track, I think that gives you a step up on the competition. It helps me that I have built my own chassis in the past and that I know suspensions. I understand the geometry of a race car and that shows when we get to the track."

Having done his homework during preseason testing, Harris' Carpet Mart, Heinz Brothers Performance Monte Carlo was ready for practice as soon as it was unloaded from the trailer and the tires were measured.

A few laps around the short oval and Harris was back into the pits to make some adjustments. The first thing that Harris does after he crawls from the cockpit is measure the tires. We'll see the tire measured over and over again. It's part of Harris' preparation routine. He thinks that tires are important, very important.

"The tires are out there," he says. "The tires will tell you what the race car wants. They are the only things that touch the racetrack. I want to keep everything consistent so that we can actually gauge what the car is doing, and the tires can do that."

The changes that Harris made after an earlier test session seemed to have improved the handling characteristics of the car (See Aug. '07, pg. 48). With the installation of the longer driveshaft and the addition of a longer rearend bushing, he solved a vibration problem and stopped a leak from the transmission. The shorter power steering line and the new brake pads ended the small nagging problems that Harris had when entering the turns. Overall, he was happy with the car as qualifying was ready to begin.

"We're just about where we need to be," Harris says, while measuring the tires for the umpteenth time this particular afternoon. "It's going to be tough. It gets tougher every year. Every team makes changes over the off-season and gets better. That forces us to get better in order to stay up front. But it gets harder every year for us to do that, especially this year.

"Now I'm a car owner, too, and that means that I'm responsible for paying the bills. The price of everything keeps going up and you have to pay for it because you need it. We're on a tight budget, and that budget is getting stretched thin. With the price of gas going up like it is, it costs us more every week just to get to the racetrack."

Harris qualified on the front row for the first race of the season. After qualifying, he came back to the pits, and yep, you guessed it, measured the tires again. Waiting for the 150-lap feature to begin, Harris went over the car, wiping it down to make sure it was clean for the race and adjusting the air vent that blows into the cockpit, cooling the driver.