Big Man on Small Tracks

It’s a couple of hours before Winston Cup “Happy Hour” at Bristol Motor Speedway. Inside the gleaming Miller Lite race hauler, Rusty Wallace and his crew huddle over a computer printout, looking at the color traces from a shock dynamometer.

The dyno works a shock up and down—just like it functions on Wallace’s Miller Lite Ford Taurus—and records in minute detail the resistance in the cylinder for each fraction of an inch of motion.

People who don’t understand shock technology consider it close to a black art. Others see it as science. Wallace calls it one of the keys to his success on NASCAR’s short tracks.

The driver has emerged as NASCAR’s master of short ovals. Of the 53 Winston Cup wins he had compiled by the end of the 2000 season, 28 of them were on ovals of a mile or less. The figure climbs to 34 if you include Loudon (1.058 mile) and Rockingham (1.017 mile) in the list of small ovals.

In 1989, the year Wallace won the Winston Cup championship, he won six races, including one at Bristol and a pair at Richmond, both short tracks. He also picked up a win on the road course at Watkins Glen and one each at Rockingham and Michigan in a title fight that went down to the last race of the season. While ovals such as Talladega or California Speedway produce mind-numbing speeds, and tracks like Texas Motor Speedway attract crowds larger than many American cities, it’s the small ovals that season after season generate the closest racing in Winston Cup.

They are the tracks that gave birth to NASCAR, and they remain the incubators for many of today’s stock car veterans and its crop of young freshmen. Short tracks remain the strongest bond between Winston Cup drivers and guys who compete every Saturday night at their local speedway. Most amateurs know they will probably never drive at Daytona, but they can relate to Mark Martin or Bobby Labonte in a three-hour, fender-rubbin’ traffic jam at Bristol.

Tech Master

Wallace grew up in Missouri, building his own cars and turning his own wrenches. But the cars and technology have changed since he began driving, and talent alone is no longer enough to be successful in racing’s top ranks. Drivers also have to change.

“It means spending a lot of time looking at things like shock dyno lines, talking about what the car is doing and where it needs to be changed,” Wallace says. “We’ll look at shocks, and I’ll ask them to move a line here or there because I can feel what it is doing on the track.”

Wallace says there are drivers out there unwilling—or unable—to get that deeply involved with the technology of car setup.

“They want to walk away and let the crew do it all,” he says.

But Wallace remains very much interested in how cars work and how to make them better. And he embraces the technology that helps him go faster.

“A lot of drivers don’t want to keep up with it. I guess I don’t blame them. It can make you cross-eyed, pull your hair out and cry all at the same time. But anymore you can’t just get into a car and drive it and hope someone can fix it.”

“He’s a detail guy,” says Robin Pemberton, crew chief for Wallace. “From the equipment on the car to the way it handles, he’s simply a fanatic.

“Rusty knows exactly how the car is supposed to feel. He won’t settle for anything less. The only time we have to compromise is if we just run out of time.”

Wallace’s success has given him a confident, short-track attitude.

“I go into a short-track race just knowing I can win there,” he says. He’s right more often than any other driver in Winston Cup.

Mark Martin, driver of the Viagra Ford, says Wallace’s knowledge of chassis setup is a huge benefit at tracks like Martinsville. Martin says that, on the other hand, some drivers do well at certain tracks for no specific reason.

“I really do well on the banked tracks,” Martin says. “I really can’t say why. Others do well on the flat tracks. Rusty simply excels on the short ones.”

The Equipment

From the outside, the car Wallace drives at Daytona looks just like the one he uses at Martinsville. But beneath the familiar paint scheme, sponsor decals and number, it is a very different animal. A short-track car is special from the moment the first piece of steel is cut.

“We build each car differently. A short-track chassis is different from a superspeedway car, and an intermediate car is different from either one of those,” Pemberton says.

“On a superspeedway car, we’ll raise the framerails because we might have 8 inches of travel. On a short-track car, that might be only 3 or 4 inches. We concentrate the weight as low as it can go and as far to the left as we can get it.”

That helps keep the car balanced on the short ovals where the car is being turned almost constantly. The interior sheet metal will be the lightest weight the builders are comfortable with, because the outside steel will be built to take a beating.

“We just know we’ll have the opportunity to put a new skin on it,” Pemberton laughs. “It’s just a one-time, throw-a-way body. They can come back off the track looking pretty hammered.”

Wallace says the constant body slamming turns many drivers off short tracks. “I’ll tell you one thing, you are busy all the time,” he says. “You are just never out of traffic.”

The body skin will use the air to generate as much aerodynamic downforce as possible. Unlike a car built for the faster, longer ovals, drag is not an issue on these cars. Teams will readily sacrifice a slippery body for one glued to the track.

“If you parked them side by side, you could see the difference,” says Pemberton. “But a lot of the things that are different are pretty subtle. You would have to know what to look for to see them.”

Compared to a car built for larger tracks, the “transition” bodywork may not be as rounded, the sides will be less flat and the front fenders will be as wide as the templates allow.

The wider front fenders result in more bodywork for the air to push against, weighing the nose down and helping the car turn better in the corners. It is among the reasons cars running out front on a short track work better, because the air over the nose is cleaner and more effective.

At the back of the car, the bodywork is shaped within the rules to keep the air off the rear spoiler where rear downforce would do little good. Suspension springs are softer and the sway bars lighter.

“We don’t have the aerodynamics, so we have to make the chassis do more work,” Pemberton says. “It would be an awful car to drive on a big track. It would just sort of lay over on its side.”

One of the biggest challenges on short tracks is to make the cars stop.

“We rely so heavily on the brakes,” Pemberton says. “We’ll use brake fluid recirculation, extra cooling to the rotors and an enormous number of fans to get cool air to the brakes.”

Wallace says the brake system may be the most important part of short-track setup. He says there are hundreds of brake system combinations available. Track conditions, temperature and even the amount of traffic can influence the selection of brake pads. Another factor is whether Wallace can run a line where he can get more air to the brakes or has to stay low where they can’t cool as well.

But one of the problems is that the pad that works best when Wallace is out front may not be the right choice for when he’s fighting through the field and hammering on the brake pedal.

Wallace can use a brake bias adjuster to change the braking force on his car, but he can’t do it fast enough to accommodate every situation and each braking point on the track.

“At Richmond he could probably use more rear brakes at Turn 1, but that would be too much at Turn 3,” Pemberton says.

While getting enough brakes to stop can be a problem, getting enough horsepower seldom is an issue on short ovals. The engine usually produces more of it than a driver will ever need at a track like Martinsville.

“We’ve got 300 to 400 more horsepower there than we do at a restrictor plate race,” Pemberton says. “It’s kinda funny when you think about it. On the really big tracks where we can use all the power we can make, we have to restrict them. Then on the short ovals, we’ve got more than we can probably ever use.”

On a short track, a driver is on and off the throttle constantly, either because of traffic or because of the track, running the engine up to 9,300 rpm and then getting off the accelerator and onto the brakes.

In some ways, getting a car right for Martinsville may be harder than for Daytona or Talladega.

“At Daytona it is probably 80 percent car and 20 percent driver. With the aero and plates, at Daytona you basically run the thing wide open all day long,” Wallace says. “Where you start really isn’t all that important.”

“But then again,” he adds, “I’ve never won Daytona.”

The Right Feel

While his race car may be the result of some pretty sophisticated engineering, what Wallace does with it boils down to how confident he feels in the car.

“If it feels right, you can do well,” he says, explaining the obvious.

But what’s right?

For Wallace it is a car that can handle about any curve he throws at it lap after lap.

“In Winston Cup, you can’t win with a car that has a pushy front end,” he says.

He has to be able to put the car just about anywhere on the track and pass anyplace he can find a hole.

“At Martinsville it is really easy to burn the brakes up,” Wallace says. “At Bristol you have to have more shock control. Each track is unique.”

For Wallace, his seat time gets translated into a seat-of-the-pants feel. Then he has to explain what he feels into words Pemberton can relate to the chassis.

“We can’t use data acquisition and telemetry at the racetrack,” Pemberton says. “So we trust what he tells us.”

“No one else can tell exactly what a driver feels in the car,” Wallace says.

The key people on his team have been with him for years, so they already know what Wallace wants in a short-track chassis.

Pemberton says Wallace can tell him in two or three laps if something is wrong with the setup.

“It might take a bit longer to know that is it right,” he says.

Wallace jokes that the downside of being heavily involved in the car setup is that, when things go wrong, he’s often the one who headed the team in that direction.

“I’m the last guy in the car,” Wallace says. “If I can’t race it, then it’s my fault.”

Things Change

While Wallace may be the man to beat at short tracks, that doesn’t mean he lacks confidence on other tracks.

“When we go to Charlotte, I go with the attitude we can win there, too,” Wallace says.

But don’t get the idea that Wallace’s team simply rolls the car out of the transporter and collects the trophy and big check. Even the short track dominator can have a bad day.

“Look at Martinsville last year,” he says. “In the springtime I dominated that race. I led almost every lap. Then we made a mistake on the last pit stop and I just never caught up.”

The victory went to Mark Martin.

“We went back there in the fall with a new car that was identical to the one we raced in the spring. We were out to lunch with it. Never really did get it to work right. You just have to keep working on it. You know it is right when you can get the speed, and you can go fast, and turn it.

“At times you start the race and it isn’t right,” he says. “You have to keep adjusting for conditions. If you are lucky, you can get into that sweet spot that it all works together. That’s usually only about 20 percent of the race. The key is to be there when you need it.”

More than at any other type of track, beginning close to perfect is critical on short tracks. With laps taking less than 20 seconds, adjusting a car during a short-track race costs time and track position. And it doesn’t take much time to get a lap or two down on the leaders and never again be in a position to make that up.

“The laps go by so quickly that when things go bad you can get lapped so quickly. The crew needs to know exactly what needs to be done,” Wallace says. “You have to really pay a lot of attention during pit stops, or you can get behind in a hurry.”

Pemberton says he and Wallace discuss what the car is doing and where it is doing it. Then the crew chief will confer with his own “panel of experts “ and suggest some changes to Wallace.

“It’s pretty hard for him to think about a ½-pound of air in the right front when he’s stabbing and steering and holding on,” Pemberton says. “But if we give him some ideas, he’ll ride around for a few laps and come back on the radio and say ‘I don’t think wedge will do it, but let’s try the air pressure and the track bar.’

“On race day we’re at the mercy of the driver,” Pemberton adds. “But I can tell you, he’s hardly ever wrong.”