Road Weary Or Road Warriors?

Bobby Hamilton, a veteran Winston Cup driver, does what any father will occasionally do for his son: he offers advice. And Bobby Jr., an up-and-coming driver in the Busch Series, sometimes treats his dad’s words of wisdom like so many grains of salt: he brushes them off. Especially when the senior Hamilton offers advice on running road course races.

Father and son, traveling together during the midweek on their way to an early-season race weekend, both find it amusing—with a robust round of laughter—when the question concerns the senior Hamilton’s road course advice to his son. “He’s out there cutting grass and sawing trees down and everything,” Hamilton Sr. says. “He doesn’t have any use for them. When I try to explain it to him, he just blows me off because he doesn’t have any use for them at all.

He doesn’t even want to hear it. He just says, ‘I’ll go out there and cut my grass and saw my trees down and get away from there and go to the next one.’ The same thing happened to me. If you go run good at a road course, then you sort of get interested in them.”

While Hamilton’s advice is simple—bide your time and wait on a strong run to change your opinion of road courses—it can be a long, challenging process for many drivers.

Ward Burton recalls his first road course visit as a Winston Cup rookie. “The first time I was at Sears Point, in ’94, we didn’t make the race the first day (of qualifying),” says Burton. “In the second round of qualifying we turned in the 10th-fastest time and made the race. Then in happy hour I hit everything but the damn start-finish line. Wherever there’s a gravel pit, I’ve been there at one time or another and don’t want to go there again if I can help it.” Sterling Marlin, one of the most consistent drivers in Winston Cup over the last two seasons, professes not to like the “damn thing(s)” when discussing his road course record.

Now you’ve got a feeling for the frustration many drivers with oval track backgrounds experience on their initial and, sometimes, subsequent visits to Sears Point or Watkins Glen, the two road courses on the Winston Cup schedule. “Some people just don’t like them,” says Burton. “It’s like some people when they go to Darlington, they just don’t like it. I guess when the guy doesn’t like the place you’ve got him beat when you get there.”

The Approach

It’s not difficult to relate to that level of dislike for road courses. With their multiple turns, uphills, downhills, and odd configurations, road courses go totally against the modus operandi of going fast and turning left that most NASCAR drivers experience week after week in their formative years. Basically, they’ve spent much of their adult lives learning how to drive a particular way, then they visit a road course and have to learn how to drive all over again. “You just have to give and take,” says Burton. “You can’t keep asking a whole lot more out of your car than it’s willing to give you because it’s pretty easy to get into trouble. It’s just a real balancing act.”

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 Work

Watch 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.”

Rudd is a rarity among stock car drivers. He actually notched his first Cup victory on a road course in ’83 at the now defunct Riverside International Raceway in California. Unlike many of his peers, particularly the older drivers, he adapted quickly to running on road courses. Although he first raced Winston Cup in 1975 and was Rookie of the Year two years later, it was ’81 before he first competed in a Cup race on a road course, at Riverside.

“We didn’t test or anything and went out there and qualified third, and I was leading the race with about 18 laps to go,” Rudd recalls. “I had a pretty big battle on my hands, back and forth with Bobby Allison, and the motor broke on us with about 10 laps to go. That was my first experience (on a road course). After running that race I said, ‘Man, this is fun. I wish I had been doing that a lot sooner in my career.’”

Rudd was actually a road course veteran by that time, although not in a stock car. “I grew up on racing road courses—big ones like those at Riverside and Watkins Glen—as a kid running go-karts,” says Rudd. “Fast go-karts, enduros, where you run 115, 120 mph. It’s still quite a bit different, but the lines were the same and things of that nature, so I think that helped (me) to adjust. I was used to turning left and right.

“I didn’t come from a background of a lot of oval track racing; I came from a background of go-karts. (I) never ran Late Model Stock or never ran any of the other races. My first time in a (race) car was a Winston Cup car at Rockingham, so I didn’t have years of unlearning to do from just turning left.”

The trick for Rudd was in learning to control the 500 or more horsepower that Cup cars had in the early ’80s, something traditional stock car racers learn early in their careers.

“They’re used to controlling the power,” Rudd says. “Road courses are a lot like driving a road car on icy conditions. You just don’t stand on the gas real abruptly. If you do, you’ll spin the tires. I didn’t have any of that experience, where a guy coming up on circle tracks would have had that power management control and would be in the plus column over what I did.

“But I think just looking at a racetrack and knowing how to get through a set of esses is probably a very awkward feeling to a lot of them. To me, like the esses at Riverside, I could sit there and recall actually running a track like that at Indianapolis Raceway Park that had a set of esses like that, and I could reflect back on that. It didn’t feel awkward at all for me to turn to the right.”

Here To Stay

While road courses may puzzle some drivers, they’re even bigger puzzles to many hard core stock car fans—why bother? Road courses, however, have been a part of NASCAR almost from the beginning, with the sanctioning body’s first road event held in NASCAR’s sixth season. And despite their reputation as not so fan-friendly in terms of spectator enjoyment—hey, let’s face it, they’re mostly boring—and the fact that road events are some of Winston Cup’s smallest drawing cards, road courses will continue to be a part of the show.

Jim Hunter, vice president of corporate communications for NASCAR, points out that the two road courses currently on the schedule are located in two of the most-heavily populated states, New York and California, thereby offering strategic locales for the sanctioning body.

“I think there’s always going to be a place for them, unless there’s some unforeseen economic situations that might develop where these places are,” says Hunter. “That’s what happened at Riverside and Ontario, (where two former tracks were located) in California. From a NASCAR philosophical standpoint, we always want to have at least one road course because of what it means to the championship series.”

What road courses lend to the Winston Cup championship, says Hunter, are intangibles that place the series and its drivers among the elite motorsports sanctioning bodies in the world.

“The dimension that the road courses bring, and I think our fans would want to identify with this, is it dispels the myth that our drivers aren’t as good or as talented as Formula One or some of the other open wheel type racing venues,” says Hunter. “On a road course they do have to shift gears; they do have to brake going in and out and through the esses; they have to set the car up to get through where they want to be fastest on the course; they have to use a lot of strategy.”

Not only are the two road courses on the Wintson Cup schedule located in strategic markets, NASCAR has a vested interest specifically in Watkins Glen. The track is owned by International Speedway Corp., which is controlled by NASCAR’s France family. So, NASCAR would not likely pull an event from a track that would cost the ISC revenue.

NASCAR held its first road course race in June of 1954, running 50 laps on a two-mile track that took in the runways at an airport in Linden, New Jersey. Of the 43 cars in the race, 21 were foreign makes, including 13 Jaguars, five MGs, a Morgan, a Porsche, and an Austin Healy. Al Keller, driving a Jaguar, won the race, as the lightweight, nimble Jags claimed four of the top six spots. Even today, while you won’t find foreign brands in Cup races of any type, true road course cars are a different breed from standard Cup cars. Differences in the bodies and chassis are subtle—changes in the location of filters and coolers, changes in the rearend housing, suspension, and so on—but there are enough differences to make the cars useless for other types of tracks.

While the expense of building a road course car varies little from other cars, there is a downside to having inventory dedicated to just two events each year: Teams end up with rolling stock sitting idle for months at a time. On a two-car team, that means having at least four cars that see little action, including two backup cars that may not see the track for a season or more.

for example, to bolster the effort on road courses. “One thing I am proud of is every year we have road racers taking shots at all of us and we pretty well hold our own,” says Hamilton. “That’s strange in itself, because we don’t do it and we don’t take a lot of pride in it. Yet when we get out there with all those guys, we sort of equal out. That’s probably an equipment thing, too. Who knows?

“It’s just like Robert Pressley, who drives my truck now and he drove the 77 (Cup) car last year. He doesn’t run (road courses) and last year they sent Boris Said out there. I told him, ‘Robert, if you’ll get the right kind of car and go run those places one time, you’ll be happy with them.’ It’s the same old deal with all these guys. How many guys have you seen in the past who have run good on road courses that don’t run good at all now? I mean, the list just goes on and on. I guess the moral of the story is it comes right back down to having that perfect race car at that perfect time, at that perfect race. Without that I don’t care how good you are, you aren’t going to run good.”

For Rudd, adapting quickly to road courses involved a variety of factors—good equipment, certainly, but primarily background, talent and desire—and he is quick to profess his enthusiasm for road racing today.

“It’s like the biggest hoot you can have,” he says, “to go out there in a heavy car, with a tremendous amount of motor and not very much rubber on the ground, and then somebody says have at it.”