| | By Larry McReynolds
Special to ESPN.com
Editor's note: Veteran crew chief Larry McReynolds will provide a weekly column on ESPN.com, taking you inside the garage for Mike Skinner and the Lowe's No. 31 Chevrolet team.
There are a couple of different angles to look over when it comes to the Daytona 500.
From Day 1 -- qualifying day all the way through the Saturday before
the 500 -- I was vocal on a lot of things. I was displeased on how far the
Monte Carlo was behind since it was a new car and not an old car. I was
pretty disappointed and was vocal because we were the only Chevy in the top
15 after qualifying.
The Lowe's Chevy was at its best in the Bud Shootout and the Twin 125s, but we kinda went away from that in the 500. But there were a lot of things stacked into our performance in the Daytona 500.
We didn't do as good a job with the car setup as we should've and we were a little down on horsepower compared to practice and the 125-miler. Mike then tried too hard in the pits. You can only make up so much when you're at a deficiency and he tried too hard on that final pit stop.
He didn't overshoot the pit, but went too deep so that Tony Stewart blocked us in and Mike had to go forward and back up to get out. Did that cost us the win? Absolutely not. Did it cost us a top 10? Possibly.
But we weren't the best Chevy on race day, so that kinda humbles you.
My hopes this week are that, with the chassis dyno test that NASCAR did after the race Sunday with three Fords, three Chevrolets and two Pontiacs, and with the wind tunnel test Wednesday with the No. 31 car as the Chevrolet, the No. 88 as the Ford and the No. 22 as the Pontiac, that they're going to see the differences. My concern, however, is will NASCAR react to the differences? Hopefully so, or we've wasted
a lot of time, energy and effort doing the chassis dyno tests, and hauling
the cars to the wind tunnel.
I'm pretty confident that there's going to be a discrepancy, or a difference, in both tests.
This team worked awfully hard getting ready for the Daytona 500. When I say
this team, that's the entire Richard Childress Racing group -- the 3 and the 31. To come out of there 16th and 21st is pretty devastating because we did put in so much energy and effort. But, you know, Daytona was Daytona. It's gone. There's
nothing we can do to change anything about the results.
This is something that Larry McReynolds is going to continue to work hard on. Yeah, dwell on what your learn, but don't dwell on what you can't control -- which is the past. Pick up and go to Rockingham and try to win that race up there.
Richard Childress preaches to me to be the best Chevrolet, because when you're the best Chevrolet, you have some bargaining power to say, "Hey, look, we was the best Chevrolet and finished seventh. What are you guys
(NASCAR) going to do to help us out."
The thing I use to mentally bounce back from any weekend, but particularly
after the amount of effort and energy and work and time consumed at Daytona,
is that I make sure I can lay my head down on that pillow Sunday night and say, "You know what? You, your guys, your people, and Mike Skinner -- you all did
everything you could do. You didn't shortcut something. You didn't not do
something because you didn't think you had time to do it. You did everything
that you possibly knew to do. As long as you did that, you did the best you
could."
I think it's up to me to try to keep that positive attitude, because guys are watching me and I know that. If I panic, they must be thinking, "Well, if he's going to panic, we're supposed to be panicking too."
So, even though sometimes inside I'm nervous, concerned and panicking, my reaction is going to be their reaction in most cases. And
I keep learning this more and more every day, to make sure that the team follows my lead.
In this sport, there is not really time to dwell on the past. Races keep coming and Rockingham started
Monday morning when we got back to the shop from Daytona. If we worry about what happened at Daytona
for the next three or four days, we probably ain't going to be very prepared
for Rockingham. So, we are just going to learn from the things that maybe we should have
done different, or could have done different at Daytona, and put them in
our notes for when we go back there in July.
But I tell the team, "Let's go to Rockingham and
kick their butts. Let's show that we can pick up and move forward."
We know that we're a little front downforce deficient right now, particularly against the Ford Taurus. And we know lack of front downforce, even on the 1999 Monte Carlo, was one of the things that kept us behind last year versus the
Pontiacs.
When I say we're not as good with the front downforce this year as we were last year, I probably need to clear that up. We have just as much front downforce as we did last year, but we have more rear downforce now. You can't just add rear and not have front to go with it. That causes the car to not be balanced.
And, on the other side of the spectrum, the Ford has gotten better. We feel like they have more front downforce than they had a year ago, so that's the thing that's got us nervous. But, we've got what we've got, we've got to go
up there (to Rockingham) and max everything out that we can max out. We're going to try to do
as good a job as we can with springs, shocks and swaybars, and all the things
that make that chassis get down on that ground and stay good on long runs in race conditions.
I'm sure NASCAR is not going to make a real quick decision, even if it still don't look good at Rockingham. They're very renowned for really evaluating things from a "big picture" standpoint. If it don't look good at Rockingham, and it
don't look good at Las Vegas, then they may respond to it. Hopefully for us, if it
is unbalanced, they won't wait too long.
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