| | 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.
When I look back at Las Vegas, one more time, it's pretty disappointing. We went to Las Vegas probably with as much optimism as any race we've run so far this year. We've had a lot of success at Las Vegas -- we ran fourth there last year and eight there the year before when I was with the 3 car. We were the best finishing Chevrolet both times so my success at Las Vegas in the first two races was pretty good.
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ABOUT THE CHANGE
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The changes NASCAR has given the Chevrolets is going to help us. If it's
going to help us a lot, I can't tell.
The bad thing about what this has done is that it helps the nose, but it hurts the rear. It unhooks the rear and it has got us a little bit nervous.
The one characteristic that I don't like about this Monte Carlo is it goes through what I call, from the technical side, a "pitching moment." When you nail one end, you unhook the other. When you hook the other end up, you uhook the other. That's a bad characteristic for a race car to have.
But we've got what we've got, and that's what I tell Mike Skinner a lot during a race. We've got to learn to work with that, work around it, and find out what it likes.
I don't think this is the long-term fix for this car. This car still needs a
major component change, in particular in the nose area, and we're continuing
to pursue that. And the good thing about it is that if we can come up with a
front nose that will make it better, then NASCAR can go back on the
valance-to-bumper length like the Pontiac and the Ford.
Let us pull the front bumper forward to where we can pull the valance forward, too, and get those headlight doors laid back like that Ford Taurus. I think that's what it's going to take long-term to get this thing competitive with all the same
elements that the other cars have, without putting a bunch of spoiler on us
or taking a bunch off them. Or letting us pull our nose two inches forward
and not letting them.
To make everybody equal, I think it's going to take a major nose change.
-- Larry McReynolds
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We had taken the car that was our favorite car last year, the car that was run a bunch -- sixth at Homestead, ninth at Atlanta, third at Charlotte, sat on the pole at Pocono. It just seemed like everywhere we unloaded this car it qualified good, it ran good and it raced good. All we did was cut the '99 body off and put the best 2000 body that we could put on it.
Everything that we've learned, to date, about the 2000 was incorporated into that car. We pushed every issue that we could push to NASCAR's rules and then a little bit further. We just tried to take advantage of everything we could. We made the most power on the chassis dyno with our qualifier than we ever left here with. I couldn't wait to get in there on Friday morning.
But by Friday afternoon after qualifying, it was like, "What in the world is going on with us? What is happening? Is it the 2000 Monte Carlo? Is it a combination of things?"
I tried to figure out which wire was unplugged. When you get something going on, if you can put your finger on it, it don't make
it any easier, but it makes it a little more understandable what's going on. When you can't figure out what in the world's going on, it's frustrating. It 's like almost trying to find a needle in a haystack.
We didn't qualify very good and one thing we've become accustomed to is qualifying good. Yeah, we made first round and I know there are teams out there that would give one of their limbs up to qualify first round every
week like we normally do. We have become accustomed and orientated and acclimated to being a top-five or top-10 qualifier. We put a lot of effort in on qualifying. So when we qualified 20th on Friday, I was concerned about
getting ready to race.
We struggled our guts out Saturday. W changed a lot of stuff about that race car. I'm not talking about just springs and shocks and sway bars. We changed spindles, moving trailing arms, a lot of different things than just springs
and shocks and sway bars. And we just never could put our finger on what was
going on. It would be easy to sit back and say the 2000 Monte Carlo ain't no
good. But we probably aren't going to get any better if we lay back and take
that attitude.
We even made another major change Sunday morning on the car based on some things that we learned last year and some things we had done on race morning that helped us at a few race tracks last year. When the race started, it was obvious we didn't make any gains with it. Maybe a little bit but not enough that it was going to make a difference.
A big thing we fought with this car all weekend long was the car would want
to be loose in (to the corners), which sometimes is not bad for Mike Skinner. If you make a
car better and better for Mike Skinner getting in the corner, and I'm not saying this is bad, he would just keep driving that thing down into the corner.
Sooner or later, the laws of physics take over. You have got to make this thing turn left and go back the other direction. You can't just keep driving it forever and ever down into the corner. Our goal is to try to make it that way but, at some point in time, again, the laws of physics overrides what the real world will let you do.
But the biggest problem was, when he would go through the center of the
corner, it would slide the front wheels and the minute he'd pick the
throttle up, it would break the rear wheels loose. So it was pushing in the
center and loose off. We could change the characteristics of it but we never
could get rid of them. The race started and I knew, even though Mike wasn't
telling me nothing, we weren't any better than we were on Saturday. We were
going backward.
I knew the rain would be a threat all day long. I'd been watching the forecast all week long and there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to rain on Sunday. I'm surprised we got run what we did. It's kinda
complicated if we go anywhere and get rained out. But somewhere like Las
Vegas, where everybody has predominantly flown commercial, it becomes real
complicated. It's not like having your private plane sitting over at the
airport and it's going to leave when you're ready.
You go into the race watching the radar and almost form your strategy to the
halfway point of the race because you know that's the goal, to get this
thing to halfway. If we get to halfway and the weather's fine, so be it. Now
we go on and move forward with strategy for the rest of the race. But we
knew it was lurking at us all day long. So, the first caution came out on
lap 21 for rain. We pitted and made major adjustments to the car. I think we
ran 24 or 25 laps under caution before finally NASCAR said, "This is not
good. We can't sit here and run to lap 134 under caution. We need to put
this thing under the red flag and see what happens."
Lo and behold, it stopped and cleared up enough to get the race back
started. We had made the car a little better through the adjustments during
the pit stop but, still, what we needed, we were a long way from. We were
still getting beat by 3/, 4/, 5/10ths a lap and that's a lot. It adds up in
a hurry. It don't take many laps for those guys to really drive away from
you.
It appeared once again that, other than Dale Earnhardt Jr., leading the race
in the early stages, just watching the bulk of Chevrolets and Jeff Gordon,
who is a pretty good benchmark for how things are, we're struggling our
behinds off and they're really struggling. They're worse than us right now.
Their luck is not very good, either, but they're struggling more severely
than we our with the 31 team. So that's a good sign that Chevrolet is in
trouble right now.
Dale Jr. ran good, Dale Sr. was pretty good, (Joe) Nemechek was one of the better Chevrolets.
But just like Rockingham, and I think it will continue unless something
drastically changes. Dale Jr. was a good model for this; the car will
run good for 15 or 20 laps, but when the tires start sliding around, that's
when the downforce kicks in and if you don't have good downforce, that's
when you're going to go backwards and that's what happened to Dale Jr.
We had a few problems in inspection on Sunday morning -- trying to push that envelope. People would say, "If you didn't have problems on Friday, why would you have problems on Sunday?" We had a little bit of a problem on
Friday and we kinda Band-Aided it.
NASCAR will work with teams a lot. They'll maybe say, "Look, we know you can't fix this right now but you need to have it better by race day." Being the competitors we are, we still try to take every advantage we can. We pecked on it a little bit more but not to the extent that we should have.
Did having to work on that front end race morning hurt or help us? It
certainly didn't help us none. How much did it hurt us? I'm sure it hurt us
some. Was it the difference between us winning and running 27th. No, probably not even the difference between 15th and 27th but it certainly did take some front downforce away from us
So our guys to the Atlanta car that was about ready to be set up and
essentially dissected the nose and put it back to where it would be to
NASCAR specifications. That's the bad news. The good news is that about the
time we got ready to put in the body shop about midday yesterday, NASCAR,
through evaluating the first three races and through looking at the wind
tunnel tests after Daytona and Rockingham, elected to try to help the Monte
Carlo going into Atlanta. The thing they elected to do is let us pull the
valance forward below the front bumper two-and-a-half inches.
For a fan, they may say, "Now, isn't that unfair to the other cars, making them stay at
a half inch and letting the Chevrolet go to two-and-a-half?" I think the
real deceiving factor there is that NASCAR has measurements that they take
off these cars from the 10-inch point of the roof, which is where our roof
height is measured, 10 inches back from the windshield to the very front tip
of the nose. This Monte Carlo is two-and-a-half inches shorter in that area
than the Pontiac and quite a bit shorter than the Ford Taurus.
So, even though in Atlanta we'll have more pitch in our valance, if you take that
measurement that NASCAR looks at from the 10-inch point to the front of our
valance, now we'll be within a window of the Ford Taurus and the Pontiac. I
know you always want an advantage. If you didn't want an advantage, you
wouldn't want to be a racer. But all Larry McReynolds wants is to feel our
hands aren't tied behind our backs. Give us the opportunity to go to Atlanta
and be on the same level with everybody else, from the aerodynamics, and let
it be up to our engine guys, to myself and our guys setting the race car up,
and to Mike Skinner, to go out and determine if we run good or run bad.
When you've got an aero deficiency, Mike Skinner can only drive the car so hard,
our engine guys can only make so much power and we can only dig in the
spring and shock and sway bar cabinets so much. You're not going to overcome
a lack of downforce. Yeah, you may take yourself from running 15th to 10th
but I don't think these Chevrolets are capable of winning a race.
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ALSO SEE
NASCAR changes aerodynamic rules
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