Rusty Wallace and Dale Jarrett Talk About Bristol, 2002

RUSTY WALLACE—2—Miller Lite Taurus—“Just good handling race cars, good pit stops and just a real love for the race track, I’d say. It’s been one of my favorite tracks, won here a lot of times and cut my teeth on the short tracks back in the Midwest when I first started racing. Bristol just really suits my driving style. Plus all the car dealerships I’ve got in east Tennessee, all my friends and family come up here, it’s a big deal, a lot of fun.”

DOES WORKING ON YOUR CAR AND KNOWING YOUR CAR AS WELL AS YOU DO HELP HERE? “I think it really helps. I think everybody needs to know their car in order to be real, real successful, and I think it’s very, very important to do that. A lot of guys just drive the car, but I tend to drive the car and pay a lot of attention to the chassis, the setup and stuff like that. I think it’s been real gratifying for me to do that.”

DID THE RAIN DURING THE TEST HERE HAVE ANY EFFECT ON WHAT YOU WERE ABLE TO PUT TOGETHER FOR THS WEEKEND? “Yeah, it really did. I wanted to come up here and test real bad. This is a track that I wanted to test at and get a better handle on, because I’ve always run good but I wanted to come up here and make sure I run good. And the test got rained out and we weren’t able to test. And right off the bat yesterday we had some real strange things happen. We were practicing and all of sudden I hear one of the guys holler and I look down and the right-front A-frame is all bent in half. It bent all by itself. So, we changed it and put another one on and it bent, too. So, we spent a lot of time working with these bent A-frames, and I started looking down pit road and six or eight guys started bending ’em. This new tire that we run last year is a little harder, you get into the corners different and it’s a little harder in the right-front corner, the suspension. We won’t notice any of that in the race because after you soften the springs up it’s not as aggressive. If we would’ve tested we would’ve solved all those problems and figured everything out, but we didn’t get to do it. And I told them, ‘I think the guy that I’m gonna have to beat up there is probably Gordon,’ and he was able to test and he got the pole, so that was just unfortunate we got stuck in the rain.”

YOUR TEAMMATE HAS A VERY GOOD START. WHAT HAS THE 12 TEAM BEEN ABLE TO DO? “Honestly, really hardly nothing. Their setups are quite a bit different than what I run, and there’s two races this year that I tried to run the different qualifying setups that I normally run in trying to learn some of the stuff that Ryan ran fast with and I just couldn’t get comfortable with that. And because of that I took two provisional starting positions. That’s because I went off my normal qualifying setup that I normally run at those race tracks, and both of those tracks that I qualified bad this year I was in the top 10 last year. So, I just really shot myself right in the foot, and I went right back to the normal stuff at last week Darlington and had a decent qualifying run. And yesterday, qualifying, I was just not tight enough. The new rules have got the cars with more air-dam in the front which gives you more front downforce, and the deck lid rules that they had got a little less downforce in the back, so the cars were looser this year and I had to run a little more sway bar, more spring, a lot of things different, and it had me a little nervous about doing some of those things yesterday when I was getting off the normal routine that I normally do here at Bristol. But, because of that, I paid a little bit in qualifying. Again, that’s the reason I wanted to come up to this place and test because of the major changes that I saw in the body and the tire and things like that. But, all in all, the finishes, have been strong. I mean, I’ve come from the back to the front every doggone race, you know. Darlington was a real good run, got right up there and had a good finish. Probably the most dramatic one was Atlanta. We came from dead to the back to the front, at the very end got up to third, fell back to fourth and then fell back to sixth eventually. Vegas was another run. The Daytona 500, I really though we could’ve won that race. We were running third almost all day long there. So the cars have really, really been strong, and the neat thing is that Ryan’s car and my car have finished almost bumper to bumper in all these races. So they’ve been very, very close, even with dramatically different chassis setups in them. But the neat thing about it is the engines are the same, the cars are the same. But you can still change the springs and the shocks and that’s what we do.”

ARE YOU MORE HESITANT TO MAKE CHANGES THAN YOU WERE IN THE PAST? “I’m open-minded but I’m more conservative than most, probably. I’d rather ease into it, and when I see some things that are just a lot different than what' I’m accustomed to I’m pretty skeptical to go to it. But then again, I was very, very open-minded going into two of these tracks, going into Vegas and going into Atlanta, I guess, because of how Ryan tested, so I just immediately put that in there and I kept telling myself, ‘Man, I can’t run that. I never been able to run stuff like that.’ And I did and I about busted my ass. But then again, there’s a lot of stuff that they’re doing that I have learned some things from. And there are other things – for instance, Ryan brought my setup here. His car was identical to my car when we unloaded, and he out-qualified me by a little bit here. But, still, each driver has to adjust to what he feels most comfortable with.”

TRACK POSITION, TIRE WEAR, FRESH TIRES, ELLIOTT SADLER WON LAST YEAR BY NOT STOPPING, AND A LONGER PIT ROAD. “The pit road is something I don’t really know what’s gonna happen yet. I gotta tell you, if I had a bad qualifying run and I had to be on the back straightaway I wouldn’t be near as concerned. In fact, I told my guys, ‘You know what? I really think that that back straightaway end pit could very well be the best pit in the place. That could be the very best pit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a race got won from that pit. Because, I wouldn’t want to be the number one guy in because then your pit stop will get done in, say, 15, 16 seconds and as you get ready to pull out, there’ll still be cars coming in. But at the very end, if you were down there, I think you can get your pit stop done and get gone and you wouldn’t have any traffic leaving and that could be a real, real good deal, no doubt about that. Back to the tire, we all know Goodyear builds a good tire, but in my opinion, it’s too hard for this race. I like all race tracks when the tire wears and the handling starts to go away and that’s where you start being able to pass. But if the tire never wears out, we just find ourselves running bumper to bumper around here, and that’s what happened last year. We got that same compound of tire back, and we’ll just have to see again, but it runs for a long, long, time and nobody’s handling falls out and thus creates no passing, and that’s not a good deal. The fresh tires don’t a whole – they do do a little bit for a short period of time.”

WHAT ABOUT A SOFTER TIRE FOR THE COLD, LIKE AT NEW HAMPSHIRE LAST YEAR? “ It’s going to be a little bit warmer tomorrow. I hear that it’s going to be in the 60s tomorrow. Every day is gradually getting warmer and warmer. I was real surprised yesterday to find out how cold it was out there, even with the sticker tire, the first corner the car was hooked up. It was skatin’ and slidin’ all over the place, so that’s a good sign. I don’t think that cold tire’s gonna be a real issue. And as hard as this tire is, cold temperatures, I don’t think it’s gonna be as big of an issue as I thought it was going to be.”

HEADING INTO TEXAS AND CALIFORNIA, CARS ARE SO AERODYNAMIC NOW, CAN YOU DEFINE WHAT THAT FEELS LIKE TO THE DRIVER AND THE DIFfERENCE WITH THIS LITTLE GIFT THAT THEY GAVE THE FORDS BEFORE THE SEASON? “Well, I didn’t know we got anything before the season. That has nothing to do with Texas or California, that was just rear-spoiler reduction going into, you know, as the transition went all through Speed Weeks and everything. And I was real happy to hear the other day that they’re not going to make any changes whatsoever for Talladega versus Daytona, which I think that’s be good, because our cars ran pretty good in the race. But we did get a one more inch kickout on the front air dam on the downforce tracks versus last year. And that’s one thing I noticed that’s made a pretty good change. I’ve had to tighten our race cars up because of that. And I think I found a little of that yesterday, even at this short race track. But the aero push is just something that’s a real pain in the butt. When you go out there, you’re running real good and all of sudden you pull in behind a car and this real good grip you had in the front end, all of sudden it goes away and the front end starts sliding on you and you can’t seem to pass a car. And that’s what’s called the aero push. You got a real good sticky front end by yourself and you get behind a car and that’s gone. And you gotta have air to create downforce, but sometimes, I think, we got too much downforce on the back and not enough on the front because this aero push is more dominant.”

MIKE HELTON SUGGESTED LAST WEEK THERE MIGHT BE TWO SETS OF RULES, ONE FOR LIKE ATLANTA AND HIGH-BANKED TRACKS, AND ANOTHER ONE FOR LIKE INDIANAPOLIS AND CALIFORNIA, THE LOW-BANKED TRACKS. “Well, maybe so. Maybe the air dams would be something they’d change for places like that. I just wish the tire would get a little softer. This hard, hard tire is something that I don’t like because it’s just causes single-file racing.”

HOW? “It doesn’t wear out. It doesn’t wear, it just runs forever and everybody runs the same speed. Everybody sets their car up differently, and some guys fall of more than others. But when the tire doesn’t wear out, none of the cars fall off, and everybody tends to find themselves running bumper to bumper. I’ve never in my life been to Bristol where guys run 140-some laps on tires. That just doesn’t happen. That’s part of the excitement at Bristol, the pit stops, the passing, the excitement. When you just don’t pull off the race track and you stay running around in circles it’s just not cool.”

DON’T THE TIMES FALL OFF ON OLD TIRES? “No, not much. They don’t fall off as much as the softer tires, that’s for sure. And they sure don’t wear as much.”

IS THE AERO PUSH BECAUSE THE CARS ARE MORE AERODYNAMIC? “I think the aero push is because the cars have gotten a lot more downforce in the back than they’ve ever had. I don’t think we need that much downforce. If you remember three or four years ago, we went back to, I can’t remember the exact number but I’m gonna say, five-and-a-half-inch tall rear spoiler. And that was too loose. When you get side by side with a car you get spun out. A lot of guys were doing that. We’d be in practice. At Michigan four or fives years ago, Earnhardt and I went into turn one together, I was underneath him. My car kicks sideways up into him, he crashed, I didn’t. And then the year before that, the same thing happened with him and some fellows down in three and four in Michigan. We needed a little bit more downforce, but we went from five and a half all the way up to like six and a half. We need to be somewhere in the middle.”

IS THERE A CONCERN FOR FORD DRIVERS THAT THEY MADE A CHANGE FOR THE CHEVROLETS GOING INTO TEXAS? “No, that doesn’t concern me. That was a real minor change. Everybody likes to put their bodies forward, backwards, and overall length of the car, it might be something small, but I don’t think it’s something huge.”

AERODYNAMICS IMPORTANT AT A TRACK LIKE BRISTOL NOW? “Absolutely. We’re running 130-some miles an hour in the straightaways here, and I think aerodynamics at that speed are very important. I’ve seen a lot of guys with front ends torn up in the race, still digging along and doing okay, but qualifying, when you’re talking about from the number one position to last position only being a half second apart, aerodynamics are very, very important.”

WERE AERODYNAMICS AS IMPORTANT AT BRISTOL, SAY, 10 YEARS AGO? “Not near as much. It’s more important to build a nice lightweight car than an aerodynamic car, I would think most people would think. But now everybody’s building lightweight cars and very, very aerodynamic cars trying to create all the downforce you possibly can on a short track.”

DOES THE LEADER HAVE TROUBLE LAPPING CARS? LAST WEEK THERE SEEMED TO BE SOME PROBLEMS. WHAT ABOUT HERE? “You gotta remember, I guess, the guy that’s getting lapped, he’s not wanting to get lapped, and he’s not in a good mood because his old hot rod’s not running too good that day. He’s probably not the most jolly guy out there at that particular point. When you’re lapping a guy, you can’t get real aggressive with him because he’s not in a good mood anyway, and you gotta give him some respect but you gotta know where to pass and when to pass, how long to follow, how long not to follow. And I think every driver is different that I have to deal with out there on the race track. I understand their personalities are all different. There are some that are just a pain in the rear end to pass. There’s no respect out there. They’d rather fight you for 20th position instead of just get out of the way and fall in line. I found it’s much, much better if I’m getting lapped, man, a guy catches me, to let him go and then tuck right in his bumper so we both don’t lose time. But if guy’s who lapping you just keeps wrestling with you and wrestling with you and all of sudden you’re looking ahead of you and the guys are driving away and the guys in your mirror are getting closer, it’s ridiculous to race that way, but it does tend to happen a lot that way, and some guys are more courteous than others. But it creates aero pushes, it creates loss of patience, it creates a lot of instances out there.”

ARE YOU MORE COURTEOUS THAN YOU WERE AS A YOUNGER DRIVER? “Yeah, I think I’m a pretty courteous fellow. When I race with Mark Martin and Jeff Burton, even when I used to race with Earnhardt of late, I think we all understand that we’re not gaining any ground by racing each other when you’re getting lapped. You just gotta get out and get back in line, keep a single-file line and get truckin’ to the front so you don’t lose much time.”

HOW IS THE COMMUNICATION WITH YOUR NEW CREW CHIEF? ARE THINGS GETTING BETTER BETWEEN YOU TWO? “They’ve never, ever been bad, ever. My crew chief and I, Billy Wilburn, were probably best of friends. He’s been with me a long, long time, over 10 or 12 years, total, and he works real good with me. I guess I’ve had to keep him getting more aggressive with the guys at the shop. With two teams we’ve got just an abundance of cars, a lot of cars, and when I need something done – the car I brought up here is a good car but it’s not exactly what I wanted and I told him, ‘I wish we could’ve tested so we could’ve found this out,’ and we paid a little bit yesterday in qualifying. I think this is one of the worst qualifying runs I’ve ever had at Bristol. I’m always in the top-five or top-six or something like that. I’ve told Billy get in there and if I need a new car and the fabricators are saying, hey, this is what we can’t do, just tell we don’t use no for an answer. I got him real aggressive with the people to get the pieces and parts done. There’s a lot of work going on back there right now, we’ve got over 110 people working for us. We’re not accustomed to two teams, but we’re learning and it’s just a lot of work to get these old hot rods ready to go.”

MORE ON BILL WILBURN. “He’s not going to change me much. He’s a new crew chief, but he’s staying behind Ryan Pemberton now for eight years. Billy might have some different ideas on what he’d like to see done, you know, but there’s not a whole lot that I’m going to change. But I do listen to what he says because he does have a different opinion. He was always screaming and hollering up there on top of the tool box, disagreeing with Robin a whole lot of times. Now I say let’s try it. Where were we at not too long ago? I think we were at Daytona, I don’t know, one of these runs where we put two tires and we should’ve put four tires, and I said, ‘Now you know what it feels like.’ Because Robin would make those mistakes every now and then, doing two when he should’ve done four or four when he should’ve done two or pit when we shouldn’t have pitted. But that’s a hard decision to make sometimes. I really think Billy’s doing a great job. I was on his butt last weekend. We had great pit stops at the beginning of the year and all of a sudden last week our pit stops were horrible, they were like in the 15- and 16-second bracket and I said, ‘What is going on?’ I looked up one time, my jack man fell over a tire, was rolling on pit road, lug nuts were falling off, lug nuts were falling off, all hell was breaking loose. I said, ‘I can’t have that going into Bristol, man.’ I said, ‘ I gotta be spot on,’ and so all week long, they practiced all week, changed stuff around and they came right back to low 13s, 13.20s, 13.30s, just consistent, and I said, ‘You all better not forget what you did. Let’ not screw it up this week.’ They’ll be fine. I’m confident. The one neat thing I like about him, the one big job I gave him when he came with us was ‘I want world-class pit stops. I want you to be my lead guy to have the fastest doggone pit stops you can get out there.’ Because he’s been the number-one right-front tire changer forever. His peers have always voted him number one as being the very fastest guy, and now Billy’s not doing that, he’s on top of the box. But everytime we have a bad stop he’s ready jump off the box and shove the guys out of the way and do it himself, which he could still do it.”

IT’S BEEN ALMOST ONE YEAR SINCE YOUR LAST WIN… “Yeah, well it’s been real frustrating, but I think that thing will come around real quick, I do. We got a lot of brand-new cars coming out, we’ll have a brand-new car for Richmond, we’ll have a new car for Pocono, we’ll have a new car for Charlotte. We got two new speedway cars completed. We’re gonna test here for the second race. We’ll be back here testing – because I want to win that night race, bad, because this is one of my favorite places. I’m taken one of my best cars to California, taking one of my best cars to Texas, I’ll be testing there. Nowadays, when you look at the competition, it just gets tougher every year. I would’ve never though we’d have 19 different winners last year, like we did. There were guys who won races last year that I never dreamed would’ve won races. It is tougher, but the good thing is, when I look at last year, you know, you can look at the wins or whatever, but I look at how the car ran, all the time, thick and thin. We led the second-most amount of laps last year. We led a ton of laps. You look at those two doggone Richmond races, they got away from me. Right there, lead 295 laps or something in each race and lose it right at the very end. That Kansas City win got away from me, I sped leaving pit road with a half lap lead. Go into Michigan last year in the second race, had a 35-car length lead and blew an engine. But the performance is there, the old hot rod’s running up front and leading races, and I just gotta bring it home. But if I was just out there in the back of the pack all the time, or if I was seventh, eighth, whatever, I’d go, ‘Man, this is not getting it,’ but it’s fast, it’s been fast. One thing I gotta do is get my qualifying better.”

DALE JARRETT—88—UPS Taurus—WHAT DO YOU EXPECT WITH THE NEW PIT ROAD RULE? I don’t think any of us have any idea. It has to be better since I qualified way back, I’m glad that they changed it now. You’ve gotta feel like you’ve at least got better chance. Whether it works or not, we’ll see, but at least they made an effort to do something. And the way that it is is just a gap there, it’s just basically one pit road, and you just have a gap in-between. As long as they can monitor the pit-road speed there in-between turns three and four, I think everything should work out and hopefully it will equal things up quite a bit.”

ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT RUNNING INTO OTHER CARS? THERE ARE ONLY TWO LANES OUT THERE. IT’LL BE NARROW. “It’s up to the drivers to do their job and make sure that you can do that. I don’t see that being a problem. You just have to understand with the way things are, people are going to be pulling out. There’s going to be guys on the backstretch, they’re gonna be finished with their pit stops before these guys even get to their pit stalls over here, but you’ll just have to watch and be careful, and guys pulling out are going to have to understand that there are going to be people coming and you just can’t go straight out to the wall or you’re going to create a bad situation.”

THE PROBLEM OF BLOCKING PIT ROAD IS A PROBLEM AT MARTINSVILLE, IT COULD BE A PROBLEM HERE. “Could be, but there again, if we do our job like we’re capable of doing and like we should do, knowing that pit road is really not where we need to be racing. That happens on the race track. I think NASCAR will emphasis that. This is definitely wider than what Martinsville is, so we get by there, I think we can do it here.”

DOES IT SURPRISE YOU THAT GUYS LIKE YOURSELF AND RICKY RUDD AND RUSTY AND MARK MARTIN HAVEN’T PICKED UP THE WINS YET OR HAVEN’T AT LEAST BEEN CHALLENGING FOR WINS? “No, because the names that you mentioned there, other than Ricky a few times towards the end but not towards the very end of last year, we weren’t very good then – not on a consistent basis. We put ourselves in a position to win a few times, but you can’t expect over the winter that everything is going to be great unless you came out and found something, and I can’t honestly say that we’ve found exactly what we need to do to be more consistent and challenge for wins. We have to do that before we can think about it. We’ve got to get ourselves into the top five before we can even think about that. And we’ve done that a couple of times, but we’ve had things happen that don’t show that we were going to even get to that point.”

TWO DNF’S THIS EARLY IN THE SEASON IS UNCHARACTERISTIC. HOW DO YOU COMBAT THAT? JUST TRY TO FIND A HAPPY MEDIUM BEWEEN HORSEPOWER AND RELIABILITY? “Last week had nothing to do with reliability or anything, that’s just bad luck. Something comes up and chews the belt up on the oil pump, you can’t call that, obviously we’re out because it locked the engine up, but it wasn’t anything that had to do with the rule or anything else. That was gonna happen if we’d have had a fresh engine in. It’s just unfortunate. The first one, we know the problem, what happened there and we’ve taken the steps to remedy that. So we’re not backing off on our engine stuff at all, we’re just trying to ensure that nothing else does happen. We know that you’re gonna have some type of problems, whether they be bad or something on the race track accident-related, you’re gonna have problems. We just can’t have any more within the next 31 races.”

HOW DO YOU GET THAT MOMENTUM BACK. HOW DO YOU TELL YOURSELF, ‘I’M A CHAMPION. I CAN GET OUT THERE AND DO THAT’? “You can talk and say and do all you want, but you gotta go out and perform, and that’s the bottom line. We’ve got to get our program better. Ricky or myself, either one, we’re not running the way we’re capable of running. I can sit here and tell you my car last week, we started back, we made it better after the first pit stop and we were in the top-10 when we had problems and I feel like with one more change that I could’ve been very good. But, anybody could’ve come in here and sit and say that, so, until you go out and do it and we’ve gotta do that. Right now, there’s something that we’re missing. The thing that we’ve all talked about is we’ve gotta be careful when you get in these situations that you don’t start taking a lot of chances. We don’t feel like we’re that far off, we just need to keep making some changes to hopefully make our race teams better to where we once again are contending. But, you gotta understand right now that things are very, very tough out here. You miss just a little bit like we did at Atlanta, ran fourth, fifth and sixth all day and we made a slight adjustment at the end and it made my car not very good and went from having a chance to finish in the top five to I couldn’t even finish in the top 10. You’ve got to understand, it’s very, very difficult. There are a lot of good race teams that are performing at a higher level now and you really have to be on your game to be up there week in and week out. Obviously, Sterling and a few others have got that figured out and they’re doing that, and that’s what’s gonna make it difficult to beat them. But we’re not going to give up. We’ve got a long way to go.”

ON WORKING WITH NEW CREW CHIEF JIMMY ELLEDGE. “It’s a work in progress. You can change titles all you want to but what has happened is, I mean there’s still a lot’s the same, we’ve moved responsibilities around a little bit. Todd’s still in charge of everything. There are things that Jimmy has taken off of him that’s allowing him to concentrate more on our chassis stuff and that’s what Todd’s the best at. We’re still defining who’s responsibilities are what and working through all of that, but I think in the long run and hopefully in a short period of time all of that will be worked out and it will be for the betterment of our race team.”