Teams taking the 'i' out of Winston Cup
by Ryan McGee, ESPN The Magazine Daytona 500, 1997.
With six laps to go, Bill Elliott is in the lead and barreling into the high-banking of Turn One. Jeff Gordon challenges for the lead by running down on the apron at the entrance of the turn, daring Elliott to come down there and block him. He does. Problem is, Terry Labonte is darting to the high side, daring Awesome Bill to come contend with his Kellogg's machine up by the wall. Elliott tries that, too.
They even wear the same shoes. Tony Stewart, left, and Bobby Labonte have created the winning model when it comes to multi-car teams in Winston Cup.
"There wasn't nothing I could do," drawls Bill at the gas pumps later. "They all just ganged up on me."
Teamwork wins. That's one of the oldest sports clichés. It's true on the court, the gridiron and the diamond. Now it may be the biggest truth on the asphalt.
In 1990, only three drivers ranked in Winston Cup's top 25 were members of a multi-car team. Ricky Rudd, Ken Schrader and Darrell Waltrip were teammates together at Hendrick, and only Rudd managed to pick up any wins with two. At the end of 1999, only four drivers ranked in Winston Cup's top 25 were not involved in a multi-car team. Two of those four are taking on teammates for 2000.
Teamwork, of course, makes perfect sense on the playing field. You block, I run. You pass, I catch. On the track, though, the roles aren't as clearly defined. Teams aren't just running with each other, they're also racing against each other. Some teams have figured out the delicate chemistry. Others haven't.
Joe Gibbs Racing was the only single-car operation to finish in the top 10 in points in both 1997 and 1998. Bobby Labonte and crew chief Jimmy Makar had developed a strong relationship and picked up seven wins together over four years. When Coach Gibbs decided it was time to bring on a second car, Labonte and Makar both resisted. Gibbs, who knows a little about motivating a team, quickly told Makar that he was the man that would have to put it together.
"That's a lot of pressure," Makar admits. "One of the hardest things to do is putting the people together who will get along and work well as a team. Until you get them together in pressure situations, working day in and day out, on the road 35 times a year as well as 12 tests, you really worry that it's not going to work."
Makar honed in on Greg Zipadelli from Jack Roush's 99 car to be the new crew chief. He was a solid crewman, but something of an unknown. The potential driver wasn't unknown, just unpredictable.
Tony Stewart had blistered every track he had ever run, from the dirt of rural Indiana to the asphalt of Indianapolis. He won the IRL title in 1997, but had developed a habit of blasting his way up front too fast and being a little too destructive with his equipment.
Labonte spent time with Stewart, and Makar spent time with both. Makar realized that he and Zipadelli subscribed to the same theories on how to run a team, how to work on a car, how to handle people. Most importantly, they both felt comfortable enough with each other to say whatever they felt like they needed to say. After weeks of mulling it over, Makar called Zipadelli from his kid's birthday party and told him that he wanted both him and Stewart on board.
Their first season together was supposed to be a tutorial. Labonte worked with Stewart and Makar worked with Zipadelli while the new No. 20 race team found itself. Surprisingly, it found itself in Victory Lane three times as Stewart enjoyed the best rookie season since Davey Allison's in 1987.
"The big thing was patience," Stewart admits. "Bobby's style of driving is to run hard, but not to rush things. He is very smooth and doesn't put himself in a position to get in trouble. Patience has never been a virtue with me, but working with Bobby has forced me to be a little smarter."
In return, the young upstarts have forced Labonte and Makar to look at things a little differently, to sharpen their focus a little more.
"I think having those guys over there, working hard, wanting to win, and running as well as they have ... well, I think it's kind of caused our team to step it up a little bit," Makar says. "The intensity level with the 18 seems to be a little higher than it has in years past, and that's showing up on the race track."
Cut from the same mold are Roush Racing's top pair of Jeff Burton and Mark Martin, who have taken the mentor-apprentice approach to a new level. They're buds. They eat together, they sit together in drivers' meetings, they speak the same language about their cars, and they both win -- a lot.
In 1997, car owner Jack Roush decided to take Martin's team, based in Liberty, N.C., and move it into the same building with Burton's team in Mooresville, about 100 miles south. Working under the same roof, the pair won seven races in 1997, nine races in 1998, and seven races in 1999.
During qualifying, whichever guy goes first immediately jumps out of his car, runs the length of pit road and passes on tips to the other. During practice, they spend as much time going back and forth to see each other in the garage as they do on the track.
"And it's not just stuff like, 'Hey, try these shocks,' or about driving the car," Burton says. "Mark's a racer's racer. He makes racing his passion. We all like what we do, but he loves what he does. I pull a lot of energy off of that. A lot of motivation."
The Gibbs and Roush duos operate with an "open book" policy. If one team hits on a killer set-up, then the other team is encouraged to check out the notes and try it for themselves. In a perfect world, all notes would be translated for all drivers. In the racing world, they aren't.
"We do have an open-book policy at Penske South," says Robin Pemberton, crew chief for Rusty Wallace, whose teammate is Jeremy Mayfield. "Unfortunately, drivers have different things they like in a car, different ways they like a car to feel. Jeremy may like a set-up to be a little more free than Rusty, or vice versa.
"We would love to build all of our cars under the same roof and use the same notes for all of them. But until Rusty and Jeremy get to where they like their cars basically the same, we can't do that."
In 1998, Rusty and Jeremy did like the same stuff. Rusty was the veteran and Jeremy the youngster. The number of times that they actually ran together on the track was remarkable, finishing within two spots of each other in five of the season's first eight races and holding down 1-2 in the point standings. But as Mayfield started to mature as a driver, he developed his own style, and the two-car operation started to become two separate operations.
"At the beginning of 1998, we were meeting all the time and comparing notes and running a lot of the same stuff, and we were right on," Wallace remembers. "Then we both just sort of started doing our own thing and kind of got lost, you know. Now I think we're getting back to that working together thing."
When drivers and teams aren't on the same page -- or can't even stand being in the same room with each other -- there's still a benefit to suiting up with a teammate.
In 1984, Junior Johnson's legendary race team with Darrell Waltrip was coming off a four-year stretch of two championships and 25 wins. Then Johnson decided to bring in a second car with Neil Bonnett.
"No one had made the two-car deal work since the '50s," Junior remembers. "Darrell, and lot of other people, didn't think it would work at all."
Eventually, the two crews became so competitive and fought so often that they had to be split apart and moved into two separate shops, and Waltrip eventually left the team. But in the meantime, the pair won 16 races and D.W. won his third championship.
The Junior Johnson experiment of the mid-'80s made the idea of teammates seem taboo and many old-school drivers still quietly resist. But the benefits and results have become too obvious to ignore.
At Hendrick Motorsports in Harrisburg, N.C., the three race teams are in separate buildings and barely on the same property. Terry Labonte's team does its thing at the top of the hill, Jeff Gordon's at the bottom and Jerry Nadeau's right in the middle.
What these separate operations do bring to each other is a sponsorship pool of cash from DuPont, Kellogg's, and Holigan Homes that could fill nearby Lowe's Motor Speedway. All three of those sponsors rank among the top 10 biggest deals in the sport, and the resulting money flow leads to an endless supply of everything.
The shop of Hendrick's head engine builder, Randy Dorton, cranks out over 500 power plants a season, thanks to computerized robots that look like something out of The Phantom Menace. The chassis department fires off cars that are tailor-made to each driver's driving style. And in the free-agent market of crewmen, Hendrick is able to add just about whomever he wants with an open payroll checkbook.
The three teams don't communicate very much because they don't have to. Don't like what you've got? Throw it out and go get something new.
"It's all about resources," says team owner Rick Hendrick. "It's learning curve times three. During practice at Charlotte for The Winston in 1995, Terry Labonte's motor broke because of a new oil design we were trying on a rod. Well, we had nine engines at the track with those rods in them. We came back over here, changed them out, and Gordon won The Winston."
At Daytona and Talladega, teamwork on the track is obvious. Teammates hook up in the draft to help each other push by or block out the competition. During the other 30 races of the season, however, the effects are much more subtle.
Some race days, crew chiefs log as many miles as the drivers, hoofing it back and forth to a teammate's pit for data swaps and friendly advice.
They'll ask each other, "What kind of fuel mileage are you getting?" or "Is your car handling as bad as ours is?" or "When are you pitting next?"
Drivers rarely ever talk to each other directly over the radio, but they do communicate through crew chiefs and spotters. "You were behind the leader on the last two restarts, and now I am. Can I get a jump on him?" Or "Can I fly home on your plane after the race?"
Open notebook, closed notebook, buddies or not, all teammates do agree on one thing. Helping each other out is good and fine, but when the white flag is shown, the philosophy is simple.
"You can talk about working with people all day long," Dale Jarrett says. "But when the chips are down, it's every man for himself. You can't trust anyone."
Just ask Mike Skinner. When he joined up with Richard Childress Racing in 1997, he became a teammate with seven-time champ Dale Earnhardt Sr. Skinner won the pole for his first race, the 1997 Daytona 500. He managed to lead lap one, but then Earnhardt smoked by, bringing a train of other cars with him. Skinner finished 12th.
In the 1998 Daytona 500, Skinner helped the Intimidator draft his way to the front, then lost touch and drifted back to eighth.
At Talladega in October, it happened again. Skinner pushed Earnhardt by Jarrett for the lead with just four laps to go, only to watch Earnhardt block him relentlessly. He lost the lead draft, and fell all the way back to 13th.
"I hated that I lost him," the Intimidator said afterwards. "We drafted to the front together, then everybody got to racing, and I was holding off the 88."
"I'm finding out the hard way that it doesn't matter who you've been talking with, or working with all day," Skinner said. "When it's time to go, all bets are off. No matter who you think your friends are, you don't have no friends in the end."
