Gibbs team looking to get back on track

By Stephen Thomas, CNNSI.com
April 9, 2001
6:39 PM EDT (2239 GMT)

Feel sorry for Mark Cronquist -- the poor guy hasn't had a decent night's sleep in months. You see, Cronquist is the engine builder for Joe Gibbs Racing.

Flash back to last year, when the 35-year-old was on top of the world: his engines drove Tony Stewart to a series-leading six wins and Bobby Labonte to another four and, oh yeah, a Winston Cup title. But even more significant, at least to an engine builder, Labonte had zero DNFs in 2000 (while Stewart had five, only one resulted from engine failure).

Joe Gibbs Racing is battling bad luck with engines. Jon Ferrey/ALLSPORT

Fast forward to 2001, when, just seven races into the season, Labonte had already endured three DNFs, his first since August of 1999. Two of the DNFs came because of bad engines (of Stewart's two DNFs, one resulted from engine failure). Heading to Martinsville for the season's eighth race, the defending Cup champion stood 25th in points while Stewart was a marginally-better 17th.

Cronquist and the entire Gibbs organization are all working on that part of it -- while they all accept that some amount of bad luck is an inevitable byproduct of racing, they haven't yet come to accept the significant increase in failures that has bedeviled the teams thus far in 2001.

"We're doing nothing different than what we run last year," Cronquist says. "It's the same group of guys, same parts ... we have no idea. Something's changed and we haven't figured it out yet. We've checked every procedure in the shop, we just don't know what it is."

Like Cronquist -- "Trust me, I ain't slept too good since that first [engine failure]", he says -- team owner Gibbs is frustrated by the glut of problems. "Our deal is, we think we have real good race teams," Gibbs says. "We haven't made any changes [to either team], we've just had mechanical problems ... and it's really hurt us four times. You get no guarantees, but that's why we love [racing]. It's just a matter of us identifying [those problems]."

While Gibbs maintains that no one in the organization has allowed the bad streak to adversely impact their efforts, he admits that the problems are worrisome. "I don't care what the problem is," he says, "it always would concern me. I think when you've got a series of problems it highlights where you've got a problem and we're working real hard on that. So we're working to solve those problems."

But if there's any one thing that appears to frustrate Cronquist the most, it's that he has yet to discover any logical reason for the teams' hard luck.

That's the funny part about this," he says. "It's all the same stuff we had last year. You put last year's stuff next to this year's stuff, everything looks the same, every piece looks like it's out of the same motor. Tony won five of his six races with this stuff in his car and this year we can't even finish a 500-mile race with it."

Bobby Labonte was eighth at Martinsville.

The engine builder continues, if not trying to convince his listener that he agrees that something strange is at work, then at least striving to convince himself.

"In Vegas and Atlanta we broke some valve springs that Tony had raced about 15 races last year," he says. "In Texas, we had a connecting rod break. That's probably the flukiest deal we ever saw -- we went 6 1/2 years without breaking one. In Atlanta we didn't practice the motor because we think 'okay, both cars ran this stuff at Atlanta last year, both cars finished, everything looked great.' And then Bobby's engine lets go."

Cronquist and Gibbs and everyone associated with Joe Gibbs Racing (but especially Cronquist) are likely hopeful that Sunday's Virginia 500 signals the end of their long run of bad luck.

Not only did both drivers finish, but they both finished well -- Stewart was seventh to Labonte's eighth. And if the fact that it was a 500-lap race as opposed to a 500-mile race dampens its significance any, at least now, Cronquist might finally get a good night's sleep.