Tech Q&A: Mike Ford

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- Ray Evernham has taken a different approach to his NASCAR Winston Cup team. The three-time Winston Cup champion crew chief has assembled one of the most technically minded teams in the sport.

Evernham's teams do as much, if not more, engineering than any team out there. Evernham Motorsports is even different in its organizational structure. There are no crew chiefs on his team, only team directors. And lead engineers. And lead mechanics.

	Mike Ford

Has the new approach worked? Results are mixed. Bill Elliott won once in Evernham's first season, and then Elliott won twice -- including the prestigious Brickyard 400 -- with four poles in 2002.

But Evernham's second team has struggled. Between Casey Atwood and Jeremy Mayfield, the No. 19 car has had three top-five finishes. And this season, neither Elliott nor Mayfield is running particularly well.

But the team is going to the site of one of Elliott's poles last year, Texas Motor Speedway. NASCAR.com recently talked with crew chief -- er, team director -- Mike Ford about Texas, about Elliott and about Evernham Motorsports.

A lot of the talk last year was the new pavement and how fast the speeds were. Do you expect a lot of wear and tear and the speeds to come down?

Yeah, absolutely. If you look at each race track, especially the mile-and-a-half ovals, the fastest that they are are on the fresh pavement. There's a lot of grip and you don't have any imperfections in the surface. If you look at Chicago, Kansas, you go the first year, and the track's incredibly fast. Texas got repaved last year and was incredibly fast. I would imagine this year, after a year of sun and weather on the track, it will have some imperfections, and the grip will go away.

What do you do to compensate for the lack of grip? Is it through aero stuff or are there mechanical things you can do?

You always want to max out your aero, regardless of your grip. To say you'd make any aero changes, you really wouldn't do that. It's pretty much mechanical at that point. Your corner entry is where you first feel a difference in the grip, so your front spring splits, your swaybar will be affected on entry. When you get back in the throttle, if the track has given up grip, you'll have a tendency to be a little free, so you'll work with your rear spring splits and things like that. The center of the corner is not that big of a change, other than total grip. But your transitions, your entry and exits, are affected more.

When you say front spring splits, you mean the difference in the spring rates?

Yes, the rates left to right will change.

One of your team's biggest strengths is qualifying. Is that a tribute to preparation once you leave the shop and having the car good once you get to the track?

	Credit: Autostock

Everything we do has to do with preparation. If you look back through Bill's career, he's been a good qualifier. We feel like we've got a package. We understand qualifying a lot better than the race. One thing in qualifying you don't take into account is what happens with the tires over a period of time. In the race, that's the biggest question mark that not a lot of people have solid answers for.

Bill's one of the older drivers. There seems to be a lot of talk these days that some of the older guys haven't been able to adapt to how technology has dictated setups. Is his success a tribute to him being open-minded and his willingness to try new things?

I think so, yes. He's extremely open-minded. Very rarely will he not let you try something. Sometimes you do need an explanation because as things evolve, he has to rethink how he drives the race car. He needs to know the goal of where you're trying to be so he can adapt to it as well. But he is very flexible.

Your title is team director as opposed to crew chief on some other teams. Is there any difference between what other crew chiefs do and what you do?

The structure of the sport dictates what that position is. I look at it as a title. The work is still the same.

How much do you actually touch the car?

Not nearly as much as I'd like. It's odd, the thing that gets you to where you are, once you get there, you don't do anymore. Very rarely, maybe once every couple of weeks, do I even get pick up a wrench. The majority of my time is spent in the office, reviewing notes, planning for month's ahead, spending time in the fab shop, body shop, trying to get ahead so you don't pull the long hours a lot of teams have done in the past.

	Credit: Autostock

Is Ray's organization structure really that much different than some other teams? And if it is, how has it helped you guys?

I haven't been on that many teams to be able to know how a lot of them are structured. I know we're engineering-based. We put a lot of emphasis on engineering. If anything, that's probably something that's different than other teams. The structure, I really don't know if it's different from other teams.

Is the structure so that you're still making the final decisions? Are you the final say as far as the car?

Yeah, definitely. As hard-headed as I am, I won't let things go. I'm open-minded to discussion between the team engineer and the crew chief. You're in the hot spot as far as knowing everything that's happening with the car at all times and the team at all times. To have the decisions come anywhere from other than that, I don't think that would be a wise decision.

That's a lot of pressure. Like you said, you have to keep an eye on everything.

That's what's taken the sport to the next level: the attention to detail. The tolerances continue to tighten. The people who keep the tightest tolerances have success. In doing that, in the position where the pressure comes from, you have to be on top of absolutely everything. You're the one who ties all the systems together.

Do you guys feel you're as technical as most teams? Or maybe even more so?

I'd say absolutely, positively more so.

What are some of those areas?

Pretty much everything we do on the race car is engineering based. When we started the race team, we built a car, and all the changes from there have come from engineering, proven facts -- not from people's opinions. We have evolved. The race car is a machine. Things are black and white. Opinions don't go into race cars. That's where engineering has helped us. That's why I say we're above and beyond where most teams are, as far as engineering.

Is it difficult to stay ahead of the curve, so to speak, as far as engineering? When you want to make a change, there has to be a process involved in testing out that change.

Absolutely. The thing that you fight is time. The hard-core racer will run through eight or 10 changes and find one that works. The engineer will take that amount of time and prove his theory to be right. You end up in the same spot. It's how fast you can get there and how accurate you can be when you do get there. If you have engineers that are hard-core racers, you get there quicker with better answers.