Rusty Wallace and Larry Carter won the Bud Pole for last year's All-Star Challenge and finished ninth in the race. Credit: Autostock

Shop Talk with... Larry Carter

The Nextel All-Star Challenge at Lowe's Motor Speedway is, by definition, a shootout among NASCAR's top stars that features wide-open, no-holds-barred racing action. Special Challenge-only cars are built, and the drivers revel in the chance to race with no point penalty hanging over their heads should they write a check their talent can't cash.

For a crew chief, however, the challenge is to build a car that will allow his driver to do all the things he normally doesn't during the course of a points-paying weekend, yet still have enough of the regular setup to make it worthwhile for the following week's Coca-Cola 600.

	Credit: Autostock
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Remembering famous cars that made appearances in the All-Star Challenge and were, strangely, never seen again, you can start and stop with T-Rex, the car that was so good NASCAR told Hendrick Motorsports never to bring it to the track again. It is doubtful that anything like that will ever make another showing at Lowe's for the money race, given the new rules and NASCAR's somewhat dim view of excessive fits of imagination.

So, pragmatism dictates that you use the All-Star as a test session of sorts, hoping to find an edge for the week after, when the points again become a factor. Of course, winning the Challenge could pay for a lot of test sessions, so there is a competitive balance that must be struck.

Larry Carter, Rusty Wallace's crew chief, says the challenge for him is to concentrate solely on race trim from the word go, just like they do every weekend there's an impound race.

What is the key to setting up a car for the Nextel All-Star Challenge?

Mainly, when you go there for the All-Star race, you're mainly concerned with race trim. Qualifying is not as important as getting the car dialed in for race trim. We try to use it as a tool to get ready for the 600. We work on our race setup and see what we can learn and move on with to the 600.

Is there a lot of experimentation, setup-wise, on the Challenge car?

The two cars that we're taking are pretty close to identical, so hopefully the stuff we learn on the first car we can apply to the second car for the 600.

What is the most important thing to have in a car for Charlotte?

I think you have to have a really good aero balance. Anywhere we go that's really fast, like Texas or Charlotte or places like that, aero balance and having a good engine are pretty key elements in being successful there.

Aero balance is what, exactly?

You don't want the car to have too much rear downforce or too much in the front. We try to build our cars at a balance Rusty seems to like, and we know what area, how he likes his car to feel. We can tell by a lot of things we do in the wind tunnel and the results we get from the wind tunnel, that kind of tells us what that aero balance is and we can make a decision if that would be a car Rusty would like or not.