Around the Track: Infineon

Infineon Raceway is one of two road courses that Nextel Cup Series competitors face during the season.

The site of Sunday's Dodge/Save Mart 350 -- formerly known as Sears Point Raceway -- is the sole dedicated road course operated by Speedway Motorsports Inc., which also operates a number of oval venues visited by the Nextel Cup Series.

Infineon is a 1.99-mile course with 10 turns of varying radii and numerous elevation changes. The course has undergone numerous changes in its 17-year Cup history in an attempt to continually improve the racing.

I think all of us have been guilty of maybe going down some country roads faster than we needed to. But Infineon is truly a really, really cool road course. It kind of is like driving through the mountains or something.

You have these huge elevation changes, real sharp corners and a lot of low-speed corners.

	Credit: Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images
	JEFF BURTON •   Driver Page •   2005 Stats •   Article Archive

It is, much more than Watkins Glen, something that you would think of, if you were mimicking a really tight back road when you were driving something faster than you should have been driving it, for sure.

Certainly, Infineon is different, but at the same time it's still driving a car as fast you can drive it and paying attention to where you need to hit your marks, where you need to brake because those kinds of things are real important.

But it is different. Obviously, if you watch road course drivers who do it all the time, they do it better than someone who doesn't do it all the time.

But certainly we've seen that the Cup regulars are plenty capable of running with the best road course drivers out there, and I think that's because they come in and they get in our equipment, and that's their disadvantage.

So it is a different mind-set, but if you go into it thinking that everything is going to be totally different, I think that's the wrong approach.

I've always gone into it understanding that the racetrack's different, but it's still similar equipment to what we normally run.

Getting the thing to turn well, not spinning the rear wheels and having good brakes -- the same as what you need at Martinsville, is the same thing that you need at Infineon except you're turning in different directions.

How you approach qualifying depends on where you are in practice.

Weekend WeatherCNN/Headline News forecasts the weather in Sonoma FedEx PreviewNBC/TNT's Marty Snider previews all the action at Infineon Sonoma 2004Watch highlights of Jeff Gordon's win at last year's Dodge/ Save Mart 350 Sign up for TrackPass now and earn Fan Miles BUY YOUR NEXTEL DRIVER PHONE

If you feel like you can go out there and run a safe lap and still qualify well, then that's what you do. If you've got to go out there and lay it on the edge to pick your speed up, then that's what you do.

Because we don't have a lot of road course experience, it depends. And there is a certain extent of going out there trying not to make a mistake, because if you go out there and run well and don't make a mistake -- you can have a good finish.

But in qualifying, to qualify well you have got to lay it out there and you've got to go for it. You've got to be an aggressive driver when it comes to qualifying.

The thing with driving a road course is that it's a lot like golf. Your last corner is done -- it's over -- finished. You've got to pay attention to the next one.

If you're worried about what you did for the corner before, you'll get yourself in trouble. If you miss a corner, you miss it, and you have to adapt and do whatever you do to get yourself lined up for the next corner.

But you can't try to make it up. You have got to try to get the most you can out of every corner. If you try to do more than you can normally do, then that just makes you that much slower.

I think racing the track is the crucial thing there, in the race. I believe that you have to pay attention to the racetrack -- you have to race the racetrack there -- but I kind of race like that everywhere.

When you catch a guy and you're faster than he is, you need to pass him because he's keeping you from being able to race the racetrack the best way that you can.

Certainly, the opportunity for mistakes is greater at Sears Point than it is at Phoenix, because there are so many more corners -- so you have to race the racetrack, for sure.

You have to pay attention to every corner. There are some corners that if you over-drive them you won't get into trouble -- it'll just make your lap time slower.

Credit: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images

And there are some corners where if you over-drive it you can get into the tire barriers and it can end your day.

So knowing where to be aggressive and where to be careful is important.

Strategy and having the right track position at the right time is critical at Infineon. The trend has been to pit early and hope to get a caution while you're on pit road, which is exactly opposite of what we do everywhere else.

If you can get in there as early as possible and get your tires and gas and that gives you an opportunity to catch a caution, that seems to be the strategy that most people have done.

It's a very slow pit road, and coming on pit road seems very slow. The pit entrance there is easy, although it's a very narrow getting into the pits.

It's a very narrow pit road and it's single-file, for sure. It's mandatory because there isn't enough room to enter double-file.

Getting off of there is an easy exit, but a good pit stop, because good track position is important, is imperative.

You get penalized on pit road if you have a flat tire -- and if you run out of gas you're dead.

Even if you run out of gas coming down the esses, it's so difficult to get back around there at any speed at all. So running out of gas is something that you just can't do there.

A flat tire is a very bad thing. A lot of things can really ruin your day there, for sure, because track position is so important and when you give that up you're in big trouble.

I'm not sure that we do the Lucky Dog rule there -- and there are no double-file restarts so there's not a chance to get your lap back.

So if you have trouble, you tend not to be able to get it back.

Qualifying well and pit strategy are the things that you can do to engineer better track position for yourself.

We've seen a lot of road course races won based on pit strategy and we've seen them lost based on pit strategy -- especially at Watkins Glen because it really seems to make a big difference there.

But at Sears, a lot of people are going to pit early. You may not want to pit early. You might want to not pit, stay out and get the lead like that.

There are a lot of different ways to play it, but what's been the most successful is pitting early.