Crew chief Matt Borland and Ryan Newman are seemingly on the same page from the time the garage opens on race weekends. Credit: Autostock

The Perfect Lap

Engineering is the inside angle for on-track success

Inside the No. 12 team transporter, a crewmember is detailing the team's technologically-focused approach. It goes something like this:

In God We Trust. Everyone else bring data.

The No. 12 team is comprised of engineers. Many of them. All teams employ engineers these days, but for the most part the entire 12 team has an engineering background.

From driver to crew chief to shock specialist to shop foreman, they're all wired like the guy from Numb3rs. Everything, when broken down into zeros and ones, makes perfect sense.

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In today's NASCAR, where testing and track time are limited like liquor on Sunday, engineering is the primary data acquisition method for most Nextel Cup Series teams. And it sails right over the average head.

Last fall, after Ryan Newman blistered the track record (and more than a couple tires) to earn the outside pole at Lowe's Motor Speedway, he attempted to explain Delta apexes, or some such thing, to the assembled media.

He may as well have been a Pilates instructor in a biker bar.

Is this keen understanding of Delta apexes what makes Newman so fast on Friday?

"I honestly think when Ryan Newman leaves pit road he could care less how fast the other 42 guys run," said Elliott Sadler, who out-sprinted Newman by 13-thousandths of a second to win that LMS pole last fall.

"It's him against the racetrack. That's his mindset. That's his personality. You can't teach that."

But given the proper tools, you can simulate it.

T-Rex Stumped

As recently as 10 years ago, driver-feel inside the racecar was the end-all, be-all. Still is, for the most part, just doesn't take as long to acquire thanks to computer simulation technology.

Back then, teams took driver feedback from the previous event at a particular track, scribbled half-legibly on crumpled notepads, input it in the car and see if it still applied.

Then Hendrick Motorsports showed up at The Winston with the T-Rex car.

At that moment Rex Stump, HMS' lead engineer, single-handedly rewrote the book on race preparation.

That particular No. 24 Chevrolet was nearly a decade ahead of its time.

Ray Evernham

"It was a fully-engineered racecar. [Stump] engineered and designed every part of that car to work, not even necessarily in the gray area, but even in areas they hadn't even thought about writing gray rules for, yet," said Matt Borland, Newman's crew chief.

"He really figured out the best way to build a racecar, and Ray [Evernham] had the confidence in him to go ahead and build that car and take it to a test, get it working, then ultimately race it."

The T-Rex car was so advanced that NASCAR seized it for its own education.

"I would say that Rex is really the guy that was ahead of the curve for engineering in the sport," Evernham said. "He started running simulations way before other guys came on board. And that goes back to Rick [Hendrick] being willing to start an engineering department when nobody else would.

"The sport would have changed anyway. It's got to as it gets faster, got to evolve. It was inevitable. Rex opened the door, but not a lot of people walked through it until the past four or five years."

Hello NASCAR engineering boom.

"Maybe it's more widely known now, but for sure Rex was the guy that spearheaded engineering in NASCAR," Borland said. "Everyone took notice when the T-Rex car showed up at Charlotte for The Winston race.

"We've tried to take the approach he does behind closed doors in the shop, and at the racetrack."

Lap Tops

Again, given the lack of track time at their disposal these days, every NASCAR team relies heavily on engineering data. But few trust it as much as the No. 12 team does.

When Newman hits the racetrack for the weekend's first practice, the machinery under his backside is glorified computer simulation.

"We spend quite a bit of time running simulations all during the week," Borland said. "Our engineers run through literally thousands of simulations each week.

"It gives us a really good tool for trying to predict the ideal or ultimate lap time. We pretty much rely on that information to lead us down the right path of how to get the best lap time possible out of the car."

So, Matt, this simulation thing. How's it work?

Grin. ... Silence.

One thing about the 12 team, they're tight-lipped about their algorithms, theorems, equations, graphs. You'd have a better chance finding out who killed JFK.

The No. 38 crew preps Elliott Sadler's car. Credit: Autostock

"We try to do as much as we can to be as fast as we can, but we don't want any advantage we might get to go out the door to another team that might hinder our performance," Borland said. "We try to keep everything we do within our group. That's the best way to keep an advantage."

Fortunately, Sadler isn't quite so secretive.

"What we do [at Robert Yates Racing], we have a number that our engineering staff comes up with -- it's an X value to most teams," Sadler said. "Your car has to be such-and-such percent tight or such-and-such percent loose to run the perfect lap for that particular driver.

" ' Elliott Sadler likes X percent tight or X percent loose in his racecar to run the perfect lap to get the pole. So they run that through a simulator to determine what goes in the car in order to give Elliott the car he needs in qualifying.' I believe all engineers do that for their teams.

"Let's say I go to California and qualify third. All the numbers in that car -- springs, shocks, travel, tire build ups, all of it -- they put all that in the computer and the computer spits out a number.

"Say that number is 3.8 percent tight, they'll take that number and put it back in the car when we come back in the fall. That's where engineers come in, and why so much money goes into engineering now.

"With the lack of track time and lack of testing, we need to be near that simulated number. Because if we're close to that number, we're mostly likely gonna be pretty good."

So, judging by Newman's success in qualifying, it stands to reason the 12 team is better at simulation than most teams, no?

"Yeah, that's what the 12 bunch has done so good," Sadler said. "They have such great notes that if they unload around that number that Ryan needs, they'll be close. Every driver has a different number, and they know Ryan's magic number."

Shocking Simulation

Several crucial variables in that magic number are honed on the seven-post shock dynamometer. This device enables Stufflet to learn shocks' characteristics, and their influence on the racecar, on different styles of race tracks.

In past years engineer Patrick Stufflet was part of the traveling road show, but shock testing has become so crucial he now hangs back at the shop to focus solely on perfecting new shock setups.

"We definitely do quite a bit of seven-post testing. We rely so much on that, finding the ideal shocks for a given track and staying ahead of the shock development curve," Borland said.

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"It's been a pretty hot topic the past two years, and there's definitely a lot you can do with them to make your car faster. The question is really about the legality of what you do."

The computer simulation is so precise it breaks down what must happen where in many different portions of the racetrack in order to produce the perfect lap.

"It can tell you certain things you'd want to do to get the perfect lap out of a car," Borland said. "But then once you do that you've got to have a car that's drivable and balanced so the driver can take it to the edge of what it's capable of doing.

"A lot of times you've got to use the computer to tell you where the car is the fastest, and use his butt to tell you how you can get there realistically, then tune around it."

Class is in session

Once practice is over and the No. 12 Dodge is both computer and driver friendly, it's up to Newman to get it done. Not a problem; he amassed 35 poles in his first five seasons.

"To qualify great you have to be willing to hold it out there on the edge," Newman said. "Other drivers do it, too. It's just a matter of how precise you do it."

He must be as sharp as surgeon's scalpel. The next-closest driver on the poles-earned list since 2002 is Jeff Gordon (15).

"Ryan is the best qualifier I've ever seen, because he does it everywhere," Sadler said. "It doesn't matter what style track it is. It could be Martinsville or it could be California or it could be Dover. He understands it everywhere.

"Great qualifiers from the past were geared to one type track, whether it was intermediate tracks or short tracks or whatever. With him, it's everywhere."

The rest of the Cup Series agrees.

Inside the Numbers Cup poles (1972-present) Rank Driver No. 1. D. Waltrip 59 2. D. Pearson 57 3. B. Elliott 55 4. J. Gordon 54 5. C. Yarborough 51 6. M. Martin 41 7. G. Bodine 37 8. R. Wallace 36 9. B. Allison 35   R. Newman 35 Cup wins (2001-present) Rank Driver No. 1. J. Gordon 21 2. J. Johnson 19 3. T. Stewart 15 4. Ku. Busch 14   D. Earnhardt Jr. 14 6. R. Newman 12 7. G. Biffle 9   M. Kenseth 9 9. D. Jarrett 8 10. K. Harvick 5   B. Labonte 5

"He's pretty amazing," Casey Mears said. "Regardless what they do with the car to make it faster, his ability makes a big difference. He's pretty amazing."

And Dale Earnhardt Jr.?

"Newman, in qualifying, is in a league of his own," Junior said. "If he never won another pole people would still watch him in each qualifying attempt he makes for the rest of his career.

"Lots of credit goes to his crew, who has found something a little extra that gives him that kind of confidence. But he still has to put it on the line every time. That takes guts.

"Newman needs to donate his body to science so we can figure out what he has that the rest of us don't."

Newman needs 25 poles to become the modern era leader (1972-present). By comparison, Bobby Allison had 35 poles in his entire career.

So what's Newman's secret? Bigger ... guts?

"You have to have a driver that's confident enough in his abilities to take a car on that edge, or even go over that edge a little bit and be able to recover from it and not write a racecar off every other time you take it out," Borland said.

"That's a hard thing to come by, and he's definitely one of the best there is."

Newman cites Atlanta Motor Speedway, Texas Motor Speedway and Lowe's Motor Speedway as the biggest eye openers. Not scariest, mind you.

"I've never been scared, but on the edge," he said. "I hold my breath sometimes. I just think about hitting my marks and doing what I need to do to drive it according to its balance."

"Certain drivers just understand what they need to run fast for one lap," Sadler said. "I know at certain tracks when I leave pit road for qualifying, my mindset is 'I think I can get the pole.' Other times it's 'Don't wreck this thing.'

"With Newman, I think every time he leaves pit road he thinks it's him against the racetrack. He could care less what the other 42 drivers do. It's him and that racetrack and that's it."

Transfer Case

The biggest question, and stigma, surrounding the No. 12 team is a byproduct of its own success. Why doesn't Friday's dominance transfer to Sunday's race?

Newman's pole tally outnumbers his victory total (12) by a three-to-one margin. What gives? Once again, numbers.

"We always get the criticism that, 'Well you won the pole, you should win the race,' " Borland said. "There's just so many more things that can go wrong in a race situation.

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"In qualifying there's a lot less variables that can go wrong, so there's a lot less opportunities for situations to present themselves to go wrong. Traffic. Crashes that happen in front of you. Things that happen on pit lane.

"There's a wide variety of things that can go wrong over a four-hour race that a two-minute qualifying run doesn't present."

Though the sentiment that Newman is only a threat for one lap hovers over the team, the fact is he is among the Cup Series' winningest drivers during his tenure.

Just four drivers -- Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, and Tony Stewart -- have scored as many wins as Newman since 2002.

The qualifying success "might take away from [the wins] in some people's minds, but not ours," Borland said.

To the point

Given the focus teams place on qualifying, and the added marketing value it would add to the race weekend to teams, sponsors and fans, many feel it's time NASCAR begins awarding points for poles.

Newman proposed a descending point structure, from five-to-one, for the top-five qualifiers, respectively. The pole winner would earn five points, down to one point for a fifth-place qualifying effort.

"We spend one entire day of the three days we're [at the track] on qualifying," Newman said. "From a marketing standpoint it's perfect. It's an opportunity to change the points around before the race ever even starts."

Evernham said points-for-poles is one area NASCAR needs to address.

"Do they want us to go for it or not?" Evernham said. "If they put the emphasis back on qualifying then yes, there should be points awarded for it. But if they take the emphasis off where we work mostly on race setup, then no, I don't think points should be awarded.

"That's one of the things NASCAR needs to make up their mind about, if they want us to go after qualifying or not. Sometimes they really encourage us to do it, and other times it seems like they discourage all that work."

Currently, the advantages of earning the pole aren't so finite.

"There's a lot of advantages to qualifying well, whether it be good pit selection, starting up front in the race and staying out of the traffic problems, or staying out of crashes and situations," Borland said.

"But that attitude moves over to everything you're doing, just wanting to be the best at everything. Whether it be turning a qualifying lap, running a race, doing pit stops, whatever, being the best at it."