Inside the Garage: Berrier

Two different races. Two different ways of taking care of business. But the results were the same last year: Kevin Harvick in Victory Lane at Phoenix.

Harvick won the spring race at PIR last season after starting 15th and working his way to the front before leading the final 10 laps.

The fall race was a different story. Starting second, Harvick owned the race in leading 252 of the 312 laps and cruising to victory.

Crew chief Todd Berrier said the reason his driver was so successful at the 1-mile oval in the desert was simple -- patience. That virtue will carry even more weight this weekend when the Nextel Cup Series returns to Phoenix in the Car of Tomorrow. Gone are the advantages under the hood and in the shop that Berrier's bunch created.

Remaining, however, is Berrier's No. 1 bullet in his arsenal -- his driver.

Q: Your team won both races at Phoenix in 2006. What was the secret?

Berrier: I don't know that there's a secret we're banking on. Obviously, our driver likes the place. It's somewhere he's raced a lot and it fits us well. We've had success there by winning both those races plus having success leading up to that. So he can adapt pretty well to the racetrack. That's the big secret we have, the wheelman.

Q: What are the challenges you will face at Phoenix?

Berrier: Both ends have a fare amount of differences. You have to really be almost spinning out off Turn 4 to get off of Turn 2. If the pace slows down you've got to be able to move around and slow your entry to the corner.

Kevin's really a disciplined driver. If he finds something, he can do the same thing over and over and over. Places like that seem to fit him well when you have to apply a lot of discipline and roll the corner. Every short track you've ever been to in your career, it seems like the slower you try to go the faster you go. They know it, but it's hard to make yourself not do something. You think you can get speed or go a little faster and it ends up costing you. Once he hits on something, he's good about disciplining himself enough to keep doing it.

Q: Because you will be running the Car of Tomorrow as the defending winner, does that change things as you prepare for this weekend?

Berrier: Yeah it does, it changes a lot of things. We're just off the Richmond test and a lot of things are going to apply from Richmond to Phoenix. I think it was important to go there because we wouldn't have been able to race Richmond like we thought we would.

A lot of things have changed with this car, just like at Bristol and Martinsville. Nothing that we've ever done in 1910 or today applies. Everybody says it goes back to the old school. There isn't such a thing. We didn't go back in the record books and pull out notes from 1999 or 1995 -- nobody did that. We learned a lot leading up to 2007 and you just apply everything you can and try to make it go over the humps. It's something new.

Q: Considering you have only raced the Car of Tomorrow on short tracks, how will Phoenix's 1-mile oval be different?

Berrier: It's going to be a lot different. These cars seem to be really light on the front end. They have no downforce and they don't turn at all. We're going to be running the fastest speeds we've ever ran with them. So they're going to get to the corner and they're going to have to slow it down a lot quicker or it won't go through the corner as quick as our current cars. We're going to use as much brake at Phoenix as we used at Martinsville, it's just going to be faster. It's not going to go but so fast through the center of the corner, but it's going to go twice as fast down the straightaway because it's longer. We just have to have better brakes on the thing.

There's going to be a few cars that hit on it; the rest of the race is going to be ugly. There's not a lot of those cars that are going to be turning in the corner and be able to actually race, in my opinion, just from the Richmond test. In Richmond at the test, I don't know if any of us ever saw anybody pass anybody. Somebody had to be coming off the track to get around them, and Phoenix is going to be the same way. We'll keep working to see where we can get with these things on our end to make them turn.

Right now, to have zero front downforce it doesn't enhance the performance and it doesn't make the race really good. You've got to turn under somebody to be able to pass them, and everybody goes straight when they enter the corner. So that's the problem we're having.

Q: Why are drivers having such a difficult time getting the Car of Tomorrow to turn in the corners?

Berrier: They're heavy. They're 50-50 in that the left-side weight is the same as the right-side weight. The bodies aren't twisted up, and the weight of the cars is a lot heavier on the right side than the current cars; the roof is higher; the center of gravity is really high. You've got to slow them down a lot. They roll a lot. These cars [current cars] can travel a lot. The front-air dam is like 7 inches off the ground, so when you get in the corner and have the front-air dam on the ground, the center of gravity is lower. We add that much more pitch in the car, which is more downforce. We're doing half of that with the Car of Tomorrow. There are just a lot of things adding up to the thing not driving well.