Inside the Garage: No. 16 crew chief Greg Erwin (cont'd)

Q: With chemistry between crew chief and driver being so important, how do you first find it and then keep it?

Erwin: I'm not sure chemistry happens overnight. I think it is, more often than not, a result of performance. I don't know that there's any driver or crew chief out there ... maybe it's the chicken and the egg. All the guys that seem to have real good results and run well week in and week out develop good chemistry. The crew chief has a lot of confidence in the driver and the driver gets a lot of confidence in the crew chief because what he does usually makes the car go fast.

I don't know Greg very well. I've spoken with him on the phone a few times and gotten to speak with him briefly once or twice. But I don't suspect he's much different from any of the other really good drivers out there. You put him in something close, and you work your tail off to make it better, better, better and let him do the rest.

Q: You have an engineering background, and now it seems like even the tire changers have that kind of background. Is that a trend that will continue?

Erwin: No. It might continue, but I think it will go in cycles. What you're seeing right now is car owners investing a lot of money and time in engineering-related tools. They have to take their core group of engineers who run those tools, but it's important to have guys on the car side of it that can at least sort through the results, what comes out of the raw engineering data. They'll say, 'this will work,' this won't work,' and 'I understand what you did here, but I don't think this applies because ...' You can give them a reasonable answer, one that has some facts behind it. It pops up and down.

Q: Is the crew chief's role more an executive role now as opposed to being the guy with all the knowledge?

Erwin: As the cars come better prepared from the shop, the crew chief's role tends to be less of the inventor every weekend and more of a guy that just sort of executes the plan. It gets that way more and more every year, as the programs grow. They become more and more diverse and you're dealing with larger groups of people. Here, we have one of the largest groups in all of racing. It becomes a people job, and the people skills part of it is something you need to learn. I've got a couple of years of doing this under my belt.

Q: The box you're in with the COT is a lot narrower than it is with the current car. Is the role of innovation narrower too?

Erwin: I think NASCAR set the precedent so many years ago, and every year they put the current car in a tighter and tighter box. First it was X number of templates and then it was twice that many, and now it's max camber rules and you can do this and you can't do that. The COT is just an evolution of that. I don't think it's going to meet their initial intention of each of the teams being able to carry fewer cars. Yes, I can see areas where it will cut down on some of the complexities of building a new fleet. The bodies are much more in a window, the chassis is a lot better inspected, the frame rails need to be a certain height -- it takes away the ingenuity on some of the larger teams. Maybe it's not ingenuity, but it's just resources. If somebody tells you that you have the personnel and the budget to build six different kinds of racecar and take them all to the racetrack and figure out which one is the best, then the team with the most people and the most racecars is going to get to the answer a lot quicker.

Q: Extrapolate that back to the single-car team. What does that mean to them?

Erwin: If we had stayed on the current car, I think Robby Gordon Motorsports would have been much further along. What we did well over there was really pay attention to the details of our piece. We didn't have teammates, and that hurts because when your teammate makes an improvement, you don't get to know about it. But on the other hand, it was all hands and all eyes on our racecar every single week. I'm confident that the COT has hurt that program, for many reasons. The bottom line is, you really do take your notebook and your rulebook and everything you thought or saw on your racecars and you put it aside. Now, not only do you have to work on that program, but this thing (the COT) is a totally different animal. You're starting from scratch.