Inside the Garage: No. 1 crew chief Bono Manion

Dale Earnhardt Inc. crew chief and New England native Kevin "Bono" Manion looks forward to every trip "home" to New Hampshire International Speedway, this week's Nextel Cup venue and a place near where Manion and many of his DEI teammates grew up in racing.

But for Manion, a native of Boylston, Mass., and his driver, young New Jersey native Martin Truex Jr., this week's trip is especially anticipated because of the finishes they have been able to put on the board over the past month -- when great promise has been converted into solid results.

In Sunday's Lenox Industrial Tools 300, Truex will drive the same No. 1 Chevrolet Car of Tomorrow that he used to capture his first Cup victory, four weeks ago at Dover.

Q: Bono, having a hot race team aside, how excited do you get when it comes to going back home to New England for a race?

Manion: It's a great time for all of us on the team. I think every road guy but two or three of us are from the New England area, like our truck driver, who is from Vermont.

So like I said, it's that just about everyone is from up there, so it's a lot of fun because you get to see a lot of family and friends. I raced a lot up there in the Modifieds, so going back up there feels like home.

I'll try to catch a Red Sox game, you know, and eat some lobster. There's just a lot of stuff that we're accustomed to, being from up there. And then there's some good racing, so it don't get much better.

Q: How many clambakes you plan on having?

Manion: Aaah -- we usually hit one or two. You know somebody's usually having one somewhere. I don't really have a lot scheduled this week, but for the fall race at New Hampshire we've got a few things going on.

Q: What does it mean to you -- a guy who grew up racing in the Northeast and knowing how tough it was -- to have a homegrown team, if you will, racing and competing at the top of the Cup Series?

Manion: It's cool. It's a lot of neat people. Once in a while, if we're having a bad day, we'll go out and talk about old times and just cheer ourselves up.

It's a tough sport and you can get down really, really quick -- so obviously, the last three or four weeks we've been on top of the world here. We were hoping to come out of [Infineon] with a good finish and then we go on to Loudon.

I think we've got a really good car for up there. We're taking the same car we won with at Dover, but quite a bit different on the setup, so we'll just go up there and see what we've got.

It's a tough place to pass. You've got to go up there and get a good qualifying lap in. It's a short race and like I said, it is tough to pass so kind of like at Infineon, you want to qualify up front and just stay with the lead guys.

Q: Speaking of good feelings leading to good results and confidence, Martin's run real well there. He made his Cup debut there a few years ago subbing for Dale Earnhardt Jr., so how excited does he get about going there?

Manion: Yeah, I think it's right up there on the top of his list of tracks that he really, really enjoys racing. He had a lot of success up there in the Busch North car.

He's told me a couple times that this Car of Tomorrow kind of drives like his Busch North car -- the feeling that he wants. So that kind of made us feel good.

But going up to Loudon, I feel great about what we're doing and I know Martin's real excited about getting up there and seeing what we've got for 'em.

Accepting the role

With Dale Earnhardt Jr. leaving DEI, it's Martin Truex Jr. who will step into the spotlight.

• Complete story, click here

Q: Is Loudon like Phoenix in that it's a flat, fast 1-mile track, and do you have much flexibility in what you can do with this Car of Tomorrow to help the way it cuts in the middle and comes up off the corner?

Manion: It is going to be the first time we're with the COT at such a flat racetrack. We all tested at Milwaukee, 'we' being the whole DEI organization: The 1, 8 [Earnhardt] and 15 [Paul Menard].

There were quite a few teams up there and we stacked up pretty good against them, so we felt pretty good about that.

As far as the setup, you can work on your front springs. We're allowed to run bump stops now, with the splitter -- so working on the front springs and bump stops is your best option to get the car to turn in the middle.

The other important thing there is that you need forward bite. You need to be able to stand on the gas and come off the corner under somebody. The only opportunity you have to pass is either high or low, and low seems to be a pretty good opportunity there.

Q: With what happened to the two Hendrick Motorsports cars at Infineon last weekend, where they were penalized for working in what they called "gray areas" -- as a crew chief does that make you want to stay far away from those areas on the COT, despite what history's always told you about doing what you have to do to compete?

Manion: NASCAR keeps sending this message about the rules. I don't know ... missing the first day of practice and I guess not qualifying would hurt a little bit.

But you know, we're going into building speedway cars and [the fenders] would be another area that people might try to massage outside of the templates.

So I think that message is still being sent -- and it was sent again this weekend. If you do anything outside of the box, we're gonna get ya.

I guess what they did over there was pretty obvious, but I don't know. Unfortunately, when they say 'I didn't know it was on the car,' somebody's really going to mean that one day and [it won't get any mercy].

So you really need to check and double check your rules. And you know when you're scratching that surface. There's been a couple times this year we've scratched it -- and you know what? The risk just ain't worth the reward.

There's not [enough] speed there. It would be better, maybe -- but it's just not worth it, you know? So you've just really got to pay attention.

We surely don't want to get a fine or a points penalty -- especially this late in the game.

Q: Having said all that, you've got to be pleased with how well you've come to grips with this COT, having won at Dover, and how comfortable Martin seems to be with it.

Manion: Oh yeah. I mean, the first three COT races, we qualified in the top 10 for all three of them. DEI has not cut corners on this -- we've tested an awful lot.

I remember building one of these cars to help the [NASCAR] R&D program. We tested at Homestead last year with Kerry [Earnhardt]. We were at the Charlotte test last year with Dale Jr. and Martin and we went to the Talladega test [last fall].

So DEI has put their fair share of time in on this car. And like I said, we're not done testing yet. So we're extremely pleased with the way things are going with that car.

We're just now starting to get into our mile-and-a-half program that we're going to have to get ready for next year. We're going to start [a test at] Kentucky up here, pretty quick, to test four or five times before the end of the year.

Q: Sorry for what might be incorrect COT terminology, but have you tested what would be considered an intermediate COT car?

Manion: We brought it to Charlotte and made about five laps during the test there last month. It was our Darlington car and we had a couple ideas and we just wanted to run it at a higher speed place, just to get a couple ideas on what was going to happen.

We got accomplished what we needed to, but it definitely opened our eyes up on a couple of the areas, so it was a good idea.

Any time you can get on track, with the correct tire [is good] -- because that's been our biggest issue, is having the correct tire to test with.