Things learned on track transfers to cars on road

Motorsports in the United States began as a way to prove one brand of automobile against another. The cars they used back then were, indeed, production vehicles, and it was all about speed, reliability and proving whose mousetrap was the better.

Well, it's still that way, just on a larger, more specialized scale, and automakers still put the same sort of effort into making the product better through motorsports.

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Of course, in today's age of specialized, computer-aided design and manufacturing, there's a fair amount of technology going the other way as well.

As the NASCAR traveling road show hits Motown this weekend, a lot of the focus is going to be on which manufacturer wins on home turf, and it is important to the powers-that-be that their marquee wind up in Victory Lane.

Louis Jamail, currently a development engineer on the Ford Flex project, which debuts in showrooms later this year, has seen both sides of the coin -- from the racing side and the production side -- and he talked about how Ford uses racing to learn ways to make the production versions last longer, go faster and handle better.

The 37-year-old Jamail, from Cambridge, Ohio, was part of the Ford Racing program in 1999 and 2000, and he says that production cars benefit from several aspects of the racing program, not the least of which is process.

"I'd say the biggest thing is not necessarily just the engineering tools and fundamentals as it is the work ethic and the mindset of racing," he said. "Basically, in racing it's all about teamwork and commitment and goals and doing what it takes to get the job done and that's one of the biggest transfers into the mainstream.

"I would say the biggest thing that I learned was the process and short time that you get in racing to get things done. One of the biggest things I transferred into my engineering side of production vehicles at Ford is the time commitment it takes to do your homework and develop vehicles in a timely fashion. That's what I've transferred into the production side -- the process of engineering and tuning from a fundamental standpoint all the way to the work-ethic side."

While most racers at the highest levels are "car guys" -- Jack Roush comes immediately to mind -- there are almost as many car guys who are racers, and both permeate the ranks of engineers and technicians at Ford and the other auto makers in NASCAR.

"I think that's one of the biggest things that most of the racers take over from racing. It's a heightened level of commitment and time from the fast pace of the race world into the production side," Jamail said. "Outside of that, just the high-performance nature of people that work in racing can also transfer into the tuning of a production car and making it fun to drive, whether it's taking a vehicle like the Flex, which is a seven-passenger crossover, and trying to not only make it into something that's capable for families, but to also make it fun to drive at the same time. That was my goal with the

Flex. Yes it's big, it's long, but try to make it drive a lot smaller than it is so that it's actually enticing and fun to drive, yet still has a good purpose of what it was intended to do."

Though he is firmly entrenched on the Flex project, Jamail had a hand in one of the greatest periods of Ford success in NASCAR.

"I was working with Jay Novak and we were working on some of the initial chassis projects for Ford Motor with NASCAR," Jamail said of his two-year stint as a Ford Racing NASCAR chassis development engineer. "We were doing chassis development and we were also working with the teams to run some test vehicles. One of the main teams we worked with was Ricky Rudd, who, at the time, was a single-car team owner. We did a lot of work with him down in his shop in Mooresville, N.C., basically getting the car set up, taking data at test sessions and things like that.

"We did a good amount of track time with the car. We did some tests down at Homestead and we actually got the car run at Lowe's Motor Speedway, so we ended up doing a lot of good things and learning a lot at the time. One of the big things we gained was also getting more rapport with the teams and showing them some of the engineering tools that we can use at Ford Racing to help them out from a company standpoint."

Jamail also serves as a test driver on occasion at Ford's massive testing grounds in Arizona. Asked if the Flex would be on a racetrack anytime soon, Jamail chuckled.

"It definitely wasn't developed to race, but it's got a lot of inspiration from my past in racing," he said.