For JGR's engine builder, it's been really early to rise (cont'd)

Plus Cronquist was heavily involved in the collaborated effort to design and build the new RO-7 Chevy engine that made its debut last season. That engine took nine years to go from the development stage to the racetrack; the Gibbs switch to Toyota power seemed to take about nine minutes, making it seem to outsiders as possibly an impossible task to be competitive immediately.

But J.D. Gibbs and his drivers have repeatedly said that they fully expect to be competitive "right out of the box." If so, they will have Cronquist and his staff of engine assemblers to thank.

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"I have no question at all that Mark will give us good, reliable horsepower," said Greg Zipadelli, crew chief for driver Tony Stewart.

To give one an idea of what's involved in building an engine, Cronquist said the RO-7 is made up of 1,604 parts. A similar number of parts are in the Toyota engine. So for the 105 new Toyota engines required for JGR's three Cup teams and two Nationwide teams, Cronquist had to keep track of some 168,420 new parts that came in.

Yet Cronquist said that the switch from the Chevy engine to Toyota isn't at all like the painstakingly slow development of the RO-7. That's because the Toyota engine was used at the Cup level last season by several other teams. Even though they experienced little success, the basic engine was there to be provided to JGR, along with data from those other teams that JGR could use to try to make it better.

"To me, the Toyota thing is good for us because they can go and develop something and we can go develop something," said Cronquist, who has headed up the JGR engine program since 1996. "Then we can come together and say, 'Hey, your valve spring is better. Maybe we'll put it in our motor.' And maybe we have some things, that they can look at it, too."

He said Chevy teams usually worked together only on future projects like the RO-7 and on durability engine issues. Otherwise, the teams worked independently of one another. He said he expects the Toyota teams, now that JGR is involved, to work together more to get better results overall.

With Speedweeks now upon Cronquist, the time to begin seeing how he and his engine assemblers have fared has arrived. But he said that he is more anxious to see how the new Toyota "open" engine fares in the second and third races of the year at California and Las Vegas than he is to see how the restrictor-plate variety performs at Daytona International Speedway in the season-opening event.

"California and Vegas. That's the motor man's nightmare. It's cold, it takes a lot of power, it's 500 miles with a big gear in the car. Those are tough ones on engines," he said.

Is he confident Toyota-powered JGR is ready to win some races?

"Talk to me after Las Vegas," Cronquist said. "I think so -- I hope so -- but the first couple of races will be the tell-tale sign here."

Success could mean more sleep for Cronquist, who is looking forward to cutting back on his hours at some point after weeks of arriving at the office in the middle of the night.

"I can get work done at 3 a.m. without people asking me questions," Cronquist said. "I had to come in early because during the daytime, it was guys going, 'What are we doing about this? What are we doing about that? What are we doing about this?' And a lot of it was [Toyota doing] things differently than we do things. We had to decide, are we going to do things their way or are we going to do it our way? That's what I did during the day, so I had to come in from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. or 7 just to answer e-mails and get some other stuff done without all that going on."

How they will do things going forward remains a work in progress.

"We see some good things," Cronquist said. "Our package turned out really well. [Toyota's] package seemed pretty good, too. Now we just got to take ours and theirs and kind of marry the two together and use the best of both of 'em, and see what we come up with there."