Special K: rookie Kasey Kahne's midget racing experience has helped him to a stunningly good Nextel Cup start, buoying Evernham Motorsports in a transition year

Sporting News, The, April 12, 2004 by Matt Crossman

As this season opened, it promised to be a down year for Evernham Motorsports. Last winter, the two-car team lost legendary Bill Elliott, the only lead driver it had ever had, to semiretirement. Taking over for Elliott was Kasey Kahne, who had zero Nextel Cup starts and modest success in the Busch Series. That's not a recipe for a breakout year.

But seven races into the season, Kahne is dominating the Rookie of the Year race, and this class is as deep as any in history. Kahne's near-miss last Sunday at Texas gave him his third runner-up finish. Teammate Jeremy Mayfield would be a shoo-in for comeback driver of the year, if NASCAR gave out such an award.

The surge of Evernham's teams can be partially explained by improvement in every facet of the organization. Its Dodges' horsepower and handling are equal to, if not better than, that of every car on the track. Kahne stepped into a great car--Elliott won once and should have won at least twice more with the No. 9 last year. Kahne has a veteran crew chief in Tommy Baldwin and an experienced crew that was the best in the sport last season.

Kahne also has gotten priceless advice from Elliott. But Kahne still has to drive that 3,400-pound sheet metal rocket for four hours every Sunday. His success can be boiled down to six words: The guy can flat out steer.

In this postmodern NASCAR era, driving skills such as Kahne's are only part of the equation. A driver needs a story, a hook, a look. Kahne is all over that, too.

He is a soft-spoken young man with rosy cheeks and a face that would prompt a father to ground his daughter. Luckily for dads back in the exquisitely named Enumclaw, Wash., Kahne skipped his prom. He also went to night school and graduated from high school six months early, all so he could go racing.

His story: Talented nobody from nowhere works his way to the top--quickly. Kahne's three top fives in his first four races was the best start to a Cup career in 40 years, and--here's the hook part--fast starts are nothing new for him.

In 2000, he ran his first race for noted midget racer owner Steve Lewis, who has won championship after championship with stud driver after stud driver. Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart have driven for him.

The midget racing world isn't as bound by contracts as Nextel Cup is, and Kahne's first race for Lewis was a no-strings-attached trial run. If Kahne bombed, big whoop-ti-do. He didn't. He won on a last-lap pass of Ryan Newman. "We thought, 'That's a pretty good outing for our first,'" Lewis says. It got better. Kahne won his second race the next night and won the midget championship that year.

Lewis says Kahne learned in midgets to pass without making contact. Bumping and banging is undeniably part of stock car racing, but a car wearing only its own paint usually comes home sooner than one wearing someone else's. The ability to put a 72 1/2-inch-wide car through a 73-inch-wide hole is important, and not all drivers can do it without throwing sparks. Kahne can.

Kahne's experience sliding through turns at small tracks across the country has been invaluable on the massive concrete speedways. "The guys that are going fast in Cup cars are sliding around," says Ray Evernham, who owns Kahne's car. Some drivers get spooked if their Cup car gets wiggly; Kahne's midget experience means he doesn't.

"He's used to the car going sideways;' says Jeff Hammond, a FOX analyst and a former Cup crew chief. "Car control is the huge difference right now. With these open-wheelers coming in, car control is where it's at."

You call it steering. Gearheads call it car control. Whatever it's called, Kahne's great at it. Like Gordon, Stewart and Newman, all previous Rookies of the Year, Kahne learned car control driving midgets.

A midget's power-to-weight ratio is scary. If you merely think about pushing the gas pedal, suddenly you're going 120. In comparison, a Cup car seems to accelerate when it's good and ready. Midgets' engines even sound different. They whir and scream like bumblebees the size of Winnebagos.

A midget doesn't turn as much as slide through corners, especially because many midget races are run on dirt tracks. A Cup driver turns the wheel right only on road courses; a midget driver does so on nearly every corner, to keep the car in line. Keeping a midget pointed in the right direction requires skill and courage. Midgets run on small tracks with tight corners; if not handled with a deft touch, they can roll over.

Midget races don't have pit stops, so drivers must be able to deal with ill-handling cars. Gordon is good at it, Stewart is a master, and Kahne has shown that he can do it, too. In March at Atlanta, he kept a 15th-place car safely in that spot. Toward the end of that race, his crew turned it into a top five car, and he finished third.

The best example of Kahne's car control this year came in the fifth race of the season, at Darlington--probably the track at which handling is most important. Darlington hates drivers. It runs the most successful of them into walls. It chews up tires, fenders and quarterpanels without regard to speed, creed or sponsorship.