What lies within: for a closer look at the inner workings of a racing team, start at its headquarters: a body shop, engineering research center and funhouse—all on 18 wheels

Sporting News, The, July 15, 2002 by Matt Crossman

Compton qualifies 33rd, not a success but better than practice by seven-tenths of a second and six places. "If you improve on what you ran in practice, that's always a plus," Compton says.

7:15 a.m. Saturday. Rain or shine

Saturday's work starts where Friday's ended: inside stall No. 7 of garage No. 3. It's 58 degrees with a drizzle making practice unlikely. Every crew member is busy, but Junior suggests the pace is reserved. "You didn't get to see one of those days where you cram four hours of work into two hours," he says. "It's kind of laid back because it's raining."

There's still plenty being done. Irvan uses the No. 14's trunk as a workbench, on top of which is a piece of a plexiglass-like material. He's making a duct that will suck air from outside and blow it onto Compton to cool him. The previous duct is either left behind or lost. "It's sitting back at the shop ... we're pretty sure of it. Sometimes that stuff happens," Irvan says.

Using a straight edge and black marker, Irvan draws a square. Once he has the square cut out, he takes it over to the irregular pentagon-shaped hole it must fill. He pushes the square against the hole from the outside and reaches inside the car with his right hand to trace what will become the final piece.

Kendrach looks up from under the hood. "You know what the most important thing on a race car is? The motor." Could be a coincidence, but Kendrach's in charge of the motor.

Meanwhile, tire man Brian Carter, who watched Days of Thunder in the hauler Thursday night ("For the hundredth time," says Jennings), secures a tarp that protects the tires from the rain.

Brian DePouli--nickname "Shim Stack"--works in the hauler on shocks. A Dell monitor shows a line graph describing force versus absolute velocity, a relationship Shim Stack uses to determine how to construct the shocks. On the counter in front of him are the washers--shim stacks--from the innards of a shock. Vertical in separate vices are the body and shaft of a shock.

Shim Stack, 22, finished his engineering degree this spring at UNC-Charlotte. He also was an intern with Hendrick Motorsports. Shim Stack loves his job, and he wants to explain in layman's terms the sport's technical side. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he fails, and sometimes the person he's trying to teach is thicker than 10W-40. "I'm tuning the shock, I guess you could say, would be a decent way to describe it," he says.

The better the shock, the better the car handles, the better the team finishes. It's all simple physics, except it's not. A slight miscalculation can mean the difference between finishing on the lead lap and Carter popping in Days of Thunder somewhere near Toledo on Sunday afternoon. Or everything could be arithmetically, geometrically and physically perfect, and the driver still doesn't like it. Or a wreck or broken part could make it all moot.

Regardless, it's the crew's job to get the car exactly how the driver wants it. "Jeff Gordon's shop has a sign in it: `In a competitive environment, to stay the same is to regress.' So you're always trying to get more speed. Always," Shim Stack says.