Newman and Johnson teams are engineering a bright future

Sporting News, The, Sept 30, 2002 by Lee Spencer

On the way to New Hampshire, my son Sam and I took a side trip to Boston.

Sam, a high school senior who plans to study physics, has MIT on his short list of colleges he would like to attend. So the next step was taking a tour of the campus. The admissions counselor didn't need a hard sell to impress Sam about the merits of MIT, and when she described MIT's philosophy of education being "a collaborative effort" among its students, he took notice.

Forty-eight hours later, those same words, "a collaborative effort," were used in victory lane in Loudon to describe rookie Ryan Newton's first Winston Cup win. By bringing the brightest engineering minds together, Penske Racing South has created the race team of the future.

Newman, 24, has a degree in vehicle structural engineering from Purdue, and he jokes that engineering was his backup plan if racing didn't work out.

Matt Borland, Newman's crew chief, also is an engineer. Good communication is crucial to success in auto racing, so having the crew chief and driver on the same wavelength is an advantage. Newman often says of their relationship: "We speak the same language."

As do the other engineers on the staff of Newman's No. 12 Ford, including Don Miller, co-owner of Penske South. Miller was instrumental in mentoring Newman through his transition from USAC to stock cars in 1999. He describes Newman as "a thinker."

"Ryan's not a guy that rushes in with a hacksaw and starts chipping away," Miller says. "He thinks about where he's going to go. Matt is very, very organized. They're both engineers, and they have two or three other engineers on the team.

"They calculate where they want to go. ... If they make a mistake, they go back out there until they get it right."

That methodical approach to racing will raise Newman's team and others like it to the top of NASCAR's ranks.

Throughout the season, the team has continued to improve its position, and no one is running better right now. The pole Newman won at New Hampshire was his third of the season. He finished second in the two previous races, Richmond and Darlington. In the last 11 races, Newman finished outside the top five just three times. He has climbed to seventh in points.

Technical dialogues and the marriage of ideas also are a big part of the approach taken by Jimmie Johnson's No. 48 Chevrolet team, which won last Sunday to complete a season sweep at Dover. Johnson has climbed to second in points, only 30 behind the leader, Mark Martin. It's not difficult to see why. After Johnson finished third in June at Pocono, the Hendrick Motorsports team didn't waste time on the flight home. Engine builder Scott Maxim and Team 48's Whiz Kids--twenty-something college-trained specialists and engineers--reviewed the just finished race and debated setup strategy for the next race at Michigan. The discussion wasn't much different from those that occur in the labs my son and I observed at MIT.

The days when a crew simply can show up at the track and expect to qualify are over. Bill Elliott was 25 when he won his first pole, in 1981. He didn't have anything dose to an engineering staff preparing his cars.

"If we ran what we ran in the '80s, you wouldn't even be an honorable mention," Elliott says. "You probably wouldn't even make the race. (Technology has) just brought it to another level, and it's going to keep refining and keep bringing it to new levels, and that's all there is to it."

The late Alan Kulwicki, who denied Elliott his second title in 1992 by 10 points, the narrowest margin in NASCAR history, was the last driver/engineer to compete at a high level in Winston Cup. Kulwicki, who had a mechanical engineering degree from Wisconsin, amazed his competitors with the way he could do more with less. Despite inadequate funding, Kulwicki won 24 poles and five races in 207 starts. Before he died in 1993, his methodical approach to racing foreshadowed those taken by the Johnson and Newman teams.

The question in 2002 is which methodical approach and collaborative effort will be rewarded with the Rookie o the Year award.

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SPEED READS

* The ratings NBC/TNT got for the last seven races before Dover were ahead of last year's. So one has to wonder when NBC will realize the benefits of televising the night races at Bristol and Richmond, which were on TNT, rather than reruns. Those races deserve prime-time network exposure. The numbers could surprise NBC.

* Bobby Labonte's top five finish at Loudon was his first since he won in April at Martinsville, and it was the third time this season he and teammate Tony Stewart finished in the top five. With the strain of building the 2003 Pontiac and Monte Carlo behind, perhaps the Joe Gibbs Racing of previous seasons can re-emerge.

* John Andretti has held a new contract from Petty Enterprise for more than a month. There has been speculation about Andretti holding out for more money or going to a different team, but he may leave NASCAR and join cousin Michael, who's leaving the struggling CART Series and taking his teams to the IRL.