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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Car Is Key For Little Guys
This year at Daytona provided a perfect storm of opportunity for the 15 single-car teams that showed up with anything and everything...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted February 13, 2009   Daytona Beach, FL
Racers like Jeremy Mayfield and Tommy Baldwin are encouraged to start their own teams, using mostly crewmen laid off from other teams and equipment purchased on the cheap. (Photo:

How is it possible for a guy like Jeremy Mayfield or Tommy Baldwin to put together a team with a handful of people and a month later not only enter a car in the Daytona 500 but make the field for NASCAR’s richest race?

Time, place and opportunity are key. As it turns out, so is NASCAR’s new-generation race car.

This year at Daytona provided a perfect storm of opportunity for the 15 single-car teams that showed up with anything and everything from a wing and a prayer to some fairly sophisticated, albeit minimally funded, operations.

Thanks to the wretched U.S. economy, there was an overall contraction of established, full-time NASCAR Sprint Cup teams from the start of the 2007 season until now, with more than one-third of the regular teams downsizing, merging, cutting schedules or closing altogether. That resulted in at least 1,000 team members and crewmen losing jobs, according to most estimates.

That gave laid off NASCAR racers like Mayfield and Baldwin the encouragement to start their own teams, using mostly crewmen laid off from other teams and equipment purchased on the cheap. In Mayfield’s case, he even got free shop space from former Cup team owner Billy Stavola, for his Jeremy Mayfield Motorsports race team.

During Daytona Speedweeks, Mayfield repeatedly joked that he only hired crewmen who’d been laid off for at least three months. But there’s no question that with times being hard, talent is available at much cheaper prices than in recent years.

But a huge part of the reason for Mayfield and Baldwin to make their unlikely journeys onto the Daytona 500 starting grid has to do with the car. NASCAR phased in its new-generation race car, first called the Car of Tomorrow, in 2007 and switching completely over to it last year.

The new car, unlike the one it replaced, is held to incredibly tight dimensional tolerances across the entire body. No longer can enterprising crew chiefs or fabricators bend a fender here or contour a roofline there to result in less aerodynamic drag and more downforce. Building a superspeedway car used to be a combination of high art and exacting science, something that top teams would in some cases spend months on and millions of dollars to get it into the race. Now, it’s essentially a kit car.

Triad Racing Technologies, which builds races cars in a variety of series, built the chassis and engines for both Mayfield’s No. 41 Toyota Camry, and the No. 36 Tommy Baldwin Toyota that Scott Riggs will race in the Daytona 500.

And because it’s a kit car, builders can replicate them so each one is virtually identical in performance. “It used to take us three weeks to hang a speedway body,” said Jeff Burton, who drives the No. 31 Chevrolet Impala SS for Richard Childress Racing. “And then after you’d do that, you’d have to do all the work on the crush panels and the radiator duct work and where the NACA ducts go, and one car would spend seven or eight days in the wind tunnel. Once you got that, you weren’t going to sell it. But today, there are so many things that NASCAR makes you do, or doesn’t let you do — either way — that it’s not much of disadvantage to sell a car. So, people were able to go out and buy cars that they couldn’t have bought three years ago.”

“With the old car we were able to change nose offsets, we were able to change all this stuff on this car to try different aero platforms, try different side force, try this, try that, try all these crazy things about moving the bodies around and all that,” added Greg Biffle of Roush Fenway Racing. “We can’t really do that anymore, so with this new car we’re so limited to what we can do that at some point testing will obviously become almost obsolete with the new car because we’re in such a tight box already.”

And four-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion Jeff Gordon thinks the extremely tight rules NASCAR has specified is good for the little guys of the sport. “I think it’s a real tribute to what NASCAR has done with this car,” said Gordon, who won the first of two Gatorade Duel qualifying races on Thursday. “By putting you in such a tight box and the grid that you have to go through there’s just so few things that even a well-funded team like Hendrick Motorsports we’re just so limited in so many ways. I’m sure that NASCAR had a big smile on their face in a lot of ways to see that because it shows that you don’t have to go out there and spend millions and millions of dollars just preparing for Daytona.”

As Baldwin and Mayfield proved, more than anything it takes a dream. “To be honest with you, they haven't got the first paycheck,” Mayfield said of his crew. “Hopefully we can pay them now.”

DAYTONA 500 STARTING LINEUP

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