CUP: How To Win At The Brickyard

Sprint Cup

CUP: How To Win At The Brickyard

Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a tough place to win...

Tom Jensen | Posted July 22, 2010 Indianapolis, IN

NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Champion has won the Brickyard 400 three times at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

The venerable Indianapolis Motor Speedway is completely unlike anyplace the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races at, a challenging and difficult track that can give crew chiefs ulcers as they search for the winning combination.

Ask different crew chiefs what it takes to win at Indy and they’ll tell you there are an awful lot of separate elements that are vital to success on race day. They start back in the shop, carry over into practice and qualifying and are manifested on race day in the Brickyard 400, the second-biggest race on NASCAR’s schedule.

Todd Parrott, who was the winning crew chief when Dale Jarrett won the Brickyard 400 in 1996 and ’99, is a big proponent of having a lot of horsepower under the hood, something the Roush Yates Engines are known for.

“You need a great engine combination,” said Parrott, who now is Elliott Sadler's crew chief at Richard Petty Motorsports. “The straightaways are awfully long. The thing I have learned there through the years is the better your car handles and drives, the faster you are going to run down the straightaway. The faster you run through the corners, the more straightaway speed you will carry. We work on handling at a premium there. We don’t worry so much about drag as much as you do the total downforce and getting through the corners.”

One of the keys is qualifying on Saturday morning, which depends in large part on the qualifying draw Friday. IMS is a notoriously temperature-sensitive track, so drivers want to go out as early in the session as they can, which is the opposite of most tracks.

“Qualifying is at a premium so getting an early draw will help you because of how temperature sensitive the track is,” said Richard “Slugger” Labbe, crew chief for the No. 98 Richard Petty Motorsports Ford driven by Paul Menard. “Getting a good, early qualifying draw will put more speed in your car, but if your car is good then you can overcome some of the penalty of getting a late draw. On Friday everyone is usually more worried about where you drew for qualifying than anything else. We’ll work on race trim when we get there and make a couple qualifying runs in the second practice.”

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Once in the race, crew chiefs have to figure out a way to get their cars to turn, no mean feat at IMS.

“If you want a unique engineering challenge, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway will certainly provide it,” said Howard Comstock of Dodge Motorsports Engineering. “Nowhere else do we race on a high-speed rectangle and certainly not on a two-and-a-half-mile track. The straightaways are nearly as long and the corners are nearly as flat as anywhere we race in the series. Very long straights give the drivers high speed entry into the very flat and very tight 90-degree Turn 1 and Turn 3 corners. Being able to carry enough speed into these corners and still get the car to turn will be one of the biggest challenges of the season for the teams.”

“Indianapolis is about getting off the corners — being able to be wide open off the corners because the track has such long straightaways,” agreed Mike Shiplett, AJ Allmendinger’s crew chief on the No. 43 RPM Ford.

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Tom Jensen

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