Written by:
Kenny Wallace
Veteran NASCAR driver Kenny Wallace is an analyst on NASCAR RaceDay and NASCAR Victory Lane on SPEED. (Marc Serota/Getty Images)
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What will it take to win the Sprint Cup title this year? Will the best driver win? How do you even determine who the best driver is anymore?
More importantly, what is more crucial to the championship – car or driver?
In the past couple of weeks, I have concluded it’s more about the car now than ever before in modern NASCAR history. I would even dare to say it is as much as 70-percent race car and 30-percent driver.
Many of us were surprised to see Greg Biffle come out of the box strong in the Chase and win the first two races. What was more surprising is Biffle isn’t usually considered a major threat on the flat tracks like Loudon. In fact, many people had said he couldn’t drive them.
So I asked Greg Erwin, Biffle’s crew chief, on NASCAR Victory Lane at Loudon, why he believed in Biffle at places like Loudon while others hadn’t. Erwin knew Biffle had finished fourth at Phoenix, a flat track, once before and he knew he could do it again. So they tested eight times this year at Milwaukee to improve their program. Eight times!
That dedication, commitment and ensuing results tells me it’s all about the team and the car they put under the driver. The No. 16 team won because they tested repeatedly for that race. No matter how talented a driver is, the car still has to handle, and testing eight times will certainly go a long way toward achieving that goal.
I think most of these 12 Chase drivers have equitable abilities – none of them are head-and-shoulders above the others. When you group together 12 of the best drivers in the world, something has to differentiate them and it’s the car.
So, teams work harder on their cars than ever before. If a team tests eight times, the next team will schedule 10 tests. If one team has a brilliant engineer, another will hire the guy from Formula One who created bump-stops, like Michael Waltrip Racing just did. The sport is so competitive because teams continue to one-up each other, from the testing schedule to the over-the-wall guys’ performance on pit road.
The days of a driver making up for a mediocre car are over. The era of Dale Earnhardt Sr., in an ill-handling car, sliding sideways with smoke coming off the right-rear tire but still leading the race, are gone.
Years ago at Las Vegas, NASCAR black-flagged Dale Earnhardt Jr. because his car was so bad he couldn’t get it up to minimum speed. Junior is a great driver but he couldn’t compensate for a piece of crap car that day.
We’ve also watched great drivers like Jeff Gordon, Matt Kenseth and Tony Stewart struggle recently and I really don’t think it’s them. These guys haven’t forgotten how to drive.
