Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 11, 1993 TAG: 9301110015
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
GIVEN CHALLENGE, BODINE OUT TO BUILD BOBSLED OF GOLD
AFTER A COUPLE of heart-stopping rides down the Lake Placid, N.Y., bobsled run, Geoff Bodine put the wheels in motion that could help the U.S. bobsled team win its first Olympic medal since 1956.\ Last February, as Geoff Bodine and millions of others watched on television, the U.S. Olympic bobsled team failed to cover itself in glory at Albertville, France, extending its non-medal streak to 36 years.
"I can drive better than that!" Bodine exclaimed to his family.
And so began a journey that took the 43-year-old NASCAR Winston Cup driver on a wild ride down the nastiest bobsled run in the world right into the tangled world of U.S. bobsledding.
Today, less than a year later, Bodine is $130,000 poorer, but the United States has its first good American-made bobsled since 1956, when the team won an Olympic bronze medal.
Even without the new sled, the U.S. four-man team, driven by Brian Shimer, is winning as never before on the World Cup bobsledding circuit this year, in part because of the help from their new auto racing friends.
Things started to slide last March in Lake Placid, N.Y., when Bodine, following up on his new-found interest, took a few highly publicized rides down the infamous and treacherous Olympic run.
Bodine gritted his teeth through two brain-rattling rides as a passenger. Then bobsled driver Bruce Roselli was crazy enough to put him behind the wheel, starting halfway down the course.
Bodine hit the wall, as any good stock car driver will do. He nearly flipped, too. The crash knocked the wind out of Roselli and bent the frame of his sled.
"I'm still walking, that's the main thing," Roselli gasped after the run.
Said Bodine, "Now I've got to build you a new sled."
A few days later, Bob Cuneo picked up the phone at Chassis Dynamics in Oxford, Conn. The company Cuneo co-owns designs and builds race cars.
On the line was Cuneo's old racing buddy, Geoff Bodine. Cuneo hadn't heard from him in months.
"I bet you don't know why I called you today," Bodine said.
"I know why you called me today," Cuneo replied. "You want to design a bobsled. I read that you were up there in Lake Placid and I know how your mind works."
Cuneo, too, had been captivated by the Olympics bobsled telecast.
Cuneo found himself watching the sleds come off one particular turn on the Olympic course.
"I walked up to the TV and showed my kids a point high on that turn and said, `If any sled can get to this point, they're going to be fast and they're going to win the race,' " Cuneo said. "The sled from Switzerland hit that point and won the race.
"And at exactly the same time in North Carolina, Geoff was watching with his kids and he was doing the same thing."
Bodine's request for a new sled was great news for the recession-battered folks at Chassis Dynamics.
They badly needed a project, not only for the money, but as an outlet for their passion to build and race. Bodine, meanwhile, had agreed with his wife, Kathy, to spend no more than $80,000 on his new hobby.
So Cuneo and Bodine went to Lake Placid to talk with the U.S. bobsledders.
The meeting was a disaster.
"They were very skeptical," Bodine said. "They got hostile. Their attitude was, `You're just blowing smoke and you'll go back to North Carolina and forget all about it.' "
Actually, one would have trouble finding two things that irritate bobsledders more than celebrity athletes and new sled projects.
In recent years, team morale suffered when dedicated sledders lost their spots on the team so the federation could generate extra publicity with marquee athletes such as Edwin Moses, Willie Gault and Herschel Walker.
And in 1988, the federation blew as much as $1 million to hire scientists to build a new sled.
"They spent money like it was going out of style," sled driver Shimer said. "But the builders never talked with the athletes. They just went to the drawing board and came up with this thing. It was terrible. It was amazing it even went down the hill."
Bodine told the bobsledders they would have to work together, which further irritated some of them.
"They said, `Are you kidding me? Forget it,' " Bodine said. "They have to buy their own sleds and equipment. No way were they going to cooperate with each other."
But if you know racing, you know how Bodine reacted. He stubbornly plowed ahead. And some of the bobsledders quietly encouraged him.
"I told Geoff, `We're looking for two-tenths of a second. If you just give us a tenth of a second or two, we'll have a gold medal,' " Shimer said.
Cuneo and a computer whiz named Don Barker began gathering information. Barker shares a building and many projects with Chassis Dynamics.
They documented every chassis detail of the four European sled designs and pumped the data into the computer. And they interrogated the bobsledders like homicide detectives quizzing a murder suspect.
"They picked our brains and picked our brains and picked our brains," Shimer said. "They asked us everything - even things that I wouldn't think would matter to them."
Barker programmed his computer for bobsled data instead of race-car data. He built bobsled computer models and computer turns and "actually ran the sleds in the computer into some turns," Cuneo said.
"We were able to tell exactly what the sleds did," he said. "And then we compared that data with the drivers' feelings - all their comments on which sleds steered better or handled the bumps better.
"So we put all of that in a kettle and came up with a new chassis design that's different from anything anyone's got."
After a spring and summer of work, Cuneo and Barker were thoroughly obsessed with the project. While building their new two-man sled, they also rebuilt one of Shimer's sleds.
The bobsledders, while cheerily cooperative, remained skeptical.
By this time, however, Cuneo knew he could help them.
"They didn't understand vehicle dynamics," he said. "They didn't even understand terms racers use, such as `push' or `loose.' They would be talking about an instance where they changed something on a sled that improved it or made it worse, but they had no idea why. It was just some sort of black art to them.
"But it took us awhile to win them over. And do you know when their confidence in us came? It came when we went to Calgary in October for the first World Cup race of the year.
"We were there for no other reason than to observe. And we were really excited because all the things we saw on the computer we could now see on the track."
Cuneo and Barker roamed from team to team, quietly working their magic:
"Why don't you try this?"
"Take a look at that part over there."
"We can fix that."
They persuaded the maintenance man at their motel to let them use his basement shop.
"We were down there fabricating parts and modifying parts and making parts and modifying sleds," Cuneo said. "And the things would go faster.
"There was magic that week. And we had their confidence."
There was magic all right. Favored to win nothing, Shimer's four-man sled won the race. It was the first World Cup victory for an American team in five years.
In November, Shimer's sled won twice in Germany, at Altenberg and Winterberg. Last month, the team was second at La Plagne, France.
The Americans are on the verge of a World Cup championship. And Shimer still has not tried the Bodine two-man sled. That will come in the season's final race at Lillehammer, Norway, in late February and early March.
But other Americans tested it in October after the race in Calgary. They said it was the best handling sled they had ever run.
On Sunday, Bodine's two-man sled will be formally unveiled in Lake Placid.
"They're going to win medals," Bodine said. "We've got the athletes. Brian Shimer is winning right now in Europe. And he's got the old stuff. We feel very confident. But we need a sponsor."
Cuneo added: "I'm fully confident we have what it takes to have the fastest sled. But Geoff and ourselves are sort of at the point where reason tells us we can't put any more money in it."
The United States Olympic Committee has agreed to finance the development of a four-man sled by Chassis Dynamics as well as a development program for the sled's steel runners. But that is bare bones support.
"The problem we have is that the Olympics is exactly a year from now," Cuneo said. "We need money now or we're going to run out of time to do everything we need to win the gold.
"And we have absolutely the best potential for gold that we've ever had in the United States."
Keywords:
AUTO RACING