ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702180038
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: DAYTONA BEACH, FLA.
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
When Gary Nelson became NASCAR's Winston Cup director in 1993, after spending a year as Dick Beaty's assistant, he ushered in a new era.
Inspections became more thorough. More parts of the cars were checked.
More changes were made to the rule book. There was closer scrutiny in the garage. A new level of professionalism emerged.
As a former crew chief, Nelson knew every trick in the book. But he also had a notion of what it took to relate to crew chiefs, drivers and team members.
At Daytona International Speedway on Friday, Nelson sat down for a one-on-one interviewto discuss his work and the central issues of Speedweeks 1997.
Q: There has been a lot of talk about the lack of racing here at Daytona. What is your assessment?
A: That is always something that we're hearing. You go back a few years, when restrictor plates first came out, and remember some of the comments that were made then. Another year, it was the rear spoilers - guys were taking the air off each other's spoilers. And then we brought out the new templates. That was a big year at Daytona. So, every year there is something. And as time passes, it usually becomes a non-issue in a short period of time. The neat thing about NASCAR racing, especially Winston Cup, is you don't know what you're going to get. When that green flag falls, you never know. We're saying really that it looks pretty typical of the competition in recent years at Daytona.
Q: Are you concerned that in your continuing efforts to achieve parity, to equalize the playing field, you will adversely affect racing at Daytona and Talladega?
A: You always worry. Everything we do, you worry how that will affect competition on the track. The first thing we look at is the safety of any item we look at. The second thing is competition. And the last thing is the cost to car owners. What we found is if we level the field and everybody has the same rule book to build their car by, and you turn them loose on Sunday, they put on a show. We have a driver's series, and the driver talent comes out on Sunday - and the pit crew talent and the strategy. All of those things are in the mix of variables, and it's proven to me year after year if we can level this field, it will be great on race day.
Q: NASCAR racing at Daytona has lost the last-lap pass, the traditional slingshot move. Is that something you can regain? Is it impossible with restrictor-plate racing?
A: It's such a complicated thing to try to figure out. We haven't really seen that in a long time. We feel it's been replaced by strategy. The drivers must position themselves properly in that big pack of cars running throughout the whole race. And they're all trying to get in that ideal position to be there at the end. And that's a great show, I think. Look at Bill Elliott in the [second] 125 [Thursday].
Guys have been trying to find the right position all week. Well, all of a sudden, Bill Elliott found out there was another groove out there. And heck, he went from wherever he was - 10th - to third, just by his unique ability to go out there and search around. And that was great. That had the fans really charged up.
Q: The IROC race seems to have more racing. Is that because they're all equally prepared cars?
A: We've seen the reverse in the same series. You just don't know what you're going to get. Whatever variables cause that kind of race, some of them are not predictable. The difference, I think, is that there are no pits stops, no different makes and none of those strategies that go along with them. If you've got a Pontiac, a Chevy and a Ford out there, well, one may have an edge in aero drag. But if you line them up one, two, three, whoever is first in drag is probably worst in handling and the other guy is in the middle. And those numbers will never be as exact as you can make an IROC car.
Q: How much cheating is going on in the garage these days?
A: All I can say is our goal, every day when we come to work, is to not catch people cheating. Our goal is to convince them not to cheat because they will get caught if they do try it. Several years ago, we started escalating our fines. We had some serious meetings before we came up with that plan. For the first guy, it was $20,000. The next guy was $30,000, and the next was $40,000.
Now, we're not saying the guy who got fined $20,00 was only half as bad as the guy who was fined $40,000. We escalated it purely as a deterrent. Each of these really set a record. Our plan from the beginning was to get everybody's attention. And we decided if we continued to escalate the fines, we would get some help from the sponsors of these major teams saying, ``Hey, we don't want to be setting these records.''
Q: So the sponsors were the key?
A: Exactly. That was the key. When a sponsor picks up that newspaper Monday morning, they're going to say, ``That must be the worst thing that's happened in the sport.'' Well, all the phones started ringing from the sponsors to the car owners and from the car owners to the crew chiefs saying, ``Hey, we don't want to set any records. And if you guys are even thinking about cheating, don't do it. Don't set the all-time record.''
Q: Are you getting as many cheating tips as you did three years ago?
A: I get some crazy stuff now on major things. It's mostly race fans who you can tell right away don't know. Now, on the little things, we get tips from the garage all the time - from people that we trust and understand and believe. They will come to us and say, ``Hey, next time you look under there, look a little bit more to the right.'' So we do. And there's some small things we can find on that. But we haven't been getting the tips like we did originally.
Q: This year, the teams were complaining that they did all this work in six days of January testing and then you changed the rules. What's your answer to that?
A: This sport is evolving so fast, when we sit down in November, we really don't have a crystal ball. But we may know there's a problem. We really did not change any rules from testing until today.
Now, our procedure for checking had to change as teams figured out ways to beat our rule on springs. We said in December that we were going to put 75 pounds on each side of the cars to check the springs to make sure they're not too soft [so the cars won't bottom out]. The teams came to us with this problem. They said, ``We can't drive these cars with lightweight springs. They're getting us into trouble. You guys need to protect us from ourselves.'' So we decided to hang weight on the back and we got very positive response from the crew chiefs.
Well, what you learn is that these guys went back to work. Shocks were specifically being built to hold up the car so it would pass our weight test. The drivers would put up with the rough ride on the race track just to get through the test. So in January, we said, ``Hey, be prepared to unhook your shocks. That's a procedural change, not a rule change. So we came down here and on the first day, to verify that the shocks were unhooked, we bounced on the back end. And with some cars, the back end didn't move. Well, they had this chain in there so it wouldn't move. They still have the lightweight springs, but when we hang the weight, it's not going to move because of the chain. So put yourself in our shoes. Now what's good for the sport here? We told them to take the chain off. They finally conformed to the rule, and everybody was smiling again.
Q: Do you like your job?
A: Yeah. I've thought about that quite a bit. I didn't take this job to gain friends. The most I could expect was to get respect.
The way to make this job work is to be consistent and fair and by the book with everybody. Somewhere in there, you've got to bring in the human element called ``compassion.'' If you just go in there and do the Marine drill sergeant routine, you'll not only be hated but in a constant struggle of ``us against them.'' It's a daily thing, though.
You can lose it like that. You can work for a year trying to get people to believe you're fair, and you can lose it with one wrong word to one wrong person. And it takes a long time to build that back. But if I operated any other way, I don't think I could make it. I don't think anybody else could make it in this pressure cooker.
LENGTH: Long : 141 lines KEYWORDS: AUTO RACINGby CNB