THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9504020138
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BRISTOL, TENN. LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Last Monday, as the Winston Cup teams were regrouping after the race at Darlington, the phone rang in the office of the crew chief of a leading Ford team.
A Ford engineer was on the line and said he had watched ESPN's ``NASCAR Today'' on Saturday morning. The program did a story about how Hendrick Motorsports makes its own race cars from the ground up.
ESPN had aired about 10 seconds of footage of a bare chassis sitting on a surface plate at the Hendrick race shop in Concord, N.C. And in those few seconds, the engineer had seen something that startled him.
The Hendrick chassis was different. Some of the heavy steel beams that make up the chassis were constructed differently than on the standard Winston Cup chassis. They were angled differently where the chassis tapers at the front end.
Yes, we know that, the crew chief (who asked that his name not be used) told the engineer. We think our chassis is just as good, the crew chief said.
As it turned out, the peek at the Hendrick chassis wasn't even a fresh look. It was file footage from last year, provided to ESPN by Sunbelt Video, ESPN's Dave DeSpain said.
But this is how far the Ford folks have been willing to go in their search for answers as to how to stop getting whipped by Chevrolet in the Winston Cup series.
This weekend, as the teams prepared for today's Food City 500 at Bristol International Raceway, there wasn't a Ford team in the infield that didn't believe that the Chevrolet Monte Carlo was a superior race car.
They believe the Chevys are better because they have better aerodynamics. And most of the folks in the Ford camp are expecting that the results of NASCAR's comparative wind-tunnel tests last week will confirm a Chevy advantage in downforce.
But there are those in the Ford camp, including that TV-watching engineer, who are looking beyond the hoopla over the wind-tunnel tests. Aerodynamics is a key factor, but not the only factor.
For one thing, the Fords are not the only ones getting beat. So is Dale Earnhardt. And he's driving a Chevy. But he's getting outrun every week, usually by one of the Rick Hendrick-owned cars or by Sterling Marlin.
``They're beating Earnhardt like a drum,'' said Richard Petty. ``They just don't outrun him in the straights, he don't pass 'em in the corners, either.''
Petty believes that the Hendrick chassis may, in fact, be a key element behind the success of the Hendrick teams. Time and again in his long career, he's seen teams get hot because of something new in the chassis.
Ricky Rudd, who used to drive a Hendrick car, provided a frank and insightful explanation as to how the Hendrick teams, with drivers Jeff Gordon, Terry Labonte and Ken Schrader, might have done exactly that.
``The No. 1 rule when you start building a chassis is `rigid,' '' he said. ``If you drive in the corner and the chassis flexes, how can you be precise on your springs and other adjustments?''
The Hendrick chassis, which has carried Gordon to two victories and Labonte to one in 1995, is ultra-rigid.
``They've got braces everywhere on those cars,'' Rudd said. ``But any time you add extra steel, you add weight.'' The Hendrick teams have worked to remove weight, he said. ``By adding strength and stiffness, but also taking away weight, they've now got a rigid chassis with no extra weight.''
In years past, ``no one really paid much attention because the Hendrick car was not a giant killer at the track,'' Rudd said. ``It took Ray Evernham, who joined Hendrick as Gordon's crew chief in late 1992, to get the shock absorbers to run with their rigid chassis.
``Before Ray came along, they always kind of floundered around a little bit. The day he came along, that was when the Hendrick thing turned around.''
``We do have a better chassis, we think, than the other teams have got,'' said Hendrick general manager Jimmy Johnson. ``It's not stamped out, as some of the other chassis builders do. And the quality is not there. Each one of ours is identical. We've got 25 people working (on chassis), and that's all they do.''
But the 18 car (driven by Bobby Labonte) doesn't have one our our chassis and he's been competitive,'' Johnson said. ``And the 4 car (driven by Sterling Marlin) has been running good.''
And that simply proves it's not just the chassis, either. by CNB