By Roy J. Akers- www.skyviewsports.net
Last week, drivers raced at Darlington, “The track that’s too tough to tame. ” This week, its many drivers favorite track, Bristol. 500 laps and 250 miles of banked track that is a total of a half-mile per lap. The drivers talked this week and “It’s Bristol Baby. ”
BTW… here is the Sky View Sports zoom podcast with Steve Sweitzer and Bristol’s Anthony Vestal, who oversees the tracks 400 plus media this weekend. (Below right side) VVVVV
Alex Bowman leads a 1-2 Chevy Sweep on the front row
Can you give me a sense of what you as a driver have to do in terms of managing the tires for this race, potentially tomorrow, compared to what you did in the car last fall when you didn’t have to worry about it? What more are we going to see you guys do, or can you give us a sense of what more you’re going to have to do inside the car that we can’t see?
“Yeah, I mean honestly, in the spring last year, we rode around at what felt like half speed all day, and I thought I was going to get out of the car and everybody was going to be mad because we didn’t run hard all day. Everybody loved it because there was so much chaos. So in the fall, we just ran hard all day. You run hard every lap, and that’s kind of what Cup racing has become these days… how hard you have to run the car. There are some places you have to manage, but for the most part, you’re ten-tenths every lap. I think tomorrow, it’s really going to depend on when the cautions come out and what they do. Like you look at the end of that spring race, and we didn’t get any cautions for a lot of things that could have been cautions, probably. But at the beginning of the race, we were getting cautions all the time. So there’s two ways to predict that, right? If you save too much and you keep getting all these cautions, you’re just giving away track position. But if you don’t get the cautions and you run too hard, you’re killed on that, too.”
Carson Hocevar on Bristol
You’ve had flashes here at Bristol of really good things. You’re a short track guy, came up that way. But what is the challenge here compared to, I guess, what you grew up doing and what we would call a traditional short track, so to speak?
“You never really 100% know when the top’s going to burn in and when it’s not. It’s a little easier to predict for the Cup races because it’s 400 or 500 laps that you can kind of guess what the pattern’s going to be just because you run enough laps. But, you know, I remember when I ran trucks here, it always was a question mark if it was going to be burned in by the end of the race or at the start, and you saw that yesterday without any practice or anything. It started to move up the racetrack at, like, the last 10 laps or something. So, yeah, it’s always a difficult deal here of just track position and balancing it out, and everybody being super, super good and moving around or trying to. I got to run here in a late model when I was about 14 or whatever, so it’s still got a little bit of feel to that when I was 14 racing here.”
Denny Hamlin on Bristol (Earlier this week)
DENNY HAMLIN: Yeah, I mean, I haven’t even thought about Bristol. Truthfully I’m so week to week, I give each track about seven days, eight days of true work, and that will start tomorrow afternoon.
When Coach (Gibbs) was in here, he spoke highly of particularly your sim work. Can you speak to some of the things that you have put in to keep yourself at the top of your game.
DENNY HAMLIN: “Well, I mean, I think this is accurate. I do most of the sim work for all the cars. My job, I’ll be back in there tomorrow, working on this racetrack, working on tires, things like that. But I’m doing it for every team. I don’t know. I only trust myself to do it. I don’t know why. That’s just the control freak in me, to want to have everything absolutely perfect.
I put a lot of work in. It’s not just for myself. It’s for the benefit of all Joe Gibbs Racing. They reap the benefits of the work that I put in through the week. Yes, they don’t love it as much as probably I do, but I enjoy the process of being good at it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m not going to win these races on raw talent anymore. I’m going to have to outwork people. I’m going to have to look at things that maybe other people aren’t looking at. I’ve learned to win it more with my mind than I have with my talent.
Jesse Love makes his Cup debut with RCR racing
Jesse Love, driver of the No. 33 C4 Energy Chevrolet and No. 2 Whelen Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing, met with the media onsite at Bristol Motor Speedway to preview his doubleheader race weekend and his first career NASCAR Cup Series start in Sunday’s Food City 500.
Why Bristol? Why a place like Bristol to make your debut?
“Yeah, it’s one of the better racetracks for me… kind of more my wheelhouse. I don’t really enjoy the flat track stuff a whole lot. I really enjoy the tracks with a lot of banking, a lot of grip, moving around, running the wall, getting on the top, bottom, the middle… kind of wherever there’s grip and a clean racetrack. I like to search around and I can do that here.
I’m comfortable with the racetrack and have enough laps here. I took enough detailed notes over the years. When I come here, I’m having to learn a whole new race car. I didn’t really get do any testing, right? So I can eliminate one of the factors of learning, which is learning the racetrack, right? Still picking up, you know, things here and there throughout the weekend, but because I’ve been here enough, I can come here for the Cup race and not have to learn a racetrack and a car at the same time.”
Roy J. Akers covers NASCAR for www.skyviewsports.net
