A Chance to Make History at Chicagoland
HUNTERSVILLE, N.C., (JGR) – Crew chief Dave Rogers remembers the off-season leading into the 2006 NASCAR Nationwide Series season quite vividly. After stints as the race engineer for Joe Gibbs Racing’s (JGR) No. 20 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series team, as well as crew chief of JGR’s No. 11 Sprint Cup entry, Rogers had been assigned to crew chief duties for JGR’s No. 20 Nationwide Series team with driver Denny Hamlin.
Rogers, along with Jason Ratcliff, the crew chief of his No. 18 JGR teammate, were on the same page from the very start, as they spent the entire off-season getting all of the team’s Nos. 18 and 20 cars as identical as possible. Now, over three years later, with mostly the same people both teams had in 2006, JGR’s Nationwide Series program is on the brink of making history as a result of uniting as one. Besides, JGR as a team has rung up a head-turning 12 wins in the first 19 events with two different teams and four different drivers.
So when JGR’s Tony Stewart straps himself into the No. 20 Old Spice Toyota for Friday night’s Dollar General 300 Nationwide Series race at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Ill., he, Rogers, and the rest of the No. 20 team will be fighting for a piece of racing history on multiple fronts. And what might be the Old Spice team’s biggest obstacle to overcome to rewrite history? The Ratcliff-led No. 18 bunch.
JGR’s No. 20 Toyota team has scored nine of the 12 Nationwide Series victories thus far – five by Stewart, two by Denny Hamlin and one each by Kyle Busch and teenage sensation Joey Logano. A 10th win by the No. 20 team on Friday night would equal a series record first set 25 years ago for wins by a single car number. Sam Ard drove the No. 00 Oldsmobile for team owner Howard Thomas to 10 wins in 1983. In 2006, Kevin Harvick had nine wins and Jeff Burton one win in Richard Childress Racing’s (RCR) No. 21 Chevrolet to tie the mark. Harvick scored RCR’s record-tying 10th win in that season’s 33rd of 35 Nationwide Series races at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth. Ard scored his original record-setting 10th victory in the 35th and final event of 1983 at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway.
Add this year’s wins by Busch (two) and Hamlin (one) in the No. 18 Toyota and JGR sits just a victory away from tying another record – 13 Nationwide Series wins by a single organization, set last season by RCR’s Harvick (six wins), Burton (five wins) and Clint Bowyer (two wins), who accomplished the feat driving the Nos. 21, 29 and 2 Nationwide Series entries in 2007. RCR’s record-setting 13th win came in the season’s 35th and final race at Homestead (Fla.) Miami Speedway with Burton in the No. 29.
Those are certainly lofty numbers racked up by JGR’s Nationwide Series contingent as it heads into Friday night’s 20th event of 2008, especially considering the organization had just nine victories in all before the season began. When Stewart scored back-to-back wins during the first two weekends of 2008 at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway and Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., he already equaled the number of Nationwide Series wins by JGR in the three-year span from when Bobby Labonte snared the No. 20 team’s inaugural win in 1998, and Mike McLaughlin’s second win for JGR at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway in 2001.
JGR didn’t score its third Nationwide Series win until its seventh season, when Mike Bliss drove the No. 20 to victory at Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway in 2004. Busch scored JGR’s third win of this season just two months in when he started a string of six Nationwide Series wins in a row by JGR drivers and an incredible seven wins in eight outings. The only win by a non-JGR entry in that eight-race span during April and May still came at the hands of a JGR driver – Busch in the No. 32 Braun Racing Toyota at Charlotte.
Fast-forward to back-to-back wins by Stewart and Hamlin in the No. 20 JGR Toyota at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon and at Daytona the last two weekends, and JGR finds itself having achieved yet another milestone. Hamlin, who scored six Nationwide Series wins for JGR in 2006 and 2007, gave the organization its 100th NASCAR victory with his first-place finish in the Winn-Dixie 250 last Friday night at Daytona.
With 16 races left on the Nationwide Series schedule, there is plenty of time for JGR’s Nationwide Series teams to make history. But Stewart and Rogers would just as soon take care of business once again at Chicagoland in the series’ first-ever NASCAR night race at the 1.5-mile tri-oval. They know they’re on a roll, and after all, why put off history any longer?
Tony Stewart – Driver, No. 20 Old Spice NASCAR Nationwide Series Toyota Camry at Chicagoland
How much have your strong runs in the Nationwide Series served as a confidence booster for what you’re trying to accomplish in the Sprint Cup Series?
“It’s huge, especially if you’re having a bad weekend on the Sprint Cup side. It’s easy to start questioning what’s going on. When you can go out there and have a good run in the Nationwide car, it helps you have that confidence as a driver. If the driver doesn’t have confidence going into the Cup race, then it takes a lot to get up front. We’ve had good cars everywhere we’ve been on the Nationwide side. We’ve had good cars on the Cup side. Even if it’s a little bit off, when you’ve had that good day on the Nationwide side, it just gives you that much more confidence and that much more of a boost the next day.”
Does racing in the Nationwide Series take anything away from your Sprint Cup program?
“No, it doesn’t take away from your Cup programs unless you go out there and get hurt, or something like that. If you didn’t run the Nationwide Series race or a Truck Series race that day and you went out and went fishing that afternoon, you could just as easily trip over a log and break your arm and maybe hurt yourself more than you would if you were in a race car. You have to live life, and if you want to drive race cars, then that’s what you should do. If that’s what’s going to make you happy, then as a driver, that’s what you need to do. You can’t live your life in fear of getting hurt with everything you do. If that were the case, we would all live in padded houses and padded rooms and they would put us in padded crates and crate us to the race track, uncrate us, let us drive the race cars, and then put us back in the crates and send us home and put us back in our padded rooms.”
Chicagoland will host its first night race with Friday’s Dollar General 300. As a driver, how do you adjust from dealing with the setting sun to then running under the lights?
“What you’ll do is either run a clear visor or you’ll run an amber visor, and you’ll have colored tear-offs on top of it, and we can pull those off as the sun goes down. That gives us the ability to use some tinting without using a tinted visor that we’re stuck with for the whole night. That makes it easy. And especially for us dirt track guys, who are used to pulling them off anyway, it’s no big deal. As far as the track is concerned, from day to night it normally just gains a lot of grip and normally it doesn’t change the balance of your car. It just gets faster as the surface temperature cools down. Wherever your balance is, whether you’re loose or tight, you just gain more grip and go faster.”
Dave Rogers – Crew Chief, No. 20 Old Spice NASCAR Nationwide Series Toyota Camry at Chicagoland
This weekend at Chicagoland, the No. 20 team could tie Sam Ard’s record of 10 wins in a season, which was equaled in 2006 by Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton. When you put that in perspective, just halfway through the season, how does that make you feel about what you’ve accomplished already?
“Everyone who’s involved in the Nationwide Series is proud of what Sam Ard did back in the 1980s. And racing against the No. 21 car a few years back, we know how dominant they were. Every time you showed up at the race track, you knew you had to beat that 21 car. To post stats compared to what those guys did is incredible. We’re proud of it. We are eyeing it and want to rewrite the history books. We’d certainly like to do that in Chicago.”
With the history of JGR’s Nationwide Series program, which includes just three wins over its first seven seasons, does that make the roll you are on even sweeter?
“It’s very rewarding. I came over here at the end of the 2005 season and sat down with Jason (Ratcliff, crew chief for No. 18 car). From the very minute I walked into this building, Jason and I have been on the same page. We took the entire off-season going through all the JGR Nationwide Series cars and making sure they were identical. We don’t make any changes to the cars without consulting with each other, and we really push to make each other better. You look back at the wins this team had prior to Jason and I and the group of guys that we now have, and look at what we have now, it gives you a sense of accomplishment. We’ve had the same guys underneath us for the past three years or so, and we’ve all been going in the right direction from day one. It’s proving to be successful on the race track. It’s not anything, by any means, that I think Jason and I did on our own. But I know that all the guys who work here are a big part of it all. I’m very proud of that.”
Since 2006, JGR’s Nationwide Series program has amassed 18 wins. How rewarding has it been for Denny Hamlin, Tony Stewart, Kyle Busch, and now Joey Logano, to ride along with you as the program gained steam over the last two years and seems to be culminating with the year you’re having as a team?
“It just shows you how big of a cycle this business has. This year has had so many special moments. I worked with Tony Stewart for a number of years as his race engineer on the (Sprint) Cup side. Then I came over to the Nationwide Series side and I never knew if Tony and I would work together or not. As fate would have it, Tony gets in our Nationwide Series car and we are able to win five races with him already. Then you look at Denny (Hamlin) and he brought me over to the Nationwide Series side with J.D.’s (Gibbs) approval. We won races in 2006 and 2007. Then he steps out of the car and we win more races building on what we had done those previous years. And now, finally last weekend at Daytona, we win with Denny driving in a race that looks to be his last one in the 20 car, at least for quite a while. We’ve had two circles completed this year, by getting to win races with Tony, and ending with Denny winning in his last ride in the 20 car.”
Tony Stewart’s NASCAR Nationwide Series Career Profile At-A-Glance Entering Chicagoland
Stewart will make a return to the NASCAR Nationwide Series on Friday night driving the No. 20 Old Spice Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing in the Dollar General 300 at Chicagoland. He’ll look for his sixth Nationwide Series victory in eight races, as Stewart won the first two races on this year’s Nationwide Series schedule at Daytona and Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., respectively, before finishing 27th at Las Vegas and 10th at Texas before winning again at Talladega, Darlington and New Hampshire. (Stewart did not participate in the Nationwide Series races at Atlanta, Bristol, Nashville, Phoenix, Mexico City, Richmond, Charlotte, Dover, Nashville, Kentucky, Milwaukee and Daytona in July.)
It will be Stewart’s third career Nationwide Series start at Chicagoland. Stewart’s best career Nationwide Series result at Chicagoland came last year when he drove a Kevin Harvick Inc.-prepared Chevrolet to an eighth-place finish in his second Nationwide Series race at Chicagoland. In Stewart’s first Nationwide Series race at Chicagoland in 2006, he finished ninth. The Dollar General 300 will mark Stewart’s eighth race as part of his nine-race Nationwide Series schedule for 2008. Stewart has a total of seven wins, six poles, 24 top-fives and 33 top-10s in 84 Nationwide Series starts. Three of Stewart’s Nationwide Series wins have been in the season-opening race at Daytona (2005, 2006 and 2008).