After the Red Bull crew finally enjoyed some downtime and relaxation over the holidays following a long NASCAR season, things are humming again at the team’s Mooresville, North Carolina, headquarters.
Although last season ended only a few short weeks ago at the mid-November Miami-Homestead finale, the Red Bull team has just over a month left to prepare for the 2010 season and the opening Daytona 500.
Brian Vickers and the No. 83 crew will head to the Texas Motor Speedway Jan 19-20 for a Goodyear tire test, along with fellow Sprint Cup drivers Tony Stewart, Greg Biffle, and Kurt Busch.
“We have to get two cars ready,” said No. 83 crew chief Ryan Pemberton. “We had the Christmas break and then we have 10 working days to put two brand new race cars and a new series car in the trailer with our test plan and all the components we’re planning on testing.”
Texas will be a rare opportunity for the Red Bull team to get time on a NASCAR track outside a race weekend, something that was once routine procedure. These days, tests on NASCAR-sanctioned tracks have become much more important after the series imposed strict limits on testing last year.
The policy prohibits testing at any NASCAR-sanctioned track that has a Sprint Cup, Nationwide or Truck race, as well as those with Camping World East or West events. The restrictions were designed to help teams manage their costs better as the world financial crisis began to hit the sport in late 2008.
'It’s actually much harder and much more involved when you’re testing than it is on a race weekend.' –Ryan Pemberton
Although the policy curtails the amount of extra data that teams can acquire throughout the season, there’s little doubt that the lower costs have helped more than one team make ends meet.
It’s also changed the way teams approach tests, because they simply have no chance to redo something later in the season.
“Before we used to just try one thing one week and something different the next, but now you really have to prioritize these things before you go because you don’t want to lose valuable track time,” Pemberton said. “It’s not more critical than it used to be, but it is more defined because you don’t get a chance to do it.”
On the other hand, with testing curtailed, the significance of finding something that might give the team an advantage cannot be underestimated. NASCAR tightly controls car design and aerodynamic elements, so the difference between a quick car and a slower rival often depends on how right the team can get everything on a given race weekend.
Trying new stuff in a test can lead to a set-up that gets everything bang on and helps find that little extra speed needed to win.
“Doing the small things better than the other guy is how you can get an advantage,” Pemberton said. “We are almost down to the point that we can hardly test them because they are so small. As a group, if you do them all right, you may have something.”
But there are many ways to get around a racetrack fast in NASCAR and with the variety of venues the series visits, one style of set-up does not fit all. Even if the team finds something sublime in Texas, it probably won’t help much at most tracks. “The competition is so close that it takes a lot more to get an advantage,” Pemberton says. “And because it’s so close, sometimes you go a little bit too far. You can be off really quick.”
Getty Images/Red Bull Photofiles
While it's a welcome opportunity to try new things, being one of the first teams in line for a tire test doesn’t make things easy. The schedule means the team must continue to make plans for the mid-February opener in Daytona as it also contends with preparing for a mid-week program in Texas that promises to be one of the team’s most rigorous trips of the year.
“It’s actually much harder and much more involved when you’re testing than it is on a race weekend,” Pemberton said. “We have a test plan, lots of things we want to look at and try, and hundreds of things we are going to measure.”
Usually, a normal testing day begins somewhere around 6 a.m. with the car hitting the track by 9 a.m. at the latest. From there, a full day of running sees the team working everything out as they try new ideas and tweak old ones. Pemberton expects the team to work into the late afternoon with the car finally coming off the track at dinner time. Then, they’ll do it all over again, getting in about eight or nine hours of track time on both days.
“On a regular race weekend, we have an hour and a half session on Friday and 45-minute and 50-minute sessions on Saturday. When you add that up we are on track only three hours in two days,” he said. “But we will put 500 to 700 miles on the car in a test.”
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