Around The Track: Michigan all about momentum

"... The only way I could get him to go with me, I had to promise him that he could drive the race car in practice."

	Ricky Rudd says he's always been fond of Michigan. Credit: Autostock

Ricky Rudd, driver of the No. 21 Motorcraft Racing Ford Taurus, recalls an incident from 1978 at Michigan when help was scarce and times were different. He also talks about racing today at the two-mile oval.

Michigan Speedway was a unique track for many years. It was a track by itself -- two miles in length. There was no other track on the circuit like that.

I went there as a rookie in 1977. I remember when I first got on that track thinking, 'this is a lot of fun.' At that time there was nothing to compare to Michigan. You had Charlotte, Darlington and Atlanta, but nothing compared to Michigan. It was real wide, real flat and had good asphalt.

When we went back there in 1978, it was the year after our rookie year, and everybody had pretty much burned himself out. We had worked so hard on the rookie status the previous year, and we won that award.

But the next year sponsorship didn't come and as a result of that we weren't going to go racing. So we just picked a handful races to run and one of them was Michigan because I liked that track and we thought we could have a good run there.

That particular weekend we had some help coming to pit the car, but for Friday and Saturday practice and qualifying we didn't have anybody but myself and another boy, who was a good friend of mine, to work on the car. His name was Joel Stuart. We'd gone to junior high and high school together, and we'd raced motorcycles together.

He wasn't a particularly good mechanic and I wasn't a great mechanic myself, but we had instructions on how to set the dials on the engines and stuff like that, something that I'd never done before. We had a sheet on how to set the dials. We got through the weekend and got qualified.

But part of the deal was that my friend had been bugging me about wanting to drive a race car. And the only way I could get him to go with me was to promise him that he could drive the race car in practice.

He held a NASCAR driver's license at that time, but he'd never been in a car. We'd raced dirt bikes together, but never a car. He was one of these guys that was an armchair quarterback. 'Let me drive the car. I know I can drive the car. I'd be better than almost anybody out there. Let me do it, let me do it.'

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So we got through qualifying, and I told him there was an extra driving suit and told him to put it on and then said, 'Let's go.' I kind of called his bluff on it. He didn't know whether to believe me or not, but he went up in the truck and got the uniform and put it on and came back out.

He got in the car, and I was helping him buckle up and his knees were knocking. He went out on the racetrack. I'd told him how to stay out of the groove until he got up to speed. He thought he was at speed, but watching him, it looked like he was about close to pace car speed.

His lap times were quite slow. He came back in and he'd found out it wasn't quite like he thought it was, but he made one of the best workers I had for many years.

That shows you how things have changed over the years.

Now, there have been a lot of copies of Michigan -- not true copies, but scaled-down versions such as -- Vegas, Chicago, Kansas City, the new Fontana track are tracks that simulate Michigan. All of them strive to be Michigan, but none of them quite pull it off.

To me, and all the drivers, it is one of the most fun tracks. You can get a lot of speed there, but the track is built to handle it. It has relatively flat corners, good racing and it's at least three grooves wide. There is a lot of action there so it is a fun track from the driver's standpoint.

A lot of racing goes on in the straightaways, as much as in the corners, so there is a lot of jockeying for position and moving around. You'll see more of that there than at almost any other racetrack we run.

Michigan is a momentum racetrack, and you want to carry as much momentum through the corner as you can so that when you enter the backstretch, you enter with more speed than your competitor so that you can advance forward.

If you want to pass somebody, you want to really think hard if you want to pass them on the inside or the outside. And if you pass them on the inside, you want to make what they call a slide job in dirt track racing.

You want to have momentum when you drive in. The car is going to start sliding because you are on the inside and the air is off your spoiler so your car won't stick as well as the guy on the outside.

If you're going to pass, you've got to go in hard and fast enough that when you get to the corner and your car starts to slip, it will slip more violently than it has before because of the car being on the outside.

You want to be able to slide up in front of that person and take the position. Or you can simply drive around them on the outside. I prefer to do a lot of my passing on the outside.

You'll see side-by-side racing, two-wide, three-wide. It doesn't seem to be a huge advantage if you run the corners down, or in the middle, or on the upper side of the racetrack. You'll see a little of everything, depending on your car's particular set-up.

From the backstretch you've actually got to turn to enter the corner. And when you are three-wide, it gets real busy. The guy on the inside has no air on the spoiler. He has to make a sharper turn because he is on the bottom.

So you've got to make sure your car is under you well because you're going to lose your rear down force and a person can spin out really easily there, especially when you are running three-wide or side-by-side in that corner.

You'll see a little bit of everything going into that corner. You'll see a guy going into the bottom and you'll see him slide three lanes all the way to the top of the racetrack. If you see a guy doing that, most of the time he's not steering the thing, he's actually sliding up the racetrack. So it drives like a dirt track the way it is.

Michigan's Turn 4 is very famous for pushing the front end, not having the front wheels connected to the racetrack. And if you do get a push when you get to the exit, you have to lift the throttle.

When you do that, that's bad because you lose your momentum and if there are four, five, six cars behind you they are going to pass you. If you see a guy that does that, it looks like he is trying to run into the guy beside him to make a block.

There is a lot that goes on at Michigan and it's not quite as simple as it looks, but it's a fun track to drive.