Banquet 400 presented by ConAgra Foods - Ricky Rudd Notes

Ricky Rudd: "At Kansas, catching somebody -- running them down is one thing, but getting close enough and trying to pass them is another ..."

This week, Ricky Rudd, driver of the Ford Genuine Parts and Service Taurus answers his fans' questions about the draft at Kansas versus Daytona or Talladega, how to find speed at the aero-dependent tracks and tire pressures.

What is it like to be in the draft? Do you feel or hear anything differently when you are in it than when you are not? How far back, approximate car lengths, can you pick up the draft? Do you generally need to lift in the draft, say at Talladega, to keep from hitting the guy you are drafting off of, or does the air build-up keep you from bumping? How big a part does the draft play at Kansas? "The draft depends on what track you are at as to how it works. Somewhere like a Kansas you can feel it maybe seven, eight, 10 car lengths back, you start getting a little of the draft. When you first start picking up the draft you feel your rpm increase, you can feel the car sort of want to catch up to the car in front of you.

At Kansas when you get about five car lengths from the car in front of you, it changes the aerodynamic handling of your car. You've been a faster car, obviously, because you caught the car in front of you. But, when you get closer, then all of a sudden the handling of your car starts changing. At Kansas, catching somebody -- running them down is one thing, but getting close enough and trying to pass them is another, because your handling characteristics change quite a bit, especially if the front end of your car is already pushing a little bit to begin with. If you catch that traffic, all of a sudden you start losing your front end a little more, so now instead of just running somebody down, it is hard to maintain and just stay with them. That is some of the problems that the current NASCAR cars have right now with the aero balance shifted.

You go somewhere like a Daytona or Talladega, when we practice we want to make sure that we are least a minimum, more like a full straightaway from the car in front of you. When the cars run up and down the straightaway, the backstretch especially, they create little vortices, little tornadoes in the air. You don't see them, but the car a straightaway back actually runs a little quicker because of them. In the race, you take advantage of all the draft you can. It depends on what set of current rules we are running with how far back you will pick up the draft. Back when we had the roof deflectors, you could start from 20 car lengths back and all of a sudden catch the guy in front of you like he was running on six cylinders. With the current rules, it is not quite as easy to do that. But, you don't really get into the big handling issues at Daytona and Talladega like you do on these other tracks. So really the draft is used to your advantage to catch people.

As far as does it sound different; the sound doesn't change much, but you can feel the air inside the car, especially at Daytona and Talladega when you are in a big pack, it creates more of a vacuum in the car. You've heard drivers say they can feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up. Actually what they are talking about - you don't feel anything in the car and all of a sudden you get in that draft, and you feel the air moving around you and then you feel the vacuum. You can feel the pressure change inside of the car. You could close your eyes and feel if you are in the draft or not by the vacuum inside the car.

As far as bumping someone, that is almost an impossibility. Back when we ran unrestricted, you got much more of a slingshot effect than what you get today. Now if you are in a line draft - if you've got five, six, seven guys in a line -- the team works hard to make it so the car can pull up and if you could actually pull up and bump the guy in front of you then your car is really good that day. When you pull up on a person and get closer to them, then there becomes like an invisible barrier between you and the car in front of you. And when you start to get a run at them it will push you. It would be very hard to hit his back bumper. You won't actually be able to pull up and hit his back bumper. It's very hard with today's rules to drive into the back of somebody, because it is hard to get there, first of all. You can get a car length back real easy, but the only way you could probably hit somebody in the back end today is if they crack the throttle for a second or use the brakes for a second or the car jumps sideways. Yeah, you could run into them. But in the straightaway today, that is something you don't really have to watch out for - bumping somebody. There are a couple cars that have figured it out - the DEI cars may have that capability, but most cars do not.

Another thing that happens, when you get side by side, it's almost like if you take two magnets with the opposite energy in them, you try to put them together and you can get them close, but all of a sudden they glance off of each other. That is pretty much how the air comes around the sides of these cars. That is not to say you can't drive it and hit somebody, but if you are completely square, door handle to handle, and you turn into the guy - if I'm driving a straight line and the guy beside me squeezes me before he gets to me, I have to make an adjustment on the steering wheel because he can actually move my car around and I can move him around. The same thing when you are nose to tail. If you draft directly in line behind the guy in front of you everything is fine, but if you move to his outside quarter panel, his back end tries to line up with your front end and you can make him loose. If you pull your nose down to the inside, it will make his car tight. That applies at Daytona; Talladega; a Michigan, with large sweeping corners; and at California. At Kansas, it does not. I haven't really experienced it that much at tracks the size of Kansas. There are things you can do at these tracks like Kansas. You can drive up underneath somebody as they are going in the corner and you can put your nose almost up under the rear bumper and it will just about lift the rear tires off the ground of the car in front of you. At Daytona and Talladega, it is not as critical, but when you get to those sweeping tracks, any of the fast sweeping tracks where you enter the corner at 170, 180 miles an hour, that is really how you have to drive today because it hard to catch them and cleanly pass them because of the equal speed. So you have to get up behind that guy's fuel cell and get his back end up in the air. If you do that enough times, the guy will finally let you go by because he is about to wreck."

What do you feel is the biggest factor in finding the speed you need to run up front at some of the "aero" tracks like Kansas? "You've got to handle good in the corner, but you have to have the aero balance on the car right. The teams have gotten better and better at coming up with set-ups that are less sensitive when you are running in traffic. That is probably the biggest change in the past couple of years. The set-ups underneath the cars are quite a bit different than they used to be. It used to be that you set up the car for making mechanical grip. With the springs and shocks that go under the car today it is all about keeping your aero balance from changing from when you are running by yourself and when you are running in traffic. There are all kind of things they are doing now. People would laugh at you if you told them what you were running under the cars two years ago - the spring set-ups and such. Again, probably the biggest gains that have been made are getting the proper springs and sway bars and shocks on the car so that they are not as ill-handling in traffic and so that the handling doesn't go away when you are in turbulence."

I hear that pit crews can make changes as little as 1/2 a pound in a tire pressure. Where can I get a tire pressure gauge that accurate? "That's a good question. I'm not really sure. I think Intercom makes a gauge that is a digital gauge that reads off into the tenths of a pound. It used to be with the bias ply tires, a pound difference didn't make a huge difference. We used to play with tire stagger - the size of the left rear versus the right rear with the bias ply tires. But with what we're doing with the radial tires - the reason it makes so much difference is that the tire itself is a spring and how much air it has in it controls if it is a soft or stiffer spring. There is a chart that Goodyear produces that all the teams have access to that shows the change in the spring rate of the tire versus one pound of air. Some tires are real sensitive and some of the other construction of tires are not that sensitive, so it depends on what tire you are on. But, a pound of air sometimes is too much so, that is why they go to the tenths of a pound."