Mike Mulhern

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Can New GM Jay Frye Get Team Red Bull Turned Around?

Jay Frye, Red Bull’s new GM, could be the perfect call for Brian Vickers and AJ Allmendinger
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)

By Mike Mulhern

LAS VEGAS
Dietrich Mateschitz, the man with all those Red Bull billions, loves extreme sports, innovative advertising, and the world-wide stage for his crazy stuff.
Amazon River surfing, air racing, Formula One, and now NASCAR, maybe the craziest of all.
Mateschitz’ first stock car racing season, 2007, was fitful. Ambitious, yes, and fitful.
Brian Vickers’ 10th at California Speedway last spring was a quite promising start, and his fifth, with a shot at the win, at Charlotte a few weeks later, seemed to show things were going rather well for a startup team, headed by crew chief Doug Richert.
But the problems surrounding teammate AJ Allmendinger and the rest of the Toyota camp, lackluster engine punch up off the corners, and no top-35 guaranteed starting spots, all took a toll, and things generally spiraled downhill, and not just in the Bull camp.
However there is no doubting Mateschitz’ willingness to get this job done, and done right, and his financial backbone for this money-hungry sport. But management may not be a strong suit. Then again it’s hard to run a NASCAR team from 5,000 miles away, and Mateschitz only rarely shows up over here to check on his NASCAR investment.

Brian Vickers takes the wheel of something even crazier than a NASCAR stocker
(Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for Team Red Bull)

Now a second-year operation, the team went through some major shakeups last season, as it tried to get its sea legs. Gunther Steiner, the Formula One engineer that Mateschitz sent over from Austria to put this thing together and get it rolling, wound up managing not only the technical side of things – his expertise – but also the general operations too: sometimes less-than-thrilling nuts-and-bolts stuff, but crucial to success.
So now enter Jay Frye, the new general manager for this 180-man two-team squad.
Vickers says Frye understands the game at hand: “He has definitely brought a lot. A lot of experience.
“He’s all about the basics, and that’s what we were missing last year. We were trying to reinvent the wheel, and we didn’t even have the wheel rolling yet.
“He’s brought a lot of stability to the whole organization, and confidence. He’s a great leader, very motivational. I’ve been very impressed.
“The biggest thing is to recognize we need to get back to the basics, and we need to build a solid team. We need to run at least what the others are running, and be competitive with them, before we try to run something better. That wasn’t the philosophy last year.”

Gunther Steiner (left) and Toyota racing boss Jim Aust
(Photo credit: Toyota Motorsports)

A veteran NASCAR man with deep roots, Frye just one year ago appeared on top of this world: He’d persuaded Mark Martin to leave Ford’s Jack Roush after 19 years there and move to a newly revitalized Chevy team, and Martin and Frye came within three-feet of winning the Daytona 500.
But Frye has also gone through some of the deepest traumas imaginable in this sport during his year. Ernie Irvan….Jerry Nadeau….and their career-ending injuries. And the decline and fall of two recent team operations, where owners wound up in over the heads and finally had to bail out…leaving Frye to pick up the pieces and sort things out.
So at the end of 2007 Frye found himself sitting on the sidelines.
Now he’s back in business, again running a major league team, and ever-optimistic about what lies ahead. Frye is a people-person, 16-plus years in the sport, and most of those running NASCAR teams – where dealing with personalities is critical. And he may well be just the perfect man for this job.
First things first: It’s back-to-basics not only for NASCAR this season but also for this stock car team, Frye says bluntly.
“One thing this team has to do better is what I call ‘the blocking and tackling,’” Frye says. “The basics. We’ve got to make sure we do the basics right.
“The support we’ve got is incredible, but we’ve got to get the basics right to take advantage of that, to take advantage of the expertise we have.
“So a lot of the stuff we’re working on is just ‘the basics,’ doing the basic stuff right first.
“And we’ve got to do some different things with our facility. It’s Penske’s old building, and they’ve done a good job band-aiding it. But it was designed for a one-car team with 30 people.”

Brian Vickers, Team Red Bull’s baseline driver, after three years with Rick Hendrick, knows what he’s up against
(Photo credit: Toyota Motorsports)

The game plan isn’t about winning, not yet, not really. It’s about getting competitive. Heck, it’s about just making the field – Allmendinger, the Indy-car racer making the move to NASCAR, made only 17 of last year’s 36 tour events, and he has failed to qualify for this year’s first three races. Vickers, the Thomasville native, now starting his fifth season, went through several crew chiefs last year, after failing to make 13 races; this time around he’s got veteran Kevin Hamlin running his team.
However this lineup has youth in its favor: Vickers is just 24; Allmendinger, 26.
“AJ is a phenomenal talent,” Frye says.  But Allmendinger needs seat time, and he’s simply not getting enough of it. At California Frye put together a quick deal for Allmendinger, after he missed the 500 field, to run in the Truck race. “And he did a good job. So we’re working on different things for AJ to get him more experience in different series this year. He’ll be doing more than he did last year for sure.”

Any first-year NASCAR operation is going to look a bit rough around the edges. Heck, even a lot of veteran NASCAR operations don’t look all that solid and polished. This is not an easy game to play, particularly if your name isn’t Rick Hendrick or Jack Roush. This isn’t Poker 101.
This sport can break a man.
So it takes a strong stomach even just to pull up chair and push some chips out in the middle.
Look at Roger Penske, for example. He’s been playing NASCAR for more than 30 years, with some of the best in the business, Mark Donohue, Rusty Wallace, Bobby Allison. And Penske finally won his first Daytona. And he’s still looking for his first NASCAR championship.
Consider Ray Evernham, who led Jeff Gordon to all those championships, and then struck out on his own as team owner….
Consider even the late Dale Earnhardt. The best driver ever to run at Daytona, it took him 20 years to finally win the Daytona 500.
No, this is not an easy game, not for the faint of heart. Certainly not for an all-in kind of bettor, either.
Patience and dogged gumption.
Does Dietrich Mateschitz really have what it takes to make it in NASCAR?
“I think there is patience,” Frye says. “They understand.
“The commitment Red Bull has for this program and this team is incredible. I’ve never seen commitment like this. A lot of people may talk about ‘commitment,’ but these people are making the commitment to make this a very successful program for a very long time.
“That’s exciting as a competitor, and very encouraging. The sky is the limit for this program. And since I joined a month ago, I’ve tried to add to it.
“The opportunity here is phenomenal. And we’ve got to take advantage of it.
“For me personally, it’s fun to be able to go to work and be working on making things better, rather than just worrying about survival.”

Crew chief Kevin Hamlin brings some back-to-basics old-school racing to Team Red Bull
(Photo credit: Toyota Motorsports)

There is of course the Toyota factor. NASCAR’s newest manufacturer, in its second seasons on the Cup trail, looks to be in a major turnaround, as strong as Joe Gibbs guys are running. And now it’s “no excuses” for the rest of the Toyota teams, Frye says: “The Gibbs guys have validated all this. Gibbs is getting it done, and if they can get it done, then we can get it done.”
But then Gibbs has one of the most solid rosters in the sport, one of the few operations that can take on Hendrick and Roush head-to-head every week.  There is the distinct possibility that Gibbs may leave the rest of the Toyota teams in his wake.
However the Gibbs guys seem to understand that part of their job this season is not only to run strong but also to help the other Toyota teams get back in the game. Last year the three Toyota camps – Michael Waltrip, Red Bull, and Bill Davis – appeared to have separate agendas, and distinctively different philosophies on how to get things done: Waltrip was doing things the Michael Waltrip-Ty Norris way, Red Bull was doing things the Steiner-Formula One way, and Davis was doing things the Bill Davis way. As a result, there was little to write home about.
Frye says he understands that, “and I think that will change, that everyone will see that working together they can do a better job.”
And Vickers, perhaps better than most, because of his three years driving for Rick Hendrick, knows just what this team is up against with this new car-of-tomorrow. “I was testing the car-of-tomorrow for Hendrick in 2005, at the end of the year. They still have a huge advantage, and you can see it; that’s why they’re so fast.
“With the old car, you could kind of wing it when you got to the track, and the driver had a lot more say in it.
“But this car—and you’ve heard 100 drivers say it—when it comes off the seven-post (computer simulation machine), that’s as good as it’s going to be.
“It’s frustrating because there’s not much you can do to improve it.”

Toyota’s Andy Graves and Red Bull’s Gunther Steiner (right)
(Photo credit: Toyota Motorsports)

So how much time do Frye and Steiner, and Vickers and Allmendinger have to show they’re turning things around?
“By the time we get to Charlotte (in mid-May), you should be in a rhythm with your program,” Frye says. “Brian has that now….and AJ, if we’d had another lap at Daytona, I think he would have gotten in the 500. Now with the rain there wasn’t much we could do at California. But there’s no reason we can’t have both these teams locked in the top-35 by Martinsville (March 30).
“The reality of this sport is we’ve got to get that done.”

AJ Allmendinger needs more seat time and stronger qualifying runs
(Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Friday, February 29, 2008

Sprint Nextel Merger Hits the Ditch, Raising Speculation about the Future

By Mike Mulhern

LAS VEGAS

Remember Nextel?
The cell phone company that signed a 10-year, $70 million a year sponsorship contract with NASCAR four years ago, replacing R. J. Reynolds’ Winston brand, the primary Cup tour marketing agent for 33 years?
Well, things aren’t going so well for the company, Sprint, that, in effect, bought Nextel two years ago.
When Sprint and Nextel merged, each was valued at about $33 billion. But with this week’s report of a fourth-quarter loss of nearly $30 billion – essentially writing off its Nextel venture—the company’s market capitalization is only about $25 billion….and the business world is rift with speculation that either AT&T or Verizon (the U.S.’ two biggest telecom providers) may move to buy Sprint in a takeover. Sprint stock has lost half its value just since December. Some have even raised a question about possible bankruptcy, though company executives dismiss such talk.
NASCAR this season just renamed its top series the Sprint Cup, abandoning Nextel Cup.

NASCAR’s TV bosses have reportedly sent out a memo to the sport’s television announcers warning them not to talk on the air about either faltering ticket sales or TV ratings. TV announcers here declined to discuss the situation.

Kasey Kahne has a new commercial coming out this weekend, and it’s weird. “It’s a lot different,” Kahne says. “You won’t expect to see me doing the stuff I’m doing.  I didn’t think I could do it.  I don’t dance very often. We had a choreographer and some dancers, and I was working with them, a one-day deal, a lot of fun.
“I saw the tape. It’s different. It’s pretty funny.”

Eddie Gossage, who runs Texas Motor Speedway for Bruton Smith, threw out an interesting promotional gimmick Friday, offering $15,000 to the favorite charity of any driver throwing his helmet at another driver. Gossage said his offer was made in the vein of NASCAR’s new campaign to let drivers show more of their personalities.

If Jimmie Johnson makes it four-in-a-row here, he’ll do it from the back of the pack, after a weak qualifying run.
“The conditions out there are much different than we had in the test session, and guys are struggling with grip,” Johnson says. “The test session wasn’t totally useless, but the heat of the day here makes it much, much different. 
“It’s been a good challenge for us. The car had been really loose; we had a bunch of cautions off turn four. The sun is sitting on that side of the speedway, and getting those two corners really hot.
“At the test we could drive really, really hard, and the guys came out (Friday), including me, and had a couple of big moments. Fortunately I didn’t hit anything.
“I just had an idea of what I could run, how hard I could run, braking points, where I should be back in the gas…but the pace is much, much different than I expected. What we got away with in the test session just isn’t working right now.”
NASCAR inspectors were extremely tight with body templates during Friday inspection, and a number of drivers, including Johnson, Matt Kenseth and Dale Earnhardt Jr., lost practice while crews had to make repairs.
“It was probably 15 to 20 minutes we missed,” Johnson said. One of the ‘hard points,’ which I assume was on the nose, was off by one-sixteenth of an inch.  NASCAR is really cracking down on everything in the tech line. But it is hard to believe one-sixteenth would keep you from getting on track. But it’s the way it is.”

Teammate Jeff Gordon, on the other hand, was fourth quickest in qualifying. “You can’t drive this car the way you could drive the old car,” Gordon said. “And when you look at the engineering that goes into it, it’s very scientific. It’s very difficult to get it just right.
“If we didn’t have our seven-post (computer simulation machine) at the shop, and so many people working on it day and night, I don’t know if we would have hit it as fast as we did.”

Montreal’s Patrick Carpentier finally made a field, just barely. Not in the top-35 he has to qualify on speed. “We’re finally starting the season….and it’s fantastic,” Carpentier says. “After the last three weeks, I’ll finally be able to sleep.”

Carl Edwards, front row qualifier for Sunday’s Dodge 400, could be the man to snap Jimmie Johnson’s Las Vegas streak
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Kurt Busch, the other half of Vegas’ brothers, Just wants a straight-up shot at the pole

Maybe his third season with Roger Penske will be charmed for Kurt Busch
(Photo by Marc Serota/Getty Images for NASCAR)

By Mike Mulhern

LAS VEGAS

While kid brother Kyle is getting all the attention, Kurt Busch is quietly making ground himself, and this too is his home track.
“If I were to win Vegas on Sunday, man, I’d come unglued,” Kurt Busch says. “It’s my big race. It’s my hometown. I used to race through that desert parking lot before the big track even existed; I saw it built from the ground up.
“Vegas is number one on my hit list right now.”
After opening with a surprise second in the Daytona 500, things went bad at Fontana, where he finished 13th Monday. “We’re cautiously optimistic about what the season holds for our team. We’re trying to get a good handle on this new-style car. We were very fast at times during the California race, but we stalled out late.
“We’ve struggled with what would have been really minor adjustments in the past only to see the car react the opposite of what we were hoping. 
“Hopefully by mid-season we’ll have a pretty good handle on it.”
Pat Tryson, his crew chief, would – for starters – like to have just a good qualifying session today: “I’m just curious to see what we can do if we can ever get qualifying in and have a chance to start up front for a change. We started dead last at Daytona (after a car swap) and only 36th at California (because of rain). It would be a nice change to see how strong we can be without starting the race in a hole.
“We came back from the speeding penalty at Daytona, and we came back from our fuel mileage blunder at California—that put us down a lap at one time. So there’s no doubt we’ve been plenty-strong enough to pass a lot of cars. 
“Hopefully this weekend we can get in a good qualifying run, start up close to the front, and not have to play catch-up.”
If they do, their fate will be set when Dodge 400 pole runs get underway this afternoon at 3:40 p.m. PST.

Kasey Kahne’s hauler runs down Las Vegas Blvd past the Paris casino
(Photo Credit: Bryan Haraway/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Scott Speed, the former Formula One driver now making the move into NASCAR, at the urging of sponsor Red Bull, will be stepping up his learning curve this month, adding some NASCAR Truck events to his full ARCA schedule, beginning with next week’s Atlanta race.
Speed, a Toyota man, will ironically be in a Chevy truck.
The goal is to get Speed up to speed for the Cup series, though the timetable still isn’t clear.
“Every time I’m in the car I’m learning something,” Speed, yet another Californian-in-NASCAR, says. “To get in a Truck or Cup car and go fast by myself has been really easy, easier than I thought, to be honest. What’s difficult—and what I’m learning a lot about—is how the other cars around you affect your car.
“The Truck is the most similar to the car-of-tomorrow, and it is very sensitive to the other cars around you.”

Tim Sullivan, a long-time NASCAR veteran going back to the sport’s very early days in the 1940s, died this week, at 83. Once the general manager of NASCAR’s Motor Racing Network, Sullivan was at home in nearly every aspect of the sport. During WWII, Sullivan was cited for “extraordinary heroism” during the battle for Iwo Jima.

Meanwhile down in the NASCAR trenches, the sport’s long-haul truckers have been getting a workout. “It’s pretty tough because you’re gone to Daytona for almost two weeks to start with and then you get home from there and you’ve got one day to get rested up a little bit to head across country for two more weeks,” Gale Wilson, one of the sport’s veteran long-haulers, says. “It’s a pretty tough time. It’s not an impossible deal, but it stresses everybody out before the season gets started, really.
“They plan probably for the last month…but then it changes daily. You can plan a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily work out the way you planned it.”
Team owners need a full roster of truckers, because this West Coast swing, for example, includes running several different rigs out and back – one of the California race, another to swap out new cars for the Vegas race, and then another bringing cars in for next Monday’s Phoenix test.
“It’s a tough stretch here the first month, real tough,” Wilson says. “It seems it’s tougher now than it was back in the day, when we started out at Daytona, Richmond, Rockingham and Atlanta. That’s the tough part right there—more time away from home.”

Joe Gibbs’ Toyota Guys are Atop all three NASCAR tour series, making J. D. Gibbs look brilliant

Tony Stewart and new teammate Kyle Busch are atop all the NASCAR standings
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)
By Mike Mulhern

LAS VEGAS
The NASCAR season is only a few weeks old, but already there is one clear trend: Joe Gibbs’ Toyota guys are hot.
In fact, if not for Tony Stewart, Kyle Busch would be coming here to Las Vegas Motor Speedway atop all three tours. As it is, Gibbs’ newest is leading the Cup series and the Truck series and he’s second in the Nationwide (Busch) Saturday series….second to Stewart.
Yes, that’s right – Gibbs’ Toyota teams are leading all three series. And that means Toyota – just a year into its Cup challenge – could win NASCAR’s three big series championships.
Stewart is going for his third straight Nationwide (Busch) win here Saturday. So if Stewart wanted to run the full Saturday tour, he’d be a good bet for the title. But Stewart is only planning to run nine of those this season.
So those who were questioning J. D. Gibbs’ decision to add the volatile Busch to an already lively environment, with Stewart and Denny Hamlin, can’t find much to complain about right now.
Busch himself has been a surprisingly good fit: “It’s pretty cool to be where we’re at. But it really just means we’ve had a good start. It doesn’t mean we’ve won the championship yet.
“We’re not getting ahead of ourselves.
“It is a fun place to be right now…but it’s not just me. I’ve worked with four different teams in two weekends, and everyone’s given me a ton of support.
“I wish we could run for the championship in all three series, but we’re going to have to skip some Truck and Nationwide races. Our Cup team is our main focus. We’re leading the standings this week, but it’s going to take a lot of work to stay there.”
However consider this: Busch’s worst finish in his six NASCAR starts has been fourth (at Daytona, where he had the best car). He’s got three seconds, but only one win, Saturday’s Truck run at Fontana.
“You can’t really complain coming out of two weekends and all six finishes are in the top-five,” Busch says.
Stewart himself may be pleasantly surprised at what he’s seen in his new teammate. “Kyle is a totally different guy than people perceive him to be,” Stewart, who can relate to that, says. “I like Kyle. He’s just a kid who’s happy-go-lucky. 
“He’s always laughing about something…and that’s what we need. 
“That kid loves racing more than anybody I know. He’ll run three races a weekend, if the Trucks are here, and not even think twice about it.”
Of course Stewart and Busch didn’t get off to such a great start. Back in Busch’s rookie year the two had some very sharp battles, costly battles, including one right here that left both sides angry.
“Our relationship when he first started was a little rough,” Stewart concedes. “But even before he signed the contract, we got things smoothed out and learned how to get along well with each other.”
Part of that may be Stewart’s own empathy for Busch. “I know people think he’s a little rough around the edges, but I see a lot of talent in him,” Stewart says. “He’s a great teammate.  The test session we had at Atlanta (last fall) – just talking with him and working with him – I knew right then he was going to be a strong asset to this team.”
But then Busch and Stewart have both matured, they have both learned – Busch at a much quicker pace – how to get along in this rough-and-tumble business. (Well, yes, that was that little flap at Daytona between Stewart and Kyle’s older brother, who both may need to learn to work better together too….)
“Kyle’s learned a lot of patience,” Stewart says. “He’s got a lot of qualities that are going to help this team.  Having all three cars up front every week is something that is going to make us that much stronger. 
“Kyle is very much a team-player already. He’s so willing to give information and talk about what his car is doing.
“We have three guys with very similar personalities that I think are going to mesh really well.”
And on the technical Stewart says he’s been impressed too: “He’s got a different set of ideas we haven’t had in the past.
“We had our first team meeting --the three crew chiefs, the three drivers, and the three main engineers—after the shortened happy hour session at (rain-soaked) California.  And listening to how Kyle and Denny and I all work together, the crew chiefs all work together, I really believe that’s going to lead this team higher than it has ever been. 
“That was really one of Kyle’s ideas—to get us all together after happy hour. We tried it some last year, but he was really adamant about all three teams getting together like that and sharing information. 
“Even Denny and I are communicating more than we ever have.”
And with this new winged car such a handful to drive, teamwork like that should make a big difference.
At least this time around at this track, the tires shouldn’t be an issue, at least not on the Cup side. Last year’s new asphalt here led Goodyear to bring a very hard compound, which made drivers feel like they were ice-skating, and their complaints were loud and vigorous. Last month’s brief testing here went much better for most teams than their testing at California, and finally getting in 500 miles at Fontana should make these guys more comfortable here.
“The track has seasoned-in pretty quickly, for a year, and to be honest, I’m surprised it seasoned in as well as it has already,” Stewart says.
“A different tire has helped it also.”
However there is one nagging issue that appears to be on the rise – this new generation car is so tightly controlled by NASCAR rules that there is very little room for teams to improve the handing. Hence the follow-the-leader racing and the premium on track position – the guy out front appears to have a major advantage.
Stewart agrees the drivers themselves are now a bigger part of the Sunday equation. But engineering, more than ever, he says is critical: “Because they’re not designed to handle as well, it obviously puts the driver more in the equation.  But it’s put a high emphasis now on engineering. 
“You have to rely on the engineers to find the combination that will make the car go fast…then you just wrestle the car.
“A driver won’t be able to make up the difference. We’re not going to take a 10th-place car and run first with it.
“A driver might be able to maintain what he’s got, but if his car isn’t driving well, he’s not going to win.
“As technology marches on, the window for getting your car ‘right’ has become smaller and smaller and smaller.”