|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES: DAYTONA 500 QUALIFYINGFebruary 16, 2014Danny LawrenceDAYTONA BEACH, FLORIDA KERRY THARP: We're going to go ahead and start our post‑qualifying for the 56th annual Daytona 500, which will be a week from today here at Daytona International Speedway. Danny Lawrence, who's the trackside manager for ECR, and certainly is a happy day for this company, built some mighty fine engines, going to be on the front row for the Daytona 500, also had a lot of success here last month at the Rolex, I believe 1‑2‑3 if I'm not mistaken for that, as well, and then also Danny tells me his first time out as engine builder at NASCAR in 1998 when they built the engine for the No.3 Chevrolet that won the Daytona 500 by Dale Earnhardt, he also was responsible for the engine that went into the 2007 Daytona 500 winning Chevrolet driven by Kevin Harvick, and he whispers in my ear a minute ago, I hope there's a third one in the cards. Congratulations, Danny. Just talk about the great afternoon here today for ECR. DANNY LAWRENCE: Well, I'm going to tell you, coming down to Daytona, it is our super sport, and we got to be really good friends with Joie Chitwood through the years. I know a lot of you guys don't know, but Joie's dad and Richard were really tight, and in '69, you guys need to get Joie to show you the picture of Richard and Joie's dad. It is really cool, got hair slicked back look like two junior Elvis Presleys. I'll probably get in trouble for that one, but so, you know, it's always been coming to Daytona, back in the day we would go to Talladega and run for seven or eight days and then come here and test, and it was never good enough because it's all about the details, and it's still that way today. Every little detail matters. You asked me about did you build that engine. Well, our company does this together. Richard has given us the tools and the people. We have aligned ourselves with hiring Dr.Eric Warren and Mike Coughlan from Formula1. It takes every little thing to be able to do what we did today, so it's not just one person. Austin did a great job. Everybody just puts it together. You know, really on the sentimental side, I've really been pretty good about this 3 thing, and when I saw that car hit the racetrack today, it kind of tore me up a little bit, but I've got to tell you, Austin is such a good guy that he has been great for our company. Q. I'm going to stick with the question I was going to ask, but you threw me on that sentimental part. You had such a successful Rolex, and you guys were very, very fast at testing here, and you've been fast for two days now. What kind of preparation has to go in as a company for you guys to be so strong in both series all the way across every time out? DANNY LAWRENCE: Well, it's the approach you take. You know, you have to not leave anything on the table. I welcome any of you guys to come to our shop and see our facilities, see what Richard has done, the dynos we have in and how we test. Jimmie Johnson actually pushed us all to the next level and Hendrick Motorsports has, too, and we can't use the excuse that we're all Chevrolet, so we have to be better every time. You come down here to the test, and you're either good or you're bad. Last couple years ago we came down here and we weren't very good, so you go back home, you work night and day, night and day, trying to make sure that you're not leaving any little detail on the table. Okay, come down to the test this year and you're pretty good, and you're like, we might have a chance to sit on the front row, so we can't leave any detail on the table. The way the whole thing works is you do everything that you can possibly do and you make sure that your data's good and you make sure that you don't get any false information and you try to put it all together. The 78 car, they have five miles on that car, and that car was‑‑ that's the way Richard does things. He gives our technical partners the same thing we get. I'm going to tell you, I talked to Martin Truex a while ago, and he said, if I beat Austin I probably won't get another good engine for the rest of the year. He said, I ended up exactly where I wanted to be. But no, everything is about every little detail, every employee, everything everybody does. You have to put it all together because the competition out here in NASCAR is so stiff. You just look how tight the qualifying is. It doesn't take anything at all to have a bad day. Q. Danny, what's the challenge of taking an engine to the edge here without going over the cliff? We saw issues yesterday. How do you kind of find that balance with getting all you can out of it without creating problems? DANNY LAWRENCE: Well, the thing is we and all the big engine companies have race simulation dynos, and we actually test these engines for multiple times, but it's still not the racetrack. Things happen on the racetrack that you can't simulate in the shop. When you're sitting here, a good engine from good to bad can be three horsepower off when you're trying to do every little thing that you can to get everything you can out of it, things do happen. I mean, we're on the edge on these things. If you notice our guys out there, they're pretty much going back, checking every little part and every little piece that we can to make sure that we don't have any issues. As I said, every little detail matters, and you know, a lot of the teams, like I know that we have a car here that we have our package for Talladega in, and actually we'll run it in the 150s and we'll carry it back to the shop and we'll tear it apart. You have to think way down the road. When something happens, when you have an issue, it's not something that's not thoroughly been tested. It's usually a parts issue or you'll find out that something happened component‑wise. It's generally not a mistake that somebody made, it's just something that happened. Q. Kind of a two‑part question. The first is last year you didn't really have a great qualifying effort, and then this year it's completely turned around, so many cars there in the top 10. How much pride do you take as the head of the engine program to get that turnaround across, and while it doesn't reflect well to the racing, what does it mean to be able to have strong engines on qualifying day? DANNY LAWRENCE: Well, I can tell you like this: It's not just‑‑ it's about every race that we go to, and Richard has always told us the next race is the most important race. We've got guys going home tonight. We've got guys going to Nashville testing, we've got guys going‑‑ we'll have people pretty much all over the country tomorrow working on trying to make sure that we're good at Vegas and Phoenix and California. The thing is that we push and we plan way down the road, and we try to‑‑ once we get our plan together, we execute the plan, and then we go to the next thing. It's not all just about one race. This whole thing comes back to how you end up all together. I'll tell you one thing that Richard has worked really hard on is making sure that we all communicated better. Our cars, if you notice, our cars are closer together than they've ever been, and that helps everybody. You have a driver that if he's having an issue, if the car is not doing it right, he can actually talk to his teammate and they can be able to make changes on the car, and the cars are exactly the same, have all the same stuff in them so it reacts the same. It takes a long time to be able to lay a plan out like that to make sure that you do your whole fleet to where it's universal and everything is kind of the same. I'm not sure if that totally answered your question, but there you go again, it's all about the plan and the execution. Q. You kind of touched on this a little bit, but if you could extrapolate further about Martin's effort and how proud you are to see them get on the front row, also. DANNY LAWRENCE: Well, I'll tell you, the way it is now, when they build these cars, and you've got to applaud NASCAR for making the common template. In our fab shop they have a very sophisticated laser system to where they can measure and they start building the cars from the roofs all the way down. They know exactly, Todd and the Furniture Row guys, know exactly what setup to put in the car, what their travels will be. Yesterday they made one lap, brand new car, and then they made a qualifying run, and that's all they did, and everything was right there where it needed to be. I don't think they made any changes. When I sit here and tell you about the details, it's not‑‑ it's not close, it's right on the money. And that's what we've been working really hard on to try to make sure that we can‑‑ when we find something that's really good, we can replicate it and make all of our whole fleet better. Q. Kerry mentioned 1998 and winning the Daytona 500. Can you just talk about how big ECR has become since that time and how you persevered despite losing the guy who really, in addition to Richard, drove all of you to do what you do? DANNY LAWRENCE: Well, you know, it's no secret when we lost Dale, we rode an adrenaline for a little while there, and Kevin and Harvick did a very nice job being able to get into his seat, and then we had some pretty lean years. When you've got a guy that's driving for you that's your friend and to me the best race car driver out there, it's just about impossible to recover from that. You know, I really believe that none of‑‑ anybody in our company has ever given up, but I'm going to tell you, it's a breath of fresh air to be able to see Austin and Ty and Ryan Newman and Martin Truex and these guys that are great race car drivers be able to sit in our stuff, and it took us to while to recover to be will able to get back to where we needed to be. Richard always says, you don't want to hear any excuses and it's all about the results. Well, there we go again. It's been long enough where I think everybody is healed and we've got a little satisfaction of some of our other stuff, and we've been able to execute and we've got that feeling again, and I think that our company is ready to go to contend, and I don't think it's just about Daytona, I think we're going to be good everywhere we go, and if we're not, we're going to go back, we're going to regroup, and we're going to good hit them again. Just as I said, Richard has always told us the next race is the most important race. Our cars look great, from what I understand, in the wind tunnel, and I know our engines are good for Phoenix, and they're sitting there, and we're very prepared and we're ready to go. It's just all about the preparation, and I think that we're set up for a great year. Q. If we'd have talked to you 25 years ago, you'd have talked a lot about horsepower, finding horsepower. How much of your effort today is still about finding horsepower, and how much of your effort in putting together engines is about reliability and lastability in the product? DANNY LAWRENCE: Well, I'm going to tell you, back in the day, the engines were a little further apart, and you would have‑‑ I mean, we'd go to put our 500 engine in, and I saw Chocolate just walked in, he can tell you. It's like we really hate to do that because generally it was about 10 horsepower off. You can't compete today if it's 10 horsepower off. But today everything is so detailed. You've got to have every bit of it. You've got to have a durable engine, you've got to make the best power, or you can't keep up. It's just the facts. You know, the thing is 25 years ago to the day, the amount of equipment, the CNC machines that we have, when we build an engine now, we can make another one exactly like it, and I can look at the sheet and tell you it's going to make this power and be within two tenths. Back in the day when we built the engines, we would run one, like this is a good one, this one is okay, this one is really good, this one is not so good, and you didn't know because a lot of the stuff was done by hand, and I'm talking about, I went to work for Richard in 1985, and '85, '86, '87, we would decide, we always had our engines that were really off, that was our North Wilkesboro engines because you couldn't touch the gas. The engines that were really good, that was our Michigan engines. We've always had a plan, but today they are so, so close, and so when you hear a guy say this engine is way better than that engine, we know, we have so many checks. All these cars were run on a chassis dyno before they actually rolled off and rolled right into the trailer, and they all laid over each other really, really close. It's just fine tuning every little bit of it. But there is a big difference from 25 years ago to today. I mean, things are way closer now than what they used to be. Q. How much of your company's commitment to plate races and the work that you guys put into it still goes back to RC and Dale Sr. racing together and what these races meant to them? DANNY LAWRENCE: You know, people say a lot of times that Richard is‑‑ he used to build his own engines and he drove and he did body work, he did it all. People tell me you're lucky because Richard has oil in his veins, he's an engine guy. But really Richard is an everything guy because he can sit here, and you go to a test, and if you have a car that doesn't respond, you go out there and you do things you know to make it go faster, the car doesn't respond and it doesn't pick up speed, Richard will say, well, that's the body. But if we have a car where all the cars run the same speed and they're not good, Richard knows, like okay, maybe we missed it on this, maybe we missed it on that. He still comes through there. He still looks at the dyno sheets. He still is very, very much involved. Richard loves the engines. He told me about a year ago, I need to come down there and put one of those things together, and I said, they're way different now than what they used to be. He is so dedicated and so into every little detail, and he's the one that puts that into us, that you would be surprised. Richard knows what spark plugs that we have in the car. He knows every piece of it, and he understands how it works, and it makes my job easier when you've got a guy, when you explain to him, okay, we pushed it a little bit too far or we got a little bit too hot. You can't pull the cover over him, either, because he knows when you're trying to‑‑ just BS him I guess you could say. I was struggling with that. KERRY THARP: We'll end on that one, Danny. Congratulations, and maybe we'll see you back here next week. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|