Motorsports

Little parts, big problems

From lug nuts to bolts to stray hot dog wrappers, a few dollars' worth of worries can n affect the multimillion dollar Chase for the Championship.

By BRANT JAMES
Published October 29, 2005

The math is just not fair.

A Nextel Cup race car costs about $150,000 to craft from sheet metal and tube steel. Its engine runs about $60,000.

Top teams spend about $20-million of sponsor money a year to pay for everything from the Red Bull in the transporter cooler to the telemetry screens on the pit box.

Kurt Busch earned nearly $10-million in purses and bonuses for his team - and untold riches in endorsements - by winning the 2004 Nextel Cup championship.

But in any race, it all can be zeroed out by a 30-cent bolt, a $5 hot dog, a $400 tire, or the $1 lug nut, like the one rolling in the palm of Chris Anderson's hand.

"Lug nuts are a key," said Anderson, a Brooksville native who is the jackman for Jimmie Johnson's No. 48 team on race day, but the assistant parts manager at the Hendrick Motorsports shop during the week.

The hexagonal lug nut seems innocent enough. Made of magnetic steel and heavier than expected, it seems like a dummyproof part of a basic but crucial procedure. Five lug nuts hold each tire onto the lug bolts and therefore the wheel of a racecar. If one comes loose, the tire can wobble, come off, cost a driver a race and maybe a championship.

With two tire changers using an air-powered impact wrench resembling a drill to change a pair of tires each in 13 or so seconds, mistakes happen. But precision is critical. The lug bolts - metal rods that extend off the wheel - have about an extra three-quarters of an inch in tapered length where they insert into the holes that support the tire so the lug nuts do not get stripped.

Each lug nut is glued over its hole with weather adhesive before the race so they are already in place when the tire is mounted. The tire changer then jams his wrench onto each lug nut, screwing it down securely. When a lug nut "hangs" or does not go on securely, precious time is lost finding it and replacing it.

Red-hot lug nuts also have a nasty habit of bouncing everywhere. One found its way into the front right brake rotor of Matt Kenseth's No. 17 Ford in the first Chase for the Championship race Sept. 18 at New Hampshire, but his crew, masters of damage control, got him back on the track after a quick pit stop en route to a fifth-place finish.

Hours and hours of practice over a season can help overcome such adversity.

Men like Anderson are expected to negate the other haunting concern: a parts failure. A lug nut has no moving parts, just facets and grooves. But Anderson pores over them like a watchmaker. There are devils in the details of the tiny grooves.

"We take a lug nut and we basically tap it, clean it and then check it, just this one lug nut," he said. "I actually spend time on each lug nut, five minutes just to tap it again and clean it. Then you're going to hand spin it to make sure it doesn't cross thread.

"You check each nut three times before they get on the car."

Hendrick's central warehouse contained more than 10,000 lug nuts in February before the season, Anderson said, and virtually every one has crossed his palm.

There are some bad seeds in there, and Anderson knows he has to find them.

"Most likely it'll get caught," he said. "But the chance is there that part can go through the whole system and end up ruining a race."

Or a season.

Busch's title run nearly ended 180 laps from the finish at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November, when the center hub of his right front tire failed. Busch avoided hitting a large barrier at the end of pit road and made it to his stall as the tire rolled down the frontstretch. He fell from second to 28th, but rallied to finish fifth, recouping enough points to win the title by eight points, fewest in NASCAR history.

Jeff Gordon wasn't so lucky in 1996. He lost a 111-point lead on Terry Labonte with four races left when his engine overheated at Charlotte, causing a cylinder head to crack. That 31st-place finish allowed Labonte to pull within a point; he won the title by 37 over Gordon.

Bad lug nuts, bolts and tires can be caught in a team's quality control system. But a hot dog wrapper can bring greasy, stealthy death from above for an engine. A wrapper lands flush against a grill, is pinned down tight by a car traveling at high speed, inhibits air flow to the engine, and if unnoticed, causes it to overheat and fail. Certain tracks are more prone to the problem, especially Michigan International and California Speedway, where flying debris nearly sank the Roush Racing fleet of Fords this year.

The new Dodge Charger, with its vertical grill, was particularly prone to the wrapper scourge until teams devised ways to improve it during the season.

"It's a great way to cool a car, when there is no trash," said Hendrick Motorsports aerodynamics engineer Kurt Romberg, whose team fields Chevrolets. "But that thing is a catcher's mitt for hot dog wrappers. Chevy's grill, most of the other grills, are leaned back and the reason is so that hot dog wrapper will blow off."

In a sport where thousands of hours are spent trying to account for every possibility, the thought of losing a race because some fan in Brooklyn, Mich., was jonesing for a bratwurst would seem maddening. For engineers, though, it's another riddle to solve.

"If you've experienced that kind of bad luck, then next time you have the ability to do a redesign and say, "Hey, I don't want to ever experience that again, so I am going to design this system so that it doesn't bite me,' " Romberg said.

For crew chiefs and drivers, who feel the sting of disappointment and frustration first, it's a reminder to be more fanatical about the things they can control. And let go what they can't.

And you cut out the possibility of bad luck before it festers.

"You can affect some of those things. That's what's tough," driver Ryan Newman said. "The hot dog wrapper, the manufacturer can affect and the team can affect by the way we do some of our taping and things like that. There's potential problems in everything, whether it's the car or the racetrack or debris. For instance, we saw Dale Earnhardt's car get hit by a sea gull before. You just never know what's going to happen."

The scene: Lowe's Motor Speedway, Oct. 15.

Forty-two of 43 cars had tire failures, as many as 14 of them blowouts, when the combination of a fast track with good grip and an ill-suited Goodyear tire altered the Chase for the Championship. Tony Stewart led the race handily on Lap 217 and the points by 75 coming in. But a blown rear tire sent him into the wall and toward a 25th-place finish.

A win would have been worth at least 185 points. Instead, he earned 92 and fell into a tie with Johnson for first in the standings. He won't know until the last four races if a $400 tire cost him a second Nextel Cup title.

"We were pulling away in the points," he said after the race. "We had the best car all night, we should have been 100 points ahead and instead I'm tied for the lead. Nothing like feeling like you've got your hands tied behind your back."

But for Newman, a Purdue-educated engineer who tends to see the process of things, a season is about building a buffer for such bad days.

"That's part of racing and it's part of building leads so you have the opportunity to have a mulligan, have something to fall back on, some cushion," he said. "You just keep working for that. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't."

So Anderson works, tapping a tool through the grooves of each and every lug nut in the central warehouse. Either he finds trouble now, or it finds his team later.

A dollar's worth of trouble can be very costly.

[Last modified October 29, 2005, 01:45:21]