Todd Gordon Q and A

Todd Gordon (Crew Chief, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Dodge Charger R/T)

HOW WAS THE TEST HERE YESTERDAY?  “We were tight all day and never found anything that made an impact on it mechanically.  We’re kind of reassessing our package for today, just trying to look at what didn’t work and let that lead us in the direction of where we need to work to be better.  I feel like we have a couple of ideas there of things we could help ourselves with so we’ll see where practice goes today.  This racetrack is crazy-fast.  There were seven cars in final practice that were over 200 mile an hour lap average which is a lot of time on throttle and not a lot of time off of throttle.  You’re racing an aero race and it’ll be interesting to see what happens.  You can definitely see the effect of getting the draft down the straightaways but I think you’re also going to run into that bubble where since you’re racing on aero you’re kind of stuck when you roll up behind somebody.  We’ll see if the racetrack opens up into multiple grooves.”

DO YOU THINK THE GROOVE WILL WIDEN OUT?  “We may see the top come.  It seems like the cars are all in the middle right now and you may see the top come in.  It’ll be interesting.  Yeah, I think at some point you’ll see a couple of grooves around here.”

DO THE NOTES YOU HAD BEFORE HERE WITH THE OLD PAVEMENT STILL APPLY?  “I think the speed, the grip level, the tire change is accommodating a resurface makes this a new venture again.  I don’t know that there is a lot of what you could take out of previous year’s notes to help this package along, much kind of what we saw at Pocono last week.  When you resurface a place, put grip back in it, you take all the bumps back out of it.  A lot of things you do mechanically to try to help yourselves through those situations, they’re no longer needed.”

HAVE YOU NOTICED ANYTHING ABOUT THE TIRE WEAR OR TIRE TEMPERATURE?  “I don’t think that we’ve seen as much of a sticker tire to scuff tire swing in balance but part of that may be our balance was off, that we weren’t close enough to see that swing.  I feel like there’s more consistency here.  Obviously as we’ve repeated runs on tires they’ve gotten faster.  I noticed in first practice when you finally got to the point that guys had to put stickers back on there was about a second that they slowed up.  It’s like you get faster and faster as the tires go on.  The left-side tire wear is very minimal and right-side wear is normal.”

WHAT KIND OF STRATEGY CAN YOU DO TO GAIN TRACK POSITION?  “I think two is an option, given left-side wear.  We’ll have to see what happens with how balance goes in the race car but I think two is an option.  I don’t know that none will be an option.  It may be but you’re doing 200 and some miles an hour into a corner.  Probably making sure the right-front tire is nice and safe is a good idea for a while (smiles).”

THIS TRACK IS KNOWN TO BE DEMANDING ON ENGINES.  “That’s only exponently worse now.  There’s guys driving into the corner and turning into the corner wide-open.  There’s a very small window of off-throttle time if your balance is good.  It’s a 400-mile race which helps but your time on throttle is long.  Engine department has already made comments about it that they’re cycle time of how long you’re actually wide-open throttle is longer than any of these higher speed places that we go to.”