NASCAR Nationwide Series

But there is still plenty of room for improvement according to Steve Wallace, who drives the team’s No. 66 5-hour Energy Toyota Camry. In fact, only one thing would really satisfy him.

“We’ve got to win, man,” he says. “That’s the whole deal. In the grand scheme of things, there are a lot of drivers who can’t win because their teams aren’t good enough to win. I know I’m a good enough driver to win and I know my team is. We need to get this thing in gear, and we’re working on that.”

Their efforts are obviously paying off, as evidenced by the fact that Wallace has finished inside the top 10 eight times – including a best result of fifth last weekend at Gateway International Raceway, near his family’s hometown of St. Louis – and teammate Brendan Gaughan, who drives the No. 62 South Point Casino & Hotel Camry, owns six top 10s this season. As a result, Wallace is seventh and Gaughan is eighth in the championship standings.

The team’s fortunes have particularly improved since Nashville at the beginning of June. Wallace came home eighth from that race, and both drivers finished inside the top 10 (Gaughan in fourth and Wallace sixth) on the following weekend at Kentucky.

Gaughan and Wallace again took top-10 results in the inaugural Nationwide Series visit to Road America, with Gaughan earning a third-place result and Wallace taking ninth. The week after that, at Loudon, N.H., Gaughan scored his third straight top-10 result with a 10th-place run, one spot ahead of Wallace. Gaughan points out that there’s a good reason both drivers have performed so well and so similarly of late.

“Traditionally, drivers like different setups,” Gaughan explains. “The challenge here is, we don’t have the money, the engineering or the personnel to really do two different setups. We’ve got to help and learn from each other.

“We went to a test at Pikes Peak, which was our first one, and we switched all my setups over to Steven’s style and said, ‘Look, I’ve got to learn how to run this.’ He’s been more consistent. We go faster some weeks, but he was more consistent. We switched everything over, so in all the engineering, we could focus on one style. As soon as we did that, I’ve been getting more used to it and getting a little better with liking that style.”

It has definitely been an adjustment for Gaughan, who has been making significant adjustments all year. The 35-year-old racer reports that he has lost 35 pounds through a vigorous workout program and is feeling the best he’s felt since his college days. But on the track, he is relying on his 22-year-old teammate to help him.

“I’m not the same type of driver as Rusty and Steve,” Gaughan says. “They know how to do setups. They know cambers and casters and all the ins and outs of traditional setups. I don’t know that stuff. For me, I give the crew chief feedback and drive it.

“From my standpoint, I don’t care what the setup is. I just have a style. I like to drive on the high line a lot. I like to use a little less brake and kind of roll into a corner. Steven is a pretty hard charger still. He’s pretty young and tries to drive her on in. It’s different driving styles, but we both are adapting to what we have and it’s working.”

Not only do both drivers have different driving styles, both drivers are also suited to markedly different types of racetracks. Gaughan has his hands full on short tracks, where Wallace is right at home. Wallace will get a steady short-track diet over the next few weeks, with O’Reilly Raceway Park, Iowa Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway on tap.

“The short tracks are my deal,” Wallace says. “I really love the short tracks. It’s really weird, though, because the past four short-track races, we haven’t been able to put them together well. At Richmond, we had an awesome, awesome car and we had a pit road violation with a tire getting away and finished 17th there. There’s just weird stuff happening on the short tracks, but I’m excited about going to ORP.

“The road courses are what they are. I don’t really like them, but we always seem to be running there at the end of the day with them, and usually when we can do that, we come away with a top 10. There’s a bunch of tracks that I’m looking forward to, and definitely the short tracks for sure.”

While road course certainly aren’t Wallace’s favorite, Gaughan loves them. He will get his shot at a couple of classic road circuits over the next few weeks at Watkins Glen and Montreal, and will go to both with fond memories of his most recent road course race, June’s inaugural Nationwide Series race, at Road America fresh in his mind.

“I raced there back in the early ‘90s,” says Gaughan, who took his best result of the season at Road America. “To be able to race there again, to race against Ron Fellows, to race against Jacques Villeneuve at Road America, that – to me – was so much fun. To know that I was door-to-door with Ron – was better than him, even – and to know that I passed him and I passed Jacques, to me that was just an awesome, awesome time. It made me feel like a racecar driver again.”

So both drivers will get a few chances on their favorite types of racetracks. What else do they need to do to put themselves in a position to get that elusive first victory?

“I think we’ve done a lot of it,” Gaughan says. “The key thing was, we needed to go test. I’d love to go test some more. Rusty is trying hard to schedule some more tests for us and get some money together to go do it, to find the tires and get the ability to go test. That’s been the biggest thing that kind of got us up to speed quicker was the ability to go to the track and do some testing.

“We’ve just got to keep the engineers and the crew chiefs and the communication and the chemistry flowing. We believe we have pretty good chemistry and communication. We’ve just got to make sure that we don’t lose that.”

Wallace agrees that more testing miles would benefit the team. But just as his father has been known to be over the years, the younger Wallace is quite candid with his thoughts on what else the team needs to do to improve its fortunes.

“I think as a team we need to quit accepting so-so performances,” he says. “If we finish sixth in a week, we think it’s like a win, but in all honesty, sixth is sixth. As a team, I think we need to test more. We need to think outside the box more. We’re sixth-to-10th-place guys right now. We’ve got better cars and we’ve got better people. We just need to light a fire under me and all these guys. It seems really easy to say and kind of hard to do, but we just need to get better.

“We want to win one race. I don’t care what car it is, if it’s my car or if it’s Brendan’s. As a team, as a company, it’s a morale booster. Everybody’s got to win. That’s the whole deal.”