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THE TO-DO LIST

There’s not much time for a NASCAR crew chief to rest at the end of the season. After the season ends in mid-November, there’re maybe a few weeks to pursue his craft at a slightly less hectic pace. From the end of the season until the beginning of the next is a paltry 84 days.

The Christmas holiday, to a NASCAR crew chief, is merely the last moment of respite before the storm begins anew.

“It’s pretty hectic,” said Rodney Childers, crew chief for David Reutimann and the No. 00 Aaron’s Toyota Camry. “There’s one sense of it that you’re trying to get ready for Daytona, but there’s another that you’re trying to get ready for the entire season. There’s a lot going on.”

That is a massive understatement.

“The trailers get sent off to be re-decaled and wrapped, everything in the trailers gets taken out and restocked,” Childers began. “Every car in the entire shop, for all three teams, the bodies are cut off and the chassis are media-blasted and new bodies put on. All the finish fabrication has to be redone and every car has to be repainted. It just ends up being a huge deal.

“All the suspension gets the once-over, everything is recoated. The rest of it comes down to coming up with options for Daytona, California and Vegas, trying to have those three races already in the back of your mind and options done for those before you ever leave for Daytona.”

When you’re talking about scale, at least at Michael Waltrip Racing, everything gets multiplied by three. Childers said that by the time he and his crew are finished with the build-out, there will be nearly 50 cars sitting in the MWR shops, ready to roll for 2010.

“We do quite a few,” he said. “We might try to do specialized cars for different tracks, kind of like we used to with the old cars. We’re probably going to end up with about 15 cars per team, and most of those will be done before we leave for Daytona. We have three speedway cars that have to be done, and you try to have the Fontana-Las Vegas-Atlanta cars done before you leave for the first four races, really, just so you have some options in case you run into trouble during practice at one of them and have to pull a backup out.”

Like last year, there’s no testing at Daytona or Talladega, so there’s a lot of work done with microchips and simulators.

“We do a little bit of seven-post (referring to the setup tool known as a seven-post shaker); we don’t have a seven-post rig at the shop, so we can go over to TRD in Salisbury (N.C.) and use that one,” Childers said. “All of our simulation tools pretty much work just as good or better than the seven-post. A lot of our work is just here at the shop, sitting in front of the computer and running through a lot of different geometry packages, spring and shock combinations and bump stops. We normally go through all that stuff here.

“The week before last, I worked on Daytona stuff for four days straight, and last week I worked on California stuff for four days straight. If you go to a seven-post, you might get 15 runs in a day, whereas if you sit in front of the computer here at the shop with the simulation stuff, you might get 55 runs in a day. Sometimes you’re better off just narrowing it down and then if you feel like you have to go to the seven-post, get it narrowed down to some options and then go up to the seven-post and see what you think, to double-check.”

One of the biggest changes a crew chief has to deal with between one season and the next is personnel. If there’s a new crew member, it takes time to integrate that person into the flow of the shop and at the track. Fortunately for Childers, there’s little of that to deal with for 2010.

“Everything on our deal is pretty much staying the same,” he said. “We did do a little swapping around in as much as we have a new shock guy, but it’s someone I worked with when I was at Evernham, so our relationship is already there. It shouldn’t be that big a deal. The only other thing that changed on our team is the truck driver. As far as our team goes, it should be pretty smooth. The communication should already be there.”

There is a test on the horizon, but it’s a team-wide test, so Childers will have plenty of help, he said.

“We are going to do a little testing down at New Smyrna Speedway in Florida,” he said. “We are going to take all three teams down there for two days and let the drivers work together a little bit. With Martin Truex Jr. coming on and Pat Tryson, we’ll kind of go through some of the things they’ve done in the past and maybe we’ll even let each driver drive each other’s cars and see what they feel like and kind of get a comparison there before we start the season off.”

Some crew chiefs have the additional burden of overseeing travel for the team and parts inventory and other time-consuming things like that. Childers isn’t one of them.

“We have quite a few people that handle all that stuff, as far as the parts,” he said. “We have a person that takes care of all the travel and stuff, and that takes a huge weight off the crew chief’s shoulders. The biggest thing to us is making sure our cars are the way we want them, people and personnel and everything is in line so we can start the season off. The biggest part of it is just the setup stuff.”

As for schedule, Childers is a 12-hour-a-day man, roughly.

“It [his schedule] changes every day,” he said with a grin. “We normally get here about 6:30 a.m. and get home at 6 p.m. Before Christmas, you can get out of here between 4:30 and 6 and then once Christmas is over with…when you get back from the holidays, everything ramps up. You end up getting out of here a little later. Normally, we try to be out of here by 6 p.m.”

Another thing the crew chief has to keep an eye on is morale, and that elusive component called momentum. There’s no guarantee that the performance from the year before will stick around for the coming season.

“The biggest thing is just to keep doing what we’ve been doing and what got us to where we were last year,” he said. “We had a good year, but in one sense, we had some things we have to do better. We wrecked in too many races and had some problems in the pits and just small things that took us out of different deals. That’s the biggest thing. We have to look at what we did wrong and don’t make mistakes and be there at the end of the races.

“As far as the car side goes, we have to keep taking really good cars to the track and it’s always good for the driver to get some time off and get rested up. We’ve got a pretty tight-knit bunch of guys and hopefully we can start the season off running like we were and maybe be in the Chase this year.”

Now that the teams are entering their third season with essentially the same equipment package, Childers no longer has to worry about bodies.

“It’s maybe a little easier in one sense, and that’s the body itself,” Childers said. “We still concentrate on the same things, like the handling and setup, but we used to constantly, constantly, constantly work on bodies, hanging different ones all the time and cutting them off and doing that over and over. We were just trying to find every little thing we could.

“With the COT car, we’re in a pretty tight box and it just becomes a deal where you’ve got to find little bits whether it’s under the car or the attitude on the track with suspension and geometry and things like that. It’s nice not to constantly worry that you’re getting beat by somebody that has a nicer body than you. It comes down to getting your setup right and paying attention to details.”

In a sense, that’s the crew chief’s job boiled down to its base elements. Once the holidays are over, it becomes a matter of managing details on a macro level.

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