NASCAR Sprint Cup Series

That’s why it was tough for the Italian driver to attempt just 21 races this year in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, and why it was tough for him to accept that he had much to learn before he could go about racing his way, with all the passion and effort and drive that he puts into his craft.

Driving the No. 13 GEICO Toyota Camry from the Germain Racing stables (ably assisted by Michael Waltrip Racing and its fleet of Toyota Cup cars as well as TRD), Papis earned a top-10 finish (eighth at Watkins Glen) in 15 starts while competing against fully funded and experienced teams.

To do that, however, he needed stock car experience, and with the testing ban, he was unable to get much unless it was at the track on race weekends. That meant that the learning curve was more like Bristol than New Hampshire. An accomplished open-wheel racer and sports car ace, Papis had to learn the ropes in a couple of hours each weekend with a heavier car, limited time and limited equipment—mainly tires.

He knew all this coming in, of course, but knowing it in your head is one thing. Knowing it in your heart is a little different.

“First of all, it was challenging,” he said. “I knew it was going to be challenging because I knew how tough NASCAR was, and it proved to be a little more challenging because we didn’t run the full season. It was more or less what I was expecting. We went through ups and downs, alternated great performance with less great performance.

“To me, I felt I learned tremendously all year long, and I was talking about this with [crew chief] Bootie Barker before I left for vacation. He said he could really see a different Max from when he came on board, at the middle of the season, through the end of the season. I was very pleased to hear that.”

Papis explained what he was up against every weekend in 2009.

“Being out of the top 35 and having to qualify for every race, it’s definitely a disadvantage,” he said. “I kind of thought it was going to be like that but I didn’t think it was going to affect the whole weekend so much. What I learned was, we have two races in one weekend: the Friday race to make the show and the Sunday show. We used nearly every set of tires we had to do the qualifying mock-up. That meant we were left, when we were in the show for happy hour, that we had only those five or six sets of scuffs.

“It is pretty frustrating sometimes to look up on the board…it’s not easy to judge your level of performance because everyone else, most of the top 35 guys, had a few sets of new tires left. That means they can go out and run and see how fast they can go. They can post a fast lap. For us, I need to judge my speed based on my Toyota graph that I get at the end of practice, where we look at the average speed and everything. Sometimes, you’re out there and you look up on the monitor and you’re only 38th…you’re ticked. You ask yourself, ‘are we just as good as 35th, or are we better than that?’”

When Barker came to the team just past the halfway point of the season, it started a process that Papis desperately needed.

“The most difficult part of NASCAR is, your speed and your setups are born through a history that you build with your crew chief and your team,” he pointed out. “If you don’t have that history, you have to build that history. I’ve been a rookie in Indy Cars and at Le Mans, and you run 10 laps, get out, you have an engineer that presents you with a graph that has throttle trace, braking trace, braking pressure, steering input, throttle input, and you can easily point out, ‘OK, Max, you need to brake a little deeper there, I think you’re doing great in this corner, I think you can do better at this point.’ In NASCAR, you can only see that when the green flag drops.”

That’s a pretty tough teacher, Papis explained.

“For me, there were some weekends this year that when the green flag dropped, I was like, ‘Whoa, this is great. I can be with these guys. The car feels like we got it right.’ Some other weekends, when the green flag dropped, you knew that you had a tough couple of stints to get the car where I wanted it. That’s the most difficult part, but that’s a part that I like as well, so don’t get me wrong. I don’t miss at all not having the data. The T in team has a lot more value than in any of the other things I’ve done. That’s why I think it’s so special.

“That’s why I believe that [championship crew chief] Chad Knaus is worth maybe more. He makes as much or more than 60 percent of the drivers in NASCAR. He’s worth every penny he makes, because his experience with Jimmie [Johnson] is invaluable, and that’s what I’ve been building with Bootie this year. We are trying to build a database, so that the second time I go to Texas with him, we know that we want to be on this specific setup for qualifying and we’ll change the setup for the race. We’ll know that the car, even if it’s tight after five laps, it’s going to be good after 10 laps. Unfortunately, I don’t have much that I can look at other than the experience I have from growing up racing.”

As for the pitfalls that plague nearly every new team, Papis said he had his share, and sometimes the learning curve was wicked sharp. It came to a point, however, where he finally came to grips with what he needed to do to be fast and consistent.

“It’s hard to answer, because it’s specific to every track,” he said. “It’s not a switch you put on like, ‘now I know I need to use a little bit of brake in this corner to go faster, and that’s gonna work at Bristol and it’s gonna work at Texas.’ Every track is different, even if they look the same from the outside.

“What I’ve been focused on is being very assertive with my indication. Something that I learned and something I did through the year, is trusting more and more my instinct. Maybe in the past, I trusted them, but you had a confirmation on a piece of paper, the data. You don’t have that here. In the beginning, maybe I felt I was kind of tight in this corner, and they ask, ‘how tight?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ The race started, and I was really tight. I’ve worked on myself to not under drive the car. When you go out to qualify, if you have to make a choice. This is what Bootie told me. ‘Go in, drive it as hard as you can right from the moment you leave the pit, because if it’s not going to stick going into [Turns] 3 and 4, it’s not going to stick when you’re on your lap.’ You don’t have the time to judge the car. You have to go out there and follow your instinct.”

Sometimes his instincts gave way to the very real and very human trait of caution.

“I didn’t know what to expect, and I erred on the safe side,” he said. “Sometimes I was not 100 percent sure, so instead of driving into the corner at 100 percent, I drove it into the corner at 95 percent to feel how the car was and I drove 100 percent the lap after. I learned to just give it all right from the word go.”

Despite the fact that he’d raced at several tracks the NASCAR series visits every year, albeit in different types of cars, the learning curve was still stout, Papis said.

“When you go to a circuit where you have been in something else, California for instance, my team told me, ‘This is gonna be great. You’ve been here like 10 times in a Champ Car.’ The only thing I learned was where the bathrooms were. The first lap I did there in a stock car was like, ‘oh, man, have I been here before?’ For me, I had it in my mind that California had high banking and was a wide-open racetrack. In a stock car, I was like, ‘Did they change the track? It’s flat. Why is the track so flat?’

“Forget about what you felt when you went out on the track with something else. But in terms of what I learned from the past, I used it quite a bit, from learning how to race with other competitors. I’m a big observer. I spend a lot of time looking at TV, shortening up my learning curve. Every weekend before a race that I do, I get the tape of qualifying for the race, so it’s visual, where they brake, what they do in the race. I can tell you 100 things I do.”

Papis made his name at first in endurance racing, where it’s far more important how you’re running at the end of the race than it is at the beginning. That helped him transition a bit to 500-mile events.

“From endurance racing, I bring the pace,” he said. “When you’re out there in an endurance car, you don’t want to shoot all your bullets right away. That’s kind of what I learned this year. I started a couple of times really hard, bent a fender, opened the radio channel and asked, ‘All right, guys, how we doing?’ They said, ‘There are 385 laps to go.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me, right?’ They said, ‘No, no, we still have five pit stops to go.’

“That’s what I bring from the other kinds of racing I’ve done. I wouldn’t say at all that you need to delete everything you know. What I would say is, don’t expect the car and the track to feel the way it used to feel, but remember all the other aspects of racing that helped you to go there.”

For the 2010 season coming up, Papis has a plan.

“Going out and doing it, that’s my plan,” he said. “We’re going to run the same number we did this year, 18 races with the Camry, and between five and eight races with the Tundra [in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series].”

The first step to that is, of course, the Daytona 500, and Papis said the plan right now is to “show up in Daytona and run it, along with the first five races. I’m pretty excited about that.”

Here’s where Papis’ passion starts to come out for real.

“The mindset is going to be pretty different in 2010 than it was in 2009,” he said. “I never accepted mediocrity. Sometimes I had to tell myself, ‘OK, Max, you’ve never seen this place; cut yourself a little bit of slack.’ I did it, and I’m planning to still be patient with myself, but to ask a little bit more. I feel that this last year, on a couple of occasions, like on road courses or even at Charlotte when we were running really good on the lead lap, once we put ourselves in a position, we were able to capitalize on that. I was really happy, and next year, I want that to be more like a normal weekend and not be the highlight of the season. I’m looking forward to going to the track, we qualify, we race properly and with the people we have to race, and that’s what I’m looking forward to from my team as well, not just myself. Just go out and do it.

“I don’t mean I’m going to go out and mix it up with Mark Martin, but a couple of times, like on the road courses, I kind of mingled with them, passing them, and maybe we can do something like that on another track.”

The learning curve is going to be flatter than Auto Club Speedway to Papis in 2010, and that can only be a good thing for all concerned.