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COUNTDOWN TO DAYTONA: DETAILS, DETAILS…

It wouldn’t be stretching it too far to say that the level of preparation and detail that goes into a Daytona 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup car verges on the insane.

Now, understand, every Sprint Cup Toyota Camry is already built to space-age tolerances throughout, and prepared to the highest standards possible. But those standards go from possible to nearly impossible in the quest to build the slipperiest, smoothest race car imaginable for the Daytona 500. Why? Well, a bunch of reasons:

• The Daytona 500 is the biggest, richest and most prestigious race of the season. It truly is the Super Bowl of stock-car racing, with enormous rewards and pressure, too. It’s the one race every top team wants to win, and it’s the one race every small team wants to qualify for.

• The Daytona 500 is the first race of the season, which means teams have from mid-November of the prior year until early February to build, rebuild and finely detail their car for maximum performance. And if you give a crew chief time, he’ll use every bit of it.

• Daytona International Speedway is one of only two restrictor-plate tracks on the Sprint Cup circuit, a place where aerodynamics are critically important.

• The simple knowledge that every other team is working hard on their cars, too, forces each team to invest more time in the Daytona 500 car than any other one they run during the year.

• And last, but certainly not least, the advent of the car of tomorrow platform in 2008 meant that crew chiefs could no longer subtly contour a fender or roof line to lower aerodynamic drag. Every body now is pretty close to equal, regardless of brand or team. That in turn forces teams to spend more and more time, for smaller and smaller gains.

“You can spend your entire off-season working on it,” says Mike Ford, crew chief for Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 FedEx Toyota Camry out of the Joe Gibbs Racing stables. “Obviously, you don’t want to think that the Daytona 500 is the entire season and you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, but you can get wrapped up in it. You can get wrapped up spending the entire offseason working on it if you’re not careful. It’s basically up to the individual’s preferences as to what they want to spend their time on and what their team is capable of.”

How does the preparation of a Daytona 500 car differ from those used in every other Sprint Cup race? Lots of ways.

With the bodies required to be the same, teams look for subtle aerodynamic improvements on their Daytona cars: For example, teams used different-shaped bolt heads on the undersides of their cars to shave an infinitesimal amount of drag. Body braces are relocated to be out of the airflow and special Teflon-based ultra slick finishes are applied to the underside of the body and chassis as well. Even wiring harnesses are wrapped differently to minimize drag.

Daytona cars use the lightest-weight brakes possible, especially during qualifying, with the least amount of drag or brake-pad friction. In fact, after Daytona 500 qualifying on Feb. 6, every team will haul its car back to the garage and make wholesale changes for the race, including adding bigger brakes and beefier suspension components.

On the outside, teams paint the car in a base color, add decals, clearcoat the finish and then wet-sand it until it’s smooth as glass. Some teams even hand-paint every decal to lower drag.

“You can’t leave anything not touched, because your competition is probably touching it,” says Philippe Lopez, crew chief for Joe Nemechek and the No. 87 Nemco Motorsports Toyota Camry. “So instead of a regular old hex-head bolt, you might use buttonheads. Or if you have to use a hex-head, you might cut it down some, so it’s not as thick.”

Individually, changing one bolt head won’t show up in wind-tunnel testing, but changing 50 or 60, and then painting the underside of the car with super-slick paint can make a difference.

“It’s really incredible, the detail we go through,” says Lopez. “Some people say, ‘Well, you’re wasting your time paying too much attention to detail.’ But you’re not. When you’re on the bad end, you really start second-guessing — did you do everything? Was that your best effort?”

And with Toyota’s Sprint Cup teams, you know it was their best effort, every single time one of the Camrys hits the track.