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by David Phillips.
Racer's 1998 Official FedEx Championship Series Guide.

Some of the most formidable challenges facing CART occur between race weekends in the FedEx Championship. Moving
the equipment and personnel necessary to conduct professional auto racing events in five countries on four continents requires
precision timing second only to threading a Champ Car through traffic at 220mph in the U.S. 500. And a lot more planning.

That's where CART Vice President of Logistics Dennis Swann comes in. Swann and his staff ensure that five tractor trailers full of CART equipment arrive at race tracks from Homestead to Long Beach. On time, ready to go. "It takes two weeks to plan our truck movement for the entire year", says Swann. "We look at the schedule and determine when we want our equipment at each site. Say we want to ahev trucks available off-loading equipment on the Monday before the race. Let's also say it's a 2,200-mile trip and it's the first race of the season. We'll want to leave our home base two days before that, which is Saturday. The load-up occurs two days before that, so we put out a notice to the office that says everything associated with this event needs to be in the warehouse by Thursday".

CART's road show includes three trailers carrying timing and scoring, accreditation, technical inspection and public relations equipment along with the CART safety vehicles and track clean-up machinery. Another trailer houses the CART Medical Center, and a 53ft administrative trailer was added to the fleet for '98. All of this equipment must be maintained during the season - often "on the fly", which further complicates the situation. "After each race you say, 'Do I have time to go home or do I go directly to the next event?" Swann explains. "If we go directly to the next event, then we have to take into account how much stock we want to carry and where we are going to restock the consumables, like paper. Fire suits and uniforms have to be sorted and cleaned, the trucks must be cleaned and the copy machines must be serviced; broken radios have to be sent away for servicing, and radar guns need to be calibrated. It's an ongoing process".

No less challenging is the task facing individual teams moving from event to event while maintaining and preparing (and repairing) some of the world's most sophisticated racing cars. Again, the logistical war is often won or lost before the season even starts. "Once the trucks are loaded at the beginning of the season, they're where our inventory is stored", says Tom Anderson, managing director for Target / Chip Ganassi Racing. "Since our trucks can be parked inside the race shop during the year, they become a big tool box for us between races".

There's always the unexpected, however: What if your team comes away from one race with a couple of wrecked cars just four days before practice and qualifying begins for the next? "The amount of spare parts and cars you carry is insurance", says Anderson. "If a team has a properly prepared test car, it's the first one to go into (the truck) if you have a catastrophe. Also, the quality of what the manufacturers are delivering has greatly improved in the past few years, so it's reduced the time it takes to race-prepare a car. Not that we would want to, but we could race-prepare a new car in four days".
In all but the back-to-back races on the West Coast, Anderson's team returns home to Indianapolis between events. "Whatever you can do in the shop in one day takes you three to four on the road", he says. "So the teams that are centrally located are at a big logistical advantage".

While CART and the teams work independently getting to most of the races, they join forces for races in Japan, Brazil, and Australia. For the teams, it means unloading their transporters and delivering the precious cargo into CART's capable hands. "The major amount of push / pull happens when we have to organize for a fly-away event", says Anderson. "The shipping containers are spread around the truck bays and everything that's going on the manifest goes into a particular container. We rent a regular cargo trailer to get those containers to and from our port of embarkation, since they won't fit inside the race trucks". From there, it's up to CART. Although the scopr of CART's international movement is far greater than getting five tractor trailers from race to race, the planning process is similar.

"You look at the event and say, historically we've been able to clear customs in this time frame so I want the freight available to the teams on this date," says Swann. "You work backward from there to build the schedule. Then you have to go out to your aircraft supplier and your freight forwarder and say, 'This is the time frame I want to work in. Get a bid for me. We want to fly from Indianapolis; we need a terminal to fly out of ', and all of that. It is very, very involved".

The potential headaches involved in clearing some 450,000lb of material through customs quickly are legion. As in other aspects of racing, preparation is the secret. "We work closely with all the customs people", says Swann. "They treat us as a very low risk because of how well we do our paperwork, and the fact that we have created our own forms and the teams all adhere to those forms. When we present a manifest to a government, they're all exactly the same, all the same typeset, all the same spacing. "We present them with this great stack of books for each entrant spelling out everything we do. That makes it easy for them to do a spot-check. Like all things, you get lots of 'atta boys' but it only takes one 'oops' for it to fall apart". Here, then us to a full slate of "atta boys" in '98 as CART takes to the road once again.

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