Little solutions could fix deadly problem

By Larry McReynolds
Special to ESPN.com

Editor's note: Veteran crew chief Larry McReynolds will provide a weekly column on ESPN.com, taking you inside the garage for Mike Skinner and the Lowe's No. 31 Chevrolet team.

If you look at the past weekend in New Hampshire, what happened to our race team were minor problems. And our problems are fixable.

The real tragedy of the weekend can't be fixed. It's something we can't go back and redo. The loss of another member of our family, Kenny Irwin, will remain.

When we go to tracks like Michigan, Atlanta and Charlotte -- places where the speeds can exceed 200 mph in some areas -- you think about it, I guess. I've been a part of a semi-tragedy at one of those race tracks with Ernie Irvan in 1994.

But when we go to Loudon, N.H., where we've run over a dozen races in eight years, the last thing you think about is someone getting killed there -- and certainly not two people in two months.

I've done a lot of interviews in the past week about the situation. The way I've summed it up, and maybe people agree with me and maybe people won't, is that there's no question we have a problem. But we've all got to fix our little problems that could fix the big problem.

First and foremost, mechanics, engine guys, crew chiefs, and people responsible for these cars have got to make sure that their race car goeson the track without the throttle sticking on the air cleaner or something else. And I stress, I'm not saying these are the things that happened to Kenny Irwin or Adam Petty. But we've got to do a good job making sure things like that don't bite us, regardless of whether we're at Loudon, Martinsville, Daytona or Talladega.

I used to think Robert Yates was overly paranoid about throttles sticking. I mean, he'd check it, recheck it and then have the driver check it again when he got in the car. Obviously, I see now with the possibility of two throttles hanging, that he was doing a really good job at what he should have been doing.

But I think we as a group, and by that I mean NASCAR, the race tracks, the race teams and manufacturers, have to work together at fixing this deal. It's not all about just making sure throttles don't stick.

The example I've given to people this past week is that I could jump off a 12-story building and, if I land just right, I may only be just hurt and not killed. But I could jump off of a race trailer, which is only about a story and a half high, and if I land wrong, I could be killed. So it's all about how you hit.

But we still have to make sure we cushion the impact as much as possible. The real problem is these race cars are hitting solid concrete walls, with dirt behind them in a lot of cases, and there's no give. The wall does not move. The race car stops but parts of the body don't. And that's what we have to work on as much as anything.

I go back to two or three weeks ago and Jimmie Johnson's wreck in the Busch Series race at Watkins Glen. God knows how fast that boy was running when he hit that wall head-on. But there was a significant thickness of foam there and a guard rail behind it that has a little bit of give. I'm totally against guard rails by themselves because they're dangerous. But if you take a guard rail that has a little give to it and put a two-foot thick foam barrier in front of it, you might have something to solve a lot of this.

The comments and questions and concern are that foam makes a mess. So what?! Clean the mess up. What's worse, having to attend a funeral this week or cleaning the mess up? Clean it up and put more down.

I'm just one person with one opinion. If I stood in a room with 20 people, 10 would probably nod their heads agreeing with me, and 10 would shake their heads disagreeing with me.

I think we can look at things like kill switches and other things to help the problem, but we still have a concrete wall there that isn't going to move. It isn't just a problem at Loudon, N.H. It's a potential problem at all tracks that we go to that have fast entrance corners with no banking. It's a potential problem at Indianapolis, Pocono, Homestead, and anywhere you go into a corner at a high rate of speed and you have no banking to scrub off speed or help turn the car. You've got the potential for a problem there.

We've got to work on that. We've had two wakeup calls. We don't need a third one before we work on it.

If I reflect back on Team 31's weekend, it was probably the worst weekend we've had all year. There have been a lot of weekends when we've had bad runs, but we've qualified good. Some weekends we've had bad runs, but at least we didn't wreck and salvaged a top 20. Last weekend we were terrible qualifying, we were terrible in the race and we wrecked.

But, I'll tell you, the biggest thing I'm proud of was our race team's focus and determination. Most race cars that were as torn up as bad as ours would have been put in the truck and sent home. But thank the Good Lord for the frame machine that we carry for the 3 and the 31. Yeah, we spent 120 or so laps fixing that thing, but when Mike left pit road he never had to come back in. We never had to adjust a thing. We felt confident that everything put back on that race car was safe.

A lot of people asked if we would stay and run Monday if the race got rained out. My response was "You're dadgum right we will." Whether we set a goal of winning races, qualifying good, or running good, one goal that we really work hard at, that sometimes goes undocumented, is keeping the DNF column just as small as possible. Right now we only have one of those, an unfixable problem when we broke the rod bolt in Atlanta.

We will always work, and keep going and digging and fixing and redoing, to make sure we run as many laps as possible for Team 31 and Lowe's. We'll try to be there at the end of the race regardless of what capacity we're there in. It's always been important to me because I've always hated DNFs. I think it's almost like waving a white surrender flag.

In 1997 with Earnhardt, we finished fifth in the points. We didn't win a race, but one thing that wasn't noticed, but was important, was that our DNF column had a big fat round zero in it. And I was as proud of that as I was of anything. If you don't have DNFs, points will sometimes take care of themselves.

We're testing at Indy this week with a brand new race car. Our guys have worked harder and put in more hours in the past two weeks dealing with the schedule we've had the past few weeks -- the rainout at Pocono, out to Sonoma, back to Daytona, Loudon, testing at Indy, building a new car and rebuilding other cars.

But we have a new car we're really proud of, and we've got another car we haven't run much this year that was the car we ran at Indy a year ago. It was a chassis that was good to us last year, but we ran it only once this year, at Las Vegas, with little success. But that was before the rules change.

I'm probably going to take a long weekend. We're trying to give all of our guys vacation time right now, but it's hard for me to sit and just take five straight days off. I can't and I won't do it. When you're gone more than two days in a row, it's like you can't catch up. So I'm going to take a couple days here and another day there. I'm probably going to take a four-day weekend trying to catch up on some personal things on Friday and Monday.

But the real goal is to take the phones off the hook, throw the breaker switch on the doorbell, pull the blinds and curtains and spend four days with Linda and those three kids.