[media-credit name=”Brad Keppel” align=”alignright” width=”300″]
[/media-credit]When it comes to the Coca Cola 600, two-time Charlotte Motor Speedway race winner Jamie McMurray says it’s all about preparing yourself mentally.
“If your car is good, things go by fairly quick and if your car is not, it seems like it takes all day,” he adds.
He got a peak at how good his car will be on Sunday night in the Sprint Showdown last weekend, where he finished third.
“It gives you a good baseline of changes that you want to make,” he says of the Showdown event. “We’ve gone back and changed a few things on our car to make it better, and it’s a big test, the 600. Most people look forward, if you run decent at the All-Star event, then you look forward to going back because you have a really good baseline to start with.”
The changes didn’t bring the success that McMurray was looking for as he qualified 31st for Sunday’s race. He says, however, that their cars are better than how they ran last year.
“But we still have a ways to go,” he says. “I can’t wait to get out there tomorrow and see if the changes we have made have made an improvement. I feel like if it helps at Charlotte, it’s going to help at Dover and some of the other races that we have coming up. Yeah, I’m pretty anxious to get out there.”
10 years ago, McMurray scored his first career victory at Charlotte in his second start while subbing for Sterling Marlin. He stumbled across the video on youtube the other day, taking a peak at it.
“When I looked back at that, though, I couldn’t believe just first off that they were doing the pit road speed by a stopwatch and timing lines,” he says. “There was no electronic timing. Watching the guys do green flag pit stops, it’s just so much more advanced now and so much faster.”
Currently, McMurray sits 20th in points going into the Coca Cola 600 weekend. Despite their struggles, McMurray says it doesn’t do good to voice your opinion publicly as that should be kept between him and the guys in the shop.
“I know that there’s a tremendous amount of work going on at our shop and that Chip (Ganassi) is making a major financial contribution to getting everything where it needs to go,” he adds. “I mean, the fact is that if it was easy, everybody would run well, and it wouldn’t be the challenge that it is, but it’s a lot of work. When you get to have years like we did in 2010, it makes it even harder to not run well because you have the capability of doing it.”
McMurray adds that he didn’t expect to come out and be dominate even with the changes they made over the off-season ‘cause of the fact that it takes time to sort out any issues. Though he’s optimistic as he feels they’re finding the issues and working on sorting them out.
“I think it’s more scientific this year and it’s based on engineering and when we make a change, its better, it’s not just a guess,” he says. “It’s not hard to be patient when you feel like there’s progress to be made.”
While they’re working on their own issues, NASCAR is making changes to the rules. Last week, they made a tweak to the side skirts to make them less aero-dependent. However, McMurray didn’t feel a difference and he thinks that downforce is a problem that every racer will always deal with.
“It is what it is, and when you’re running the speeds we are running, you want to be the car up front,” he says.
McMurray will be looking for his third Charlotte Motor Speedway victory when they drop the green flag on Sunday night to hopefully leap frog himself into the 2012 Chase.
