TOYOTA NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (NSCS)
Michael Waltrip — Notes & Quotes
Daytona Media Day – February 13, 2014
MICHAEL WALTRIP, No. 66 Blue-Def/AAA Toyota Camry, Michael Waltrip Racing
What do you think about the new no ride height rule change?
“That’s a great question because it’s a huge rule change and so far from listening to the teams that have tested, they can’t figure out which way to go about it. They know it will work this way, and it’s not going to work that way, so there’s a lot of options in order to arrive at setups that seem to be comparable to one another on the track. It’s a big rule change — maybe the biggest rule change since I’ve been around the sport because of the fact the car used to want to live four-and-a-half inches off the ground, that’s where it wanted to sit still. It’s where they had to sit. You park it on the ground, it sits there. That’s because of aero, when the aero is taken away, the car wants to go back up. When the car wants to go back up, that’s not good. You want it down and it tries to go up. There’s all this stuff going on. Now the car is going to be able to live where it wants to live. It should make for the drivers to have a little more consistent, more solid feel of the car.”
How has the rule change affected your race team compared to the competition?
“We’re like everybody else. We’ve tried different setups and it’s interesting to put different setups in the car and have the same result on the track of lap time basically. But, I think everybody is sort of under the impression that we’re really not going to know the full effects of the rule change and how to properly setup the cars until you get to a place like Phoenix and try to race in traffic with the new rules. Somebody will hit it at Phoenix and others won’t and it will just continue — it will be a process that you’re going to have to sort. On testing right now, you can have two cars setup totally different, which is always sort of been that way, but it seems more significant running the same time.”
Are you looking forward to running the Daytona Beach half marathon?
“My goal last year was to make anything in the 2.0’s and I made 2.07, which was 13, 9:30 miles, which I thought was pretty good for a 49 year old man, just to be able to run along and do that. I haven’t trained as much this year as I did last and now I’m 50, so I go to a different class, but my goal last year was anything in the 2.0’s and now I’m thinking 2.0-crap, you know. It’s going to be hard. I ran 11 miles the other night and I made it in two hours even, so I should be able to make 2.20-something and that’s my goal, just to finish this year and refocus and try to be in better shape next year. When I ran the 11 miles the other night, I was so happy because I got done and I felt good. I could have gone another two and made it. Quite honestly along about January 2, I was thinking I don’t know if I can run that far or not and be able to progress. I just use it for motivation. I just want to stay fit.”
What do you think about the No. 3 returning to NSCS racing this year?
“I just look at it as, I knew Dale (Earnhardt) pretty good and I think he’d be cool with it. Richard (Childress) and his family, and I know how good of friends Dale and Richard were and I just feel it’s right. It feels perfectly right, perfectly fine to me to have the No. 3 on the race track. Austin Dillon is the perfect young man to drive the 3 car, he’s very respectful of the sport, he’s very knowledgeable of the history — he knows the significance of the number and the situation. I’m just really thankful that — I’m happy it’s back because I love Dale and any time I see something that reminds me of him, it makes me smile. Just knowing that number is right where it needs to be, in the right hand, with the right people and the right time is special to me.”
Does it seem like the NASCAR driver body types are getting smaller?
“Well that happened a long time ago and it’s just continued to trend that way. There’s guys that are bigger — (Clint) Bowyer is over six-foot tall and Kyle Busch is a tall kid. What happened was, back in the 80’s the cars were really big and I fit in there perfectly and I was happy. Then the production models that were rolling into the dealerships got smaller and smaller and the cars got smaller and smaller. Then they started having power steering and so they became easier to drive, and so smaller was better. I went to Mr. France Sr. like in ’88 or ’89 or ’90 about I think and I said, ‘You all are really making me uncomfortable in the car, it’s getting really small and I don’t really want to do anything else but drive a car.’ At that point they said, ‘Okay, that makes sense, we can’t get the cars any smaller, and we’ll work on getting them bigger.’ So now, a guy my size or bigger can race and I just always felt it would have been a shame if the cars kept getting smaller and the next Richard Petty was 6’5” and weighed 220 in his prime and couldn’t fit in the car. There wasn’t any reason for it. So, now there is room for a big guy in there and the physical requirements to race a car today is much different than they were in the 80’s, so you can be smaller and do it. The competition is tougher today and so mentally it’s a tougher game, but physically it’s an easier game.”
How is Michael Waltrip Racing heading into the 2014 season?
“We’ve been doing a lot of testing. Co-owner Rob Kauffman and I meet with our competition guys regularly and back in November, Rob’s vision was, don’t leave anything in the bank — let’s invest all we can invest in testing, in preparation, getting ready for the ’14 season — all in. If you think we need to save something for August, we’ll worry about that in August. Let’s focus on now. Obviously a lot has been made out of the way you race for a championship now. The no ride height rule is the biggest rule change that has ever happened in my opinion in the sport, since I’ve been around. If you think about a car, last year it wanted to live four-and-a-half inches off the ground. If you just set it there, that’s where it wanted to be. The teams were smart enough to fake the car out through the first three-and-a-half inches of travel and get it down on the ground and run around the track really fast. A lot of that was accomplished with the mechanics of the way the car works, but a lot of it was also aero, because the car would get pushed down. When they lost the aero, the car would want to live at four-and-a-half inches, so the drivers were constantly in traffic fighting that car, wanting to get up to where it thinks it belongs. Now we’re just setting them up in the garage area really close to where they want to run. It’s going to change the way the driver feels the cars, changing the way we’re setting them up for sure and if I was a smart guy, I would have bought a spring company about last November because we’ve bought more springs over the last couple months than we have in the history of MWR (Michael Waltrip Racing).”
How has MWR taken what they learned in 2013 and applied it to prepare for the upcoming season?
“We made the Chase with one of our cars and we finished seventh. The year before, we made the Chase with a couple of our cars and we finished second in the championship. We didn’t do as well in 2013 as we had hoped, and we’re laser focused on 2014. Like I said, practicing, testing, preparing for the upcoming season as hard as we can. We’ve been on the track most every week since December and gaining a lot of information, putting a lot of stuff in the computer and trying to understand exactly what kind of setup we want to show up at Phoenix with. There’s a lot of people trying to figure that out.”
