Mike Mulhern

Mike Delanhanty, the Dodge NASCAR boss, says it’s time for Dodge’s luck to turn for the better

Dodge racing boss Michael Delahanty
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)

By Mike Mulhern

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CHARLOTTE
Michael Delahanty has a darned good case here: If your name isn’t Kyle Busch or Carl Edwards, then so far this season the key phrase is ‘bad luck.’
Even Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, after all their NASCAR championships, have at times had miserable times this spring. Gordon at Texas, for certain. Johnson, at Darlington and several other tracks.
However Delahanty, as head of Dodge’s racing efforts, would like for at least one or two of his guys to start turning some heads.
What’s been wrong with Dodge teams since Ryan Newman’s Daytona win? Toyota, Ford and sometimes even Chevrolet are doing well, but Dodge?
“The quick and easy answer is ‘bad luck,’” Delahanty says. “You’ve seen it, race after race.

If it weren’t for bad luck.....
(Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

“Just look at Richmond: Carpentier gets spun, goes flying up the track; Kurt Busch drives right into him…and Montoya spins into the back of them.”
That’s three Dodges, Patrick Carpentier, Busch and Juan Pablo Montoya, taken out in one fell swoop.
“And go back a week earlier to Talladega: In the last couple of laps we had five Dodges taken out, and four of the five were in the top-12.
“How many bad luck weekends can you get, where our guys are just in the wrong spot at the wrong time?
“A lot of it is just that.”
Well, what about horsepower. Does Dodge need to get that new engine up on line faster? Would that help Dodge teams qualify better, and thus perhaps avoid some bad luck?
“Chevrolet, for example, has had its new engine out for two years, and they’re just now getting it rolled into the front line in their cars…and we’re pretty much in the same position,” Delahanty says.
“Our guys are doing the development in the race shops, working on durability, working on cam shafts, cylinder head configurations, stuff like that. We’ve done some initial durability tests on the dynos.
“We’ve got some track time scheduled for later in May, where we’re going to start fitting the engine into cars and go out there and just put laps on them.
“We’re taking our time, to validate the engine, and make sure it will last. And then we’ll start beating on it to get some horsepower, with all different types of designs.
“We don’t have a gun to their heads – ‘You’ve got to get this engine out there.’ But here are the pieces. And we’re running our own tests on them. And when it’s ready, we’ll race it.
“No one has run the new engine yet. We’re still developing it and playing with it.”
And where is the new engine supposed to help – up off the corners, down into the corners?
“From what we’ve seen of the power curves, they certainly look better than the old power curves,” Delahanty says.
“But we typically don’t see the teams’ individual power curves, nor do we ask to see them. That’s proprietary information.
“But we haven’t heard any complaints.”

Too much bad luck for Dodge teams this season
(Elliott Sadler tangles with Tony Stewart at Darlington)
(Photo Credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

What about the new NASCAR stocker, the winged car that hasn’t run all that smoothly on the tour’s mid-sized tracks this season?
Ford’s Jack Roush appears to have found some aerodynamic and chassis tricks, and so have the Toyota engineers at Joe Gibbs’. Chevy men so far have been hit and miss, to say the least.
“There are a couple of teams that have found something, Roush and Gibbs,” Delahanty says. “But you’ve been around for a while, and you remember the learning period when the last new car was rolled out into the sport. It’s been so long, that people have forgotten how long it takes.
“We were using that old car for a long, long time, and there weren’t many tricks left to be discovered. That last new generation car was back in the 1990s.
“But with this new car-of-tomorrow, the transition is the same type of thing. And there are some teams finding the right things, like with the rear axle, and making it work.
“The second time around these tracks this season things will be better.
“But look at the stats this year: Gibbs and Roush have a stranglehold on the wins this year. There are clearly Haves and Have-nots; and our teams aren’t in the Haves right now.
“But our guys are working their tails off; they’ve stepped up their mid-week testing, to try to figure out how to get these cars to turn and go through the corners.
“The other thing, too – think about it: we’re carrying a lot of rookie right now. Patrick Carpentier, Dario Franchitti, Sam Hornish, guys we’re bringing up.”
But maybe Dodge teams have loaded up too much on rookies and need more veterans? Then again some of the Dodge drivers who have been around for a while aren’t performing all that well either.
“We don’t tell our teams who to hire….but this rookie thing can be a double-edged sword. Some of those guys may turn into some pretty outstanding drivers. Look at Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards and Denny Hamlin.”

What about the Dodge team owners themselves? Petty Enterprises clearly has issues, but then so do Roger Penske, Chip Ganassi and George Gillett and Ray Evernham.
“It is a testimony to how competitive NASCAR really is,” Delanhanty says. “Not just in the United States but in the world.
“Juan Montoya will tell you – and he’s a world class driver – that a 15th place finish in NASCAR can be a pretty darned good achievement.
“I wish I could walk into our teams’ shops and say ‘This is the problem: X-Y-Z, and here’s how to fix it.’
“Our guys are hitting it just as hard as the other guys. And you can see this when you walk through the garage – the Penske guys are talking to the Evernham guys are talking to the Ganassi guys are talking to the Petty guys. They are team players.
“We have no beef with the guys in that regard; they’re playing team ball.
“And, remember, the ‘book’ these guys have on the car-of-tomorrow’ is a three-by-five index car. If you take the book from the car-of-yesterday and try to use that stuff now, either it doesn’t work at all or it works in 180 degrees the other way.
“These guys need time to build that new book.”
However there is so much about this sport that is in attitude, in fire-in-the-belly, in pacing, in not burning out, in not becoming frustrated.
Is that mental part of the game a factor here?
“The one common problem our teams point to about all this,” Delanhanty says, perhaps only partly tongue-in-cheek, “is the media.”
He laughs: “If it weren’t for the media this would be a happy place.”
And he laughs again.
“Really, that issue of attitude and mental toughness is a good question: how many businesses run 24/7, with no days off…and with so many appearances, where you have to stand somewhere making happy?
“This NASCAR world is a pretty taxing world for everyone.
“We go crazy ourselves just in our own little part of this world, trying to figure out how to take advantage of everything we have the opportunity for.
“The sport in general, collectively, we’re all running with our tongues hanging out.”

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