DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – NASCAR’s preseason focus shifts about 500 miles to the north this week as the Lowe’s Motor Speedway’s annual media tour comes to Charlotte beginning Monday.
Optimism is rampant at race shops in the days leading up to Speedweeks. Teams that struggled in the two weeks of testing at Daytona rationalize their woes away. They assure themselves their superspeedway cars will “race well” next month, and presume that upcoming tests at Las Vegas and California, which will indeed be a better indication of how things might go this year, will provide more encouraging results.
More than 200 media members from all over the country, who’ll gather here for the media tour, will get a heavy dose of that optimism between Monday and Thursday as they hop from shop to shop to look forward to the 2005 campaign.
The reality, of course, is that many teams will ultimately have the high hopes they’re now harboring dashed on the rocks of reality as another 36-race Cup season unfolds.
“Let’s be perfectly honest,” said Jeff Burton, who’ll drive the No. 31 Chevrolets from Richard Childress Racing this year. “Any driver who stands up and tells you guys “We’ve got trouble,’ is pretty much screwed.
“Even if you know it’s true, if you’re saying in January that you’ve got trouble, what does your team think? Every team in the NFL and baseball talks about how they’ve improved. What else do you say?”
Burton is an excellent case study on this topic, of course.
He had four straight top-five points finishes and won 15 times from 1997 to 2000. He won two more races in 2001 at Roush Racing, but hasn’t won a race since and last year left Roush after 22 races to go to Childress to drive the No.30 Chevrolets.
That team, which will change over to the No. 31 with Cingular Wireless sponsorship this year, was 22nd in the final owners’ points standings last year and has never won a Cup race.
In spite of that, Burton believes it’s realistic to make the top 10 and this year’s Chase for the Nextel Cup.
“There’s no doubt it’s realistic,” Burton said. “If you look at our team’s performance last year in the last 14 races, we would have been a top 10 team.”
Optimism goes only so far, though. Burton also has realism tinting his forecast for himself and his team.
“We’ve got to be better than we were last year,” he said. “We can’t digress any, we can only make improvements. We weren’t good enough to falter any. If we digress in any area, we’d better make improvements in two.”
Nobody, of course, sets out to digress. Every hour of work, every calorie of effort that’s going into preparing for 2005 for every team in NASCAR’s top circuit is aimed at turning optimism into real, tangible improvement in the year ahead.
Part of what makes the preseason interesting is trying to figure out for whom all of that work will pay off.
Every year, however, a lot of what’s said in January amounts to blown smoke since nobody really knows what’s going to happen. This year, the smoke will be thicker since smaller rear spoilers could significantly change how the cars handle and since teams will be racing on new tires they don’t even have yet.
Burton said his team doesn’t have a fleet of cars ready to race on the intermediate tracks that make up a majority of the Cup schedule. Until teams go to a back-to-back test at Las Vegas and California scheduled for the following week, they won’t know what they’re dealing with.
“Until we figure out what we want, we don’t want to invest time, energy and money in building a garage load of cars that we can’t use,” Burton said.
“(Car owner) Ray Evernham doesn’t know what’s coming, Jeff Gordon doesn’t. Any team that’s sitting there with all of its cars ready, unless they’re smarter than everyone else, they don’t know what they need, either.
“We base our opinions on theories and hypotheses. Sometimes you guess wrong and sometimes you guess right. If you guess wrong, you’ll struggle for a while.”
And if you’re right, you’ll sound like you knew all along what you were talking about in January.
—
(c) 2005, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.).
Visit The Charlotte Observer on the World Wide Web at http://www.charlotte.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
—–
PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099):
NASCAR
AP-NY-01-22-05 1742EST
Comments are no longer available on this story