Hard work, ingenuity evident in racing's past
Kenny Bruce
Kenny Bruce is a three-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association's George Cunningham Writer of the Year Award. He joined Street & Smith's Sports Group in 2001.
They were smarter. No two ways about it. They were smarter because they had to be. Is there any other possible explanation?
I thought a lot about that as I drove home from Mooresville, N.C., Saturday, after spending much of the morning doing a lot of listening and very little talking to some people who know a thing or two about NASCAR, about racing and about making cars go fast.
The crowd, which had come to pay tribute and raise funds for noted crew chief Jake Elder, included many of the sport’s best drivers, crew chiefs and engine builders. Sadly, nearly all of them have moved on to others things, largely due to age, injury or simply because they had finally became tired of the daily grind.
I don’t know it for a fact, but I doubt there was a single engineering degree in the house. And yet here were some of the smartest people ever to be associated with stock-car racing.
These people could do so much with the parts and pieces that make up a race car that it would make your head spin.
They won scores of races and they won all kinds of championships. They found ways to make honest-to-goodness, ground-pounding, breath-taking horsepower. They made cars go fast, and then they found ways to make them go even faster.
And they did it without multimillion dollar sponsorships. Without hundreds of people on the payroll. Without a list of engineers as long as your arm.
No computers. No seven-post shaker rigs. Nothing fancy.
Not that they wouldn’t have benefited from such luxuries. But because those things weren’t available, these people had to find other ways to achieve their goals.
Call it backyard engineering if you like. But hard work and ingenuity is probably a more accurate description.
I don’t want to insinuate that there aren’t bright people in the sport today, because that’s absolutely not the case. But are they smart in part because of the tools at their disposal? Could they still make a car fly around the race track, make it suck down and stick in the corners and make it durable enough to last all day? Could they do that without the computers and the readouts and the full-scale wind tunnel testing?
I don’t know the answer to that.
I do know that most of the people I ran into Saturday not only could do that, but they did. Time and time again.
