Recent winner Wimmer finds advantages in testing
By Rea White - Associate Editor
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Nick Laham / Getty Images for NASCAR
Scott Wimmer wants all the time in a race car that he can get, so don’t expect complaints from him when testing rolls around.
Wimmer, who shares the No. 29 Richard Childress Racing Nationwide Series Chevrolet with Jeff Burton, looks for any chance he can find to get behind the wheel, and he says the team helps him with that.
“They try to get me in a car whenever they can,” he said during testing at Richmond International Raceway this week. “I try not to sit idle. I try to do as much testing as I can.”
Wimmer, who scored his first series victory in five years as he came home first last weekend at Nashville Superspeedway, welcomes seat time in the car.
“It’s good for a driver to be on the race track getting as many laps as he can just try to get laps and … run through some things.
“It’s really not about going out and setting the fastest speed and worrying about things like that. It’s really about feel and getting
reacquainted with the track and the tires and hopefully building that notebook that we rely on.”
With the model formerly known as the car of tomorrow being used in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series this season, the cars used in the Nationwide Series are quite different. That lessens the value of running in both series in some ways, but Wimmer says there is still information that is helpful.
That particularly applies to understanding the tires.
“The things you really learn are tires,” Wimmer said of testing. “You learn [about] air pressure, what the tires do on a long run, what you can expect. I think that’s the real big thing that the Nationwide drivers, the standalone Nationwide drivers, suffer with, is just not knowing what the tire is going to do 50 laps into a run, or when you put on a new set is the car going to really free up.
“We’re so limited in tires during practice on a weekend, we can’t rifle through three or four sets of tires to see what the car's going to do. We’ve got one set to practice on … I think a lot of the struggles you see is Nationwide drivers just not knowing what to expect, not knowing how free to set their cars up to be good on the long run, and then get tires on them, and it’s too free to drive. Really, I think that’s the benefit most of the drivers get from it.”
Even though he won Saturday at Nashville, Wimmer is not scheduled to race in the series again until the April 20 event on the road course at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City.
