Kahne puts dismal ’07 behind him, hopes team changes yield quick dividends
By Kenny Bruce - Assistant Managing Editor
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
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The only dish Kasey Kahne was instructed to prepare for Christmas dinner this past December was mashed potatoes. Nothing more.
The only thing that failed to turn up on the dinner table? That would be, yeah, you guessed it, mashed potatoes.
“I forgot,” Kahne says sheepishly.
It could be that Kahne’s simply a forgetful sort, or that culinary endeavors just aren’t that important to the youngster from Enumclaw, Wash. But it’s just as likely that his lone kitchen duty was swept out in a general cleansing of the mind – the 27-year-old says he’s tried to forget 2007 and his Gillett Evernham Motorsports team’s lackluster results.
That shouldn’t be too difficult of a task, given the fact that practically nothing positive stands out. Forget it? What’s there to remember? He had six DNFs (Did Not Finish), nearly as many as his top-10 total for the season.
As the 2008 season dawns, Kahne is eager to slide behind the wheel and feel the tug of the safety harness strain against his firesuit. He’s carrying a new primary sponsor in Budweiser. Evernham Motorsports evolved into Gillett Evernham Motorsports some six months ago, and a restructuring of personnel continues as the new season approaches.
Kahne is excited, he says, to be in Daytona for preseason testing, “and I don’t know when I’ve ever been able to say that.”
He wants to feel good about his team and put the 2007 season behind him. He wants to forget. But most of all, he wants to win.
From Hero To Zero
Kahne and one other NASCAR Cup driver of note, Dale Earnhardt Jr., were two of three multiple race winners in 2006 that were expected to fare well in ’07. Earnhardt Jr. because, well, because he’s Junior and expectations follow him like daylight follows darkness. Kahne because he was coming off a breakout year that saw him win six times and qualify for the Chase. He wasn’t stealing the limelight from some of the sport’s more established, more successful stars, but he was staking his claim to at least a share of it.
Corporate America had jumped on the Kahne bandwagon with sponsors such as Allstate playing off his good looks in a series of popular TV commercials. A growing pool of female fans weren’t acting, however, when they passed along phone numbers if the opportunity presented itself.
2006 was a year worth remembering, a year that could be built upon. Preseason polls heading into ’07 had Kahne, seven times a Cup winner, as a solid lock to finish in the top 10 and contend for the championship.
Those closer to the team, however, weren’t as confident.
A year later, it seems their concerns were well-founded. Only twice, during the latter part of the year, did the team finish 15th or better in three consecutive races. Kahne failed to win a single Cup race, failed to make the Chase, and by season’s end was speaking openly about changes needed within the organization.
“As far as next year goes, that’s up to the guys,” a frustrated Kahne said as he prepared for the season’s final race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. “It’s up to the guys building the cars, [the] engineers and the people at Gillett Evernham. If they want to get things turned around and figure it out, it’s up to them.”
Team director Kenny Francis knew the ’06 results weren’t a fluke, but he also knew other teams had improved significantly as the season wore on. Kahne’s No. 9 Dodge team, meanwhile, had not. If the ’06 success wasn’t a fluke, neither were the problems of ’07.
Francis says the No. 9 team had “hit on some stuff early, way before some other people, setup-wise,” but that the teams’ bodies weren’t altered heading into the ’07 season. And that, he says, was what came back to bite the organization the following season.
“By the time everyone caught up towards the end of ’06 to what we were doing, you could tell we weren’t running as strong as we had been,” the former Late Model racer says. “In ’07 we just didn’t improve on the body. We tried ... but it just didn’t improve. And it showed.”
Although Dodge teams began the ’07 season with a new nose piece, Francis says that, “fundamentally, we didn’t have anything different than what we had the year before.
“We started off the year not quite where we wanted to be – we had some crashes and engine problems that made it look worse than it was – but then we kind of overreacted and changed some things that did make it a lot worse. Trying to get better, we inadvertently made it worse. We really didn’t do the development the right way, trying to prove it out before we went to the race tracks. So that put us in a deeper hole by going to the race track with stuff that was unproven.”
A year before, Kahne had scored three wins by the season’s 12th race. The start of the 2007 season was a different story, with three DNFs in the first 10 races. While he qualified well (earning a pole at Las Vegas and starting inside the top five in five of the first 11 races), Kahne says he realized his team was in trouble. Signs of improvement were only momentary as the team worked to turn its season around.
While his team worked to produce better cars, Kahne says he would often alter his driving style in an attempt to find answers.
“I do a lot of that, I try to change a lot of things, from braking to steering to entry [into the corners],” he says. “Throttle positioning ... There are all different types of things that you can try to do. ... I mess with that stuff all the time, even when my cars are right. Sometimes you can find ways to go faster longer.
“I couldn’t figure it out. Whether it’s because I’m still trying to learn [the characteristics of] that car or not, I couldn’t figure it out. So at some point I think you realize the cars have to be further off because I couldn’t and my teammates were no better than I was. They were the same or worse. ... I felt like I needed to give better feedback, but as far as driving, I didn’t feel like that was the problem after I kept working to make it better.”
A Glimpse Of Potential
It wasn’t until September that Francis and fellow team director Rodney Childers decided that they’d had enough.
“We were getting tired of getting our butts kicked every week,” Francis says. “So we came up with something different to try. I think if you look at the results, we ran a lot better from September on. We kind of caught up to everyone else in the bodies.”
But by then, he says, “we had everything else so screwed up, and everyone was so dejected and disappointed, we could have had better results.”
Still, it was a step in the right direction. Even though Kahne crashed out twice late in the season, he managed to log the bulk of his top-10s (six of eight) in the season’s final 13 races.
“How the air starts at the nose [of the car] has a big influence on how it ends behind the car,” Francis says. “If you’ve gotten the nose messed up, you’re not going to do anything. Once we got that fixed, we also changed some things on the roof and around the tail of the car. We were just looking for different aero properties.
“We gained a lot when we made those changes ... we thought it should be big.”
Scott Riggs, who has since moved on to Haas CNC Racing, was the first to put the new body changes to the test, and was running deep in the top 10 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in October before getting involved in a crash with Juan Pablo Montoya late in the race. Kahne’s “new” car debuted at Atlanta in October, “and the first lap off the truck, I knew that was what we had been missing all year,” Francis says. “The first corner on the track he hit, you could tell it [made a difference].”
Kahne qualified fourth, and ran inside the top 10 for the bulk of the afternoon before finishing ninth.
Lost In Translation
Attempting to develop new ideas while struggling to correct current problems with the teams’ cars proved to be a difficult task for the GEM operation in 2007. It would have been easier, perhaps, to stop waves from crashing on the beach.
Francis says it was all but impossible to develop new cars and new ideas while keeping up with the hectic Cup schedule. Kahne says that the fix needed to start in-house if the team wanted to get stronger.
“That’s really what has hurt us,” Francis says. “You’ve got to have people that can support us, kind of take the ball and run with it. You tell them, ‘Look, this is where we’re struggling and we need to fix this problem. Here are some ideas to work on, but the race team doesn’t have time to work on them.’
“That got lost somewhere between us and management. We tried, but didn’t have time to fix it.”
In spite of the apparent late-season improvement, Kahne says he wasn’t convinced the team had turned the corner, but says he did feel the changes were at least a move in the right direction.
“We got better,” he says of the final few weeks of the ’07 season. “We were better at the end of the year, definitely. We went from 34th or 35th in points earlier in the year to 18th or 19th. But we still weren’t where we wanted to be. We did get a little more consistent. We’d run from eighth to 16th or 17th and could run there ... some of the others had problems and that’s where we made up a lot of ground.”
While he did little testing himself over the winter break – in addition to the preseason test at Daytona, Kahne participated in a Goodyear tire test at Las Vegas late last year – the organization was on the track often. Jason Keller tested for the team at Greenville-Pickens, Dennis Setzer filled in during another session while Sadler and Carpentier also logged their share of laps.
But Kahne cautions that testing alone “isn’t what is going to make us better.
“There’s structure and figuring out things with the cars that will make us better. Before, when we hit on things, we could ride that for a little while. But as times changed and other teams got better, we were still riding on that. And pretty soon that [advantage] is gone. You have to continue to move forward.”
Moving Forward
GEM officials didn’t clean house in the offseason, but did make moves to address the issues of 2007. Kahne says he believes that the restructuring of key personnel will bolster shop efforts, which should translate into better performances on the track.
Mark McArdle, who previously oversaw the team’s engine program, has been promoted to vice president and managing director of competition. Sammy Johns was recently named director of operations, and will focus on assembly of cars, parts and fabrication work.
McArdle, a successful engine builder in the open-wheel ranks where his work helped power three Indy 500 winners “has done a great job with the engine shop,” Kahne says. “It’s going to be good for us ... and for our structure. As time goes on we’ll get better and then we’ll stay good for a longer amount of time with Mark in charge.”
While team founder and co-owner Ray Evernham maintains he will continue to be involved in various aspects of the organization, his success as a championship-winning crew chief shouldn’t be read as a sign that he’ll be more hands-on with the construction of the cars and at the track.
“We have quality people who are doing that,” Evernham says. “My role is going to be pretty broad. Some days I may be in the body shop, some weekends I might be at the track, some day I might be out doing something fun. It’s not going to be doing the same thing every day.”
Childers has moved from team director of the team’s No. 10 entry (with Carpentier) to team director for the No. 19 and driver Elliott Sadler; the organization’s Nationwide Series program will now be run by Kirk Almquist while former team director Mike Shiplett moves to the Cup side to work with Carpentier. Also, Iain Watt has been named director of performance engineering, with a focus on the group’s on-track performance while Tommy Wheeler, a former technical director with the engine program, has been promoted to engineering services director.
“We have a lot to look forward to ... a lot of change, a lot of things that can definitely be better,” Kahne says. “We had a down year last year, so it will be nice to get started again.”
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Dale Earnhardt Jr.
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