After a grueling 12 days, David is back home in his native Texas. Over the weekend of August 21, he’d been up at Michigan International Speedway, in the Irish Hills area of southeastern Michigan. He’d then needed to fly directly to Charlotte, NC, to work with his team on the two cars he’d be racing over the last weekend of August.
His team’s workshop is based in Statesville, north of Charlotte. David traveled there to work on the two cars he would be racing at Daytona the following weekend. When I met with David, I asked him why he felt he needed to spend the middle of the week at the team workshop. He began by telling me that, “It’s all about preparation…a lot of work before you get to the actual race.” He went on to tell me, “I’ve got to make sure that my seat’s just perfect in the race car, and my steering wheel is exactly where I want it. All my harnesses are perfect…there a lot of stuff inside race car that I like to have perfect.”
In short, when he’s going to spend many hours in a car, driving at high speed, David wants to be as comfortable as possible, within the constraints imposed by a high-performance vehicle.
On behalf of audience members who are new to NASCAR, I asked David why he needed to have two cars in Daytona last weekend rather than driving the same car in both of the races. David was delighted with the question and he was obviously pleased to give our viewers some insight into the different specifications between an Xfinity race car and a Cup Series race car. He explained, “The Xfinity car is a little bit different…, at 200 miles an hour the race car will squat…, it pushes down about four and a half inches. The air pushing on the car pushes the car down.” He went on to tell me that the Xfinity car has a carburetor on a V8 engine, and there are no electronics involved in engine control. Also, there are rules about the car’s height: it cannot be too low.
However, the NASCAR Cup Series car, he said, can be as low as possible. “The car can be as low as you want it…[it] sits a lot lower to the ground and the body style is a little bit different.” With regard to electronics, “it has a lot of electronics in it…, there’s no carburetor, it’s fuel-injected…, it’s got a computer in it.” David then described the ECM, the engine control module that controls actuators that ensure optimal engine performance.
I asked David specifically about his race experience last Friday and Saturday during the Xfinity Race at Daytona, and his narrative was enthralling. During the early part of the Friday evening race, he’d begun to hear one of the cylinders in his Toyota Supra’s V8 engine start to “miss.” Simultaneously, the dials on his dashboard began to fluctuate. With the loss of power, he began to fall back to the rear of the pack, ultimately ending up in position 40 out of 40 cars.
By coincidence, during the twentieth lap, it began to rain at Daytona, and so the race was stopped and postponed until 12:30 the next day. Immediately, David’s pit crew began examining the car, and overnight they were able to determine that the electrical current loss was in the starter motor circuit. There was time to disconnect the circuit but not to identify and repair the root cause before race time. This meant that to start the race – in last place – David’s car needed to be push-started by one of the tow trucks. Literally, pushing the car, fender to fender, so that David could drop into second gear and fire up the engine.
What happened next is truly amazing, and to find out just what happened, you’ll just need to watch the video!
David has had an amazing life, and I’m looking forward to more conversations with him. If you’d like me to ask him a question, please drop me a line at Neil@ConectUS.com
