Tech Q&A: Kevin Hamlin

October 3, 2001
10:15 AM EDT (1415 GMT)

Faced with the difficult task of continuing the GM Goodwrench race team following the loss of Dale Earnhardt, crew chief Kevin Hamlin has successfully guided rookie Kevin Harvick to the top 10 in NASCAR Winston Cup Series standings.

Under Hamlin’s guidance, Harvick won his first NASCAR Winston Cup race, the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, by just six-thousandths of a second over Jeff Gordon – in only the 25-year old’s third NASCAR Winston Cup start.

Hamlin, a native of Michigan, takes a low-key approach to dealing with rookie drivers, experience he gained in 1997-98 when he was Mike Skinner’s crew chief.

Still, he says he does as much teaching as needed to guide his team to Victory Lane.

Q: How has your style changed since working with Dale Earnhardt? -- Stacey Manitz, Allendorf, Iowa

A: I’ve had to do a lot more thinking. Dale pretty much knew everything that was going on all the time. He understood why we did what we did.

Kevin running the NASCAR Busch Series, Grand National Division, has helped a lot, as far as the rules and race track practices go – restarts, pit entrances and exits – he basically knows all that stuff. But obviously, I’ve had to do a little more coaching.

During the race, we try to keep him more posted on his track times and splits between the leaders, things which Dale didn’t need to know about or even care about. If he wanted to know something, he’d ask and I’d tell him.

I’ll go to the rookie meetings with Kevin. It really helps keep me up to speed on this stuff as well.

Q: How do you pick the members of the pit crew? By tryouts? Who’s in charge of the pit crew? -- Chris Rambo, Wadsworth, Ohio

A: Whenever I’ve come to a team, they’ve always had a team in place, but once in awhile someone will leave or we’ll have to fill in for someone.

We’re pretty aware of what the talent is out there – who can change tires or gas cars – from other teams, and we’re always looking to bring in new talent into the NASCAR Winston Cup Series from the NASCAR Busch Series or the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.

Every once in awhile teams will have someone come in out of the blue and fit what they’re looking for. Being in the right place at the right time has a lot to do with it.

On our team, everybody works in the race shop. I’ve had situations where that’s not the case, but it’s getting to be so competitive with practicing and working out that it’s practically a full-time job.

The manager of the No. 31 Lowe’s Chevrolet is in charge of reviewing all the pitstop tapes of each race. He takes the teams through their practices and critiques them. The driver is definitely not the only athlete on race day. The crew has to be in real good shape too.

Q: How much of the body of today’s stock car is “stock” and how much is built in-house?-- Bobby Higgins, Fresno, Calif.

A: The roof, the trunk and the hood are stock from the factory. The rest of the car is hand fabricated. This allows us to shape the body a little closer to what we’re looking for. Obviously, there are templates we have to conform with, but we can get away with a little shaping and we can make it lighter, as well.

Our cars go through several phases: The frame comes in our shop where we bolt on the suspension parts. We then send it to the fab shop where they hang the body on it. Then it comes back to us and we prime it, paint it and put the rest of the parts on. From start to finish, it takes less than 12 days.

Q: On race weekends, are the garages locked during the night or can teams work on their cars as long as they need to? -- Gene Davis, Tyler, Texas

A: The garages have a set schedule for being open, usually from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. You have to leave at night and nobody’s allowed in the garage to work on their car.

Under certain circumstances – say you wreck in the final practice or you blow a motor – NASCAR will allow some officials to stay with you for another couple of hours, so you’re not so far behind the next morning. Normally though, we leave at 5 p.m. and they lock the garage.

Q: During a race, the in-car camera sometimes show what appear to be metal rods hanging from the ceiling in the car. What are these? -- Steve Rome, Newark, Del.

A: Those are not actually rods: they’re cables that go to the roof flaps. When the roof flaps deploy, they prevent the flaps from opening too far.

Q: Does the presence of fans in the garage area bother you during the race weekend? -- Jen Hamann, Allendorf, Iowa

A: It’s amazing how interested people are in what we do and it’s great that they get to come down and interact with us. But it’s also good when they respect our space and let us work.

They’re not actually allowed in the garage in most cases, but outside can be a hazardous place too, because sometimes a car isn’t running when it coasts in off the track. The cars sneak up on us sometimes, and we work around them every day.

It can get pretty annoying to the driver and to the crew when the car’s trying to roll through a crowd and back to the garage – sometimes he has to stop. But it’s good for the sponsors and the sport for the fans to be down there. Let’s just say it’s a necessary evil.

Q: What kind of testing does a race engine get before a race? Greg Cook, Tempe, Ariz.

A: Once a competition engine is built, they’ll put it on the dyno and get a couple of power runs just to seat the parts. They’ll try to call that good, because they don’t want to put any more dyno time on the race engines than they have to.

They build engines in our R&D department, try different things on them and try to have it all figured out ahead of time so that when they build the actual race engine they don’t have to spend a lot of dyno time with it and wear it out.

On track testing is done just to see that everything agrees with the dyno numbers, but for the most part, when we put our race engines in we run them just the minimum amount of laps before the race.