Crash carts carry everything a team needs
By Jason Mitchell, Stock Car Racing Magazine
October 18, 2001
4:06 PM EDT (2006 GMT)
A crash cart is one of the most important things a NASCAR Winston Cup Series team takes to the track each weekend, yet it's a piece of equipment those same competitors hope they never have to use.
Stock Car Racing asked two veteran Winston Cup crew chiefs -- Robin Pemberton and Robbie Loomis -- exactly what parts and pieces they want to have on a crash cart in case of trouble.
"You want to have every piece of equipment you can physically get on a crash cart - everything under the sun," says Pemberton, crew chief for Rusty Wallace and the No. 2 Miller Lite Ford.
"You'll have rear-end housings, rear clips, fuel cells, frame sections and all the suspension parts. On a Winston Cup crash cart, you literally have about everything you need to fix a car in the event of a wreck that's waiting for the team back in the garage.
"In racing today, you have to be ready for about anything that can happen. Even back when Benny Parsons won the championship in 1973, in the last race of the year his team had to cut the door bars out of their backup car and weld them in his wrecked car to get him back out on the track.
"In this business, you've got to be ready for anything to get the job done."
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Crewmen pack all they can into crash carts so they can respond to nearly every situation.
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Because of space limitations on pit road, teams will leave the carts inside their garage stalls with the hope they won't be needed.
One important thing to keep in mind is that everything on a Winston Cup car can be changed during a race - except the engine. That's why teams will work on what seems like a demolished car and send their drivers back on track to gain valuable Winston Cup points.
Sometimes the repairs are simple, such as applying high-strength tape and bungee cords. At other times, damaged parts must be cut away and new parts installed. Teams can even straighten bent frames.
"I can't begin to tell you how important the crash carts have become in Winston Cup racing anymore," says Loomis, coming off his second season as Jeff Gordon's crew chief on the No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet.
"A good example of that was when we crashed early in the fall race at Richmond. If the guys wouldn't have had our crash cart ready with what we needed, it would have probably cost us nine to 12 points. They had all the pieces we needed to fix the car and that helped us in the championship race.
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Crew Chief Robbie Loomis credits a well-stocked crash cart for helping Jeff Gordon return to action and pick up valuable points after wrecking at Richmond.
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"One point is all you have to win by, so those nine or 12 points we gained at Richmond meant a lot to us. The sad part about the crash carts is we learn through wrecks of better ways to make them."
What may be several humiliating laps for a driver in a wounded car limping around the track can actually move them up in the finishing order to earn a few more points.
"Every lap you're in the garage area during a race is a lap you aren't getting any points for," Pemberton says. "The most important part is do it right and fast at the same time, so each member of our team has their certain areas of the car they work on if something happens to us."
NASCAR inspectors pay close attention to the repairs, and the cars must maintain certain speeds when they return to the track, or else they're forced to return to the pits.
The bottom line is that while these cars may not look anything like they did when they started the race, simply seeing them back on the track is a credit to a well-stocked crash cart and some fast working crewmen.
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