August 19, 2025 • 53 mins
On this episode of Throttle Therapy, the season is winding down and Katherine is joined by Brandon Thomas, VP of Vehicle Design at NASCAR to discuss his journey from designing suspension and steering systems for tractor trailers to crafting Next Gen cars. Brandon shares insights from his career in both IndyCar and NASCAR, highlighting the differences in designing vehicles for both series. They also delve into the ‘Garage 56’ NASCAR project at Le Mans, and how a race "run by a pack of Americans" was received by French sports car fans.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Throttle Therapy with Catherine Legg is an iHeart women's sports
production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You
can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to this
(00:21):
week's episode of Throttle Therapy with Me Catherine Legg.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
And.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Although I was not racing this weekend, I have been busy.
I've been busy trying to get things for next year.
So did I know it sounds super early, but what
happens is you need to have everything in place sponsorship wise,
team wise, series wise, because now is the time that
everybody needs to get organized ready for next year.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
As you roll into the off season.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
You've only got a couple of months before the off
season starts, and everybody needs to know what they're doing.
So this is when you're shaking hands and kissing babies.
So I've been busy trying to put myself in the
best possible position that I can for next year. I'm
hoping to do Indie again, so I've been working hard
on that, and also obviously all the exciting NASCAR stuff
(01:07):
that I got to do this year is kind of
taking on a life of its own, and I'm hoping
to do the same thing again, if not expanded, bigger, better,
all those things. Super happy to have that opportunity. I
was talking to my friend and team owner about how
sometimes things fall apart to fall together. It was like
(01:28):
that this year, like I'm very grateful looking back that
I got all these opportunities in NASCAR and now I
have something that I'm desperate to pursue moving forward. So
busy training, busy doing business, which I think a lot
of people don't understand that. They think race cut drivers
have the best lives, and we do.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
We genuinely do.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
But I think we work really hard. I don't know
that people understand what goes into the back end of
it to make it plausible, Like we do debrief from
Watkins Glen and the pre race, so we spent a
bit of time looking at data debriefing from that, but
then it's really emails getting organized. But it makes me
(02:09):
happy to be able to do it, and I think
I'm learning in.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That aspect as well.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
With that being said, and with the NASCAR link that
I have formed this year, I would love to introduce
you to our guest on this big episode. He is
a good friend of mine. He is somebody I've known
for a long time now. We work together in twenty
twelve in the IndyCar paddock when he came over from
the NASCAR world to dip his toe in the water
(02:37):
of the IndyCar engineering worlds and is now one of
the big guys at NASCAR, designed the next gen car
and a bunch of other really cool stuff along with
his colleagues. Obviously, I'm not putting it all on his shoulders,
but I still think he's a bad ass and I
am proud to call him a friend and a colleague.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
It is Brandon Thomas this week.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I am excited to have somebody on the show that
has worked with me in the past.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
A long time ago.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
We worked together in the IndyCar space, but actually his
main bread and butter is in NASCAR, and I'm excited
to talk to him about how IndyCar is different to
NASCAR and a whole host of other things. So welcome
on the show, Brandon.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
How are you.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I'm good, I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
So I would like you to tell the story of
how we first met and we're working together, way back
when it was like twenty twelve.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Was it. Yeah, it's been a day or two ago. Yes,
we met at a Sebring test right where I showed
up completely unannounced, unexpectedly. It would be your race engineer.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I was asked by the team owner at the time, Hey,
have you heard of this guy?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And I was like, nope, who is this guy?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
But I'm very glad that you were in my race
engineer before we get into working with me, and how
awesome that must have been. How did you get into
being a race engineer in the first place? Did you
want to be an engineer when you were like twelve
year old Brandon Thomas?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I wasn't sure at that age. Probably I knew I
wanted to work on cars. I knew I specifically wanted
to work on racing cars. That was my big motivation whatnot.
And my dad did a great job of kind of
I didn't come from a racing family, so he did
a great job of asking around. He had a few
(04:37):
friends in the stock car business at the time. Morgan
McClure Racing was still in Abingdon, Virginia, and that was
not far from where I grew up thirty minutes or
so and one of the guys that flew their plane,
literally one of their pilots was a buddy of my
dad's who's also a pilot, and that guy told him
in you know, late eighties, early nineties, oh, he's got
(04:58):
to be an engineer. Engineering wasn't even popular in NASCAR
at that point in time. But I liked working on things,
so a mechanical engineer seemed like a pretty solid path
to go on. That.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
So you handy as well as being good on like
the computer and stuff, you can do all of the
stuff yourself mechanically wise.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
To you, I would have a lot of people in
this business say no. I would counter that with yes,
but yeah, I mean to me, when I interview an engineer,
let's say, for a role, I will tell them things
like I won't trust a mechanical engineer that can't weld.
You know, you can't be the one to make a drawing,
(05:37):
make a model, do whatever. Come up with how something's
going to get made, and go out to the shop
and tell folks how to do it if you yourself
can't also kind of do it. I'm a real big
proponent of, you know, engineers shouldn't hurt themselves with tools.
They should be able to go to the toolbox, grab tools,
work on the race vehicle, work on whatever. Just as
much as computer programming or analytics or simulation. You should
(06:01):
be able to walk up to the vehicle and say,
we're going to make a camera change. I know what
wrenches it's going to take and what the process is
going to be to make this cambrage what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I think the same with drive is I think we
should have a certain base knowledge of how the car works,
just so when you see the cambshims or whatever it
may be like, you also know what you're doing.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
That to me, as the race engineer type person is
a double edged sword.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Oh, because you don't want to be told what we
think the car needs.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
No, No, it's if you're so busy thinking about the
setup instead of driving the vehicle, then you're distracted. Right.
So I need to be able to look you right
in the eyes and say what do you need? Yeah,
and I don't need you to necessarily tell me. Oh, man,
(06:53):
you know half pound air pressure on the left for
your and you know one sixteenth of camber shim out
of the right. Like I need to be able to
trust this thing at this point in time, like I
need to be able to go down to the corner
and I need this or I need that.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
It's doing this. I needed to do this to be faster.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
So along that same vein of being able to work
on the car, did you ever get any experience in
a race car? No?
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I mean there was this stuff like Formula SAE when
I was in college. I drove quite a bit doing that,
but let's be clear, that doesn't count. Yes, I hold
a Virginia State Autocross Champion trophy from thirty forty years ago.
That doesn't count. That wasn't on the track with other
drivers and wheeler wheel type stuff. Had shiffer cart. When
(07:44):
I was in California my first four round in the
champ Car World Series, Alex Barron passed me on the
outside of the tightest hairpin at the Adams Cart Track
on the day off, and I said, this is why
I look at the squiggly lines and you hold the
steering wheel. I'm not good at driving. I enjoyed having
a nice vehicle. I enjoy driving faster than the posted
speed limits at times, but I would never call myself
(08:07):
a race driver for that.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
At all fair enough, we all have our strengths. I
don't ever call myself a race engineer, and I don't
I'm very, actually, very conscious of not saying what I
think it is. Sometimes I'll be like, I think it's mechanical,
or I think it's ero or whatever. But I will
never try and engineer the car because I know that
that's not what I'm good at, although I think in
another life I would have liked to have learned it
(08:29):
because it is fascinating, like how it all works together
and what you can do. And honestly, the engineer, in
my opinion, at this level, is more important than the
driver because if the car is good, our job is easy.
And if the car isn't good, then you have to
work together really fast, especially in NASCAR, to get the
car good because we don't have any testing. So I
(08:51):
honestly think that the car is more important. And that's
that's on you guys. So going back to where did
you go to college? And then what happened after college?
Speaker 3 (09:02):
I was a student and a graduate eventually at Virginia Tech.
And what happened in college was I learned about formul sae,
which was one of the reasons that we ended up
choosing that university. That's a student competition thing. You design
and build a single seat autocross style car.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
It seems like most people in racing have done some
form of Formula ESSA to get experience.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I'm old enough, I have enough gray hairs that it
was still a relatively young program amongst a lot of universities.
So I mean start in the eighties. I wasn't in
college until the early nineties. It was only let's say,
probably five, six, seven years old at my university when
I got there. They're still competing, you know, to this day.
One of my interns, she's a member team leader for
(09:49):
that team, and they dig up pictures, you know, literally
printout pictures young Brandon with mullets and things like that.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
I need to see these pictures. We need to put
them on the internet. Can we put that on your
hard cord?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
No, where I work, I get choose the picture that goes.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
On my heart exactly. I think that'd be true.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
But when I went to school, I discovered that. I
also discovered that I'm fairly social and that I do
enjoy beer. So when I got through with the first
half of my junior year, I found myself being invited
to leave university by the administration because I wasn't very
good at Point College. I was very good at the
(10:32):
extracurricular activities, but not the actual homeworking exams and things
like that.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
That sucks me because you are one of the most disciplined,
diligent people that I know now.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
But that's now, right, Yeah, you go to out your system.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Well, the first digital age now is a five, not
a one or a two. Right, But this is where
our stories don't cross geography, will actually cross very near
and dear to you. I went to twenty fire hours
of Daytona with a buddy of mine, because that's what
you do when you've been kicked out of school and
you're living in your college apartment with no classes. You
(11:09):
hop in a car and you drive overnight to go
to twenty fires at day time. He sneak in, no ticket.
He had a friend that later became one of my friends,
Anthony Lazarro No way. Yes, Anthony was getting ready to
drive his very first ever professional GT race.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I know Anthony very well. We do a little coaching together.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
And so we snuck down there, snuck in, literally snuck
into the Daytona International Speedway, hung out with the team
that he was driving for. He was in the second car,
you know, GT car. They needed a little bit of help,
so lent some hands and things like that. Just kind
of ran my mouth the entire weekend as much as
I could. Anthony says, why don't you He's like, what
(11:51):
do you do? I was like, well, right now, I do, undershit,
I'm being kicked out of.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
College and between employment.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
After the race, he said, why don't you guys come
back to Atlanta on your way back to Virginia. And
so we did. We crashed on Anthony's couch the next morning.
So the really Sunday night he finishes at twenty four
hours at Daytona. We hop in cars and drive back
to Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Done that and it's brutal.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
It is brutal. Yeah. And then Monday morning, I wake
up off his couch, take a shower, and I'm at
a little place called Primus Racing and coming Georgia.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
That's down the road for me.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Yeah, I know. And it was offered a job as
a race mechanic. I was twenty years old, okay, And
so I went back to Blacksburg. I picked up my
clothes and my computer and I drove back to Coming,
Georgia and I went to work as a mechanic on
a form of the four to two liter car. I
did that for a year and realized then that I'm
(12:50):
not a very good race mechanic. I'm okay, but I'm
not great. I had to be taught a lot of things,
which the guys around me did. But on the forward,
as you know from your past, there's a mechanic, so
when something goes wrong on the car, it was your fault,
like there wasn't all the front end guy screwed this up,
(13:11):
or you know, like your bikes got no you are
that right? That was great experience. We were driving Duley's
and big enclosed trailers all over the country, running Hooters
Pro Cup, running USAC Pro races, things like that, and
then late in the season we always had too many
things going on. The team owner of the Bethos brothers
that they would always have too many irons in the fire,
(13:34):
and so we would have a race promised at a
USACK race and a race promised at a Hooter's Pro
Cup race at the same time. Ended up that they
would let me go do Hooters Pro Cup races. With
some of our pay drivers that were very let's say
the lower rate pay guys, not the USAC pro level guys,
because that was like a track sweeper series for the
(13:55):
chat car guys. Right, you go out Friday morning, you
go out Saturday morning. Yeah, clean the track off for
everybody else. And so they would let me go to
some of the Hooters Cup races by myself, meaning I
would drive the truck with you know, a car loaded
in there, unloaded car when we got.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
There at twenty one years old.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah, yeah, start working on it, and then you know,
driver come up. We'd start running. You know, these are
little short track oval races, and Darby like, you know,
stop doing this, like okay, so we'll change the spring. Hey,
let's change the right hat. Let's do this. And the
race engineer that we had, John Hayes, who's still race
engineering and IMSA, he knew that I was an engineering student.
He knew I knew how to look at the data
system a little bit, and so he kind of coached
(14:36):
me along. He'd yell at me all the time too,
which you know, but that was fair.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I know somebody else does that.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. But he would give me enough
nuggets that I could go do that, and so it
really piqued my interest. I did go back to college
after that season, and strangely enough, after paying rent at
two different apartments when I was twenty one years old
and growing up a lot and having to buy tools
and toolboxes and pay bills and all that type of stuff. Man,
(15:05):
what a difference my grades when I finished college compared
to the screw off time at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
So you're a big proponent of somebody going to college
to have a year out and learn how to do
all of that before actually going to college, Then.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
I never discourage someone from taking time off like that
if they're going to do something of value. You know,
value is you kind of self impose that value, I guess.
But even doing something like traveling is valuable. Yeah, you know,
just like learn something. You know, you've got to grow
up a little bit and just going straight through school
(15:41):
and getting perfect grades. There's a lot of things you
don't learn on that journey.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, figure out who you are.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So during that time when you're working on the flood
cars and stuff, did you have a series that you
really liked? Did you have a Oh, I really like Nascar?
I really like MS IndyCars where it's at that you
watched religiously and wanted to be a poe.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Certainly champ Car so cart in the day, you know,
IndyCar didn't. So I got into this really the year
of the split. So nineteen ninety five, well, we ran
a race at IRP called the Night before the five hundred,
you know where we ran in Indianapolis at what they
call Lucas Oil Park, Lucas Oil. Yeah, yeah, So we
(16:34):
ran on the short track over there with Formula forwards
on Saturday night before the Indy five hundred and got
rained out and sitting in Indianapolis couldn't even watch the
Indy five hundred and nineteen ninety five because of the
local blackout. And that was the year like see, they'll
not wanted I guess that year. Then we had to race,
you know, I RP that night because of the rain.
(16:55):
But to me at that point, champ Card that was
where it was at. It was you raised all over
the world growing up little ridden at kidd in Tennessee.
I wanted to see the world. I wanted to go
do that type of stuff. I really, you know, I
would say coming through college I felt like, man, I'm
going to go to Formula one. That's what I'm going
(17:17):
to go do. And then, of course, you guys formed
that European Union about the same time, which basically pulled
up the drawbridge for going to that direction for people like me,
Like I wasn't I had terrible grade in college, right,
I wasn't a master's student. I wasn't PhD student. I
didn't have a specialty. So you could not prove to
(17:38):
the EU that you were exceptional or whatever, exceptional talent
right to come in like that and take a job
from somebody within the EU. And I didn't have any
real contacts on the Formula one side either. I didn't
have any real contexts other than one or two folks
I knew on chap Car side either. But as I
got into the Formula Ford stuff, we would race with
(18:01):
champ Car quite a bit, and you know, just hearing
those things go, and like you walk through the pits
and you see thirty people wearing the same shirt and
these massive machines, and you're like, yeah, this is what
I want, what I need to go do.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
I still have a massive amount of nostalgia about the
old champ Car before it went to the Panels. So
I was lucky enough to do like the last year
of the Lola, And those things were big and brilliant,
physical and brutal and they kicked you in them. But
when you got the turbo lag and it was just
I think they were the coolest cars ever that I drove,
(18:34):
and I'm so lucky that I got to experience it.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
So I was with Journeys in ninety eight ninety nine,
so the very first years of Toyota being in champ Car. Yes,
we built our own car at Journey's, you know, the Eagle.
I was fortunate enough to be the vehicle dynamics and
simulation guy on the last Eagles ever made, you know,
race engineer, be an assistant race engineer on the last
Eagles ever raced. You know that was Penske were building
(19:00):
cars Swift Reinard Journey, you know, four engines, you know, yeah,
it was it was cool.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
They had like a thousand horse power and they were
just the kickback in the wheel.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Gosh.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
I was in the gym like three times a day
every day just to be able to drive the things. Brutal.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yeah, we would, Yeah, we would play tricks with like
the steering geometry on those things, just to try and
calm it down at like Long Beach in Toronto and
places like that, because those manhole covers and some of
the bumps and the breaking zone so it would rip,
you know, wrists out of socket.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It seemed like, oh, I remember, so is that when
you left college then when you finally got your degree?
Is that what you went and did work for Gurney
or was there something before that?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Unfortunately, it took a few months before that, because when
you come out and you graduate in May, it turns
out and now the race teams are doing a lot
of recruiting in May. They're busy, yeah timing. Nobody in
the higher education understands that they don't graduate students in December.
But I ended up going to I worked for Volvo
Heavy Trucks in Greensboro, North Carolina, designing suspension and steering
(20:07):
systems for tractor trailers.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
That doesn't sound that fun.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
I needed that kind of kick in the face a
little bit as well, because I had this dream and
now I was out of college and there was no
dream motivation. Then well I didn't really know what to
do next. One of my professors kind of connected me
with them and made sure that job happened for me,
which was awesome. I got more help along the way
(20:33):
than I should have. But literally six seven months into
that job, my dad calls me at my apartment says, hey,
I got a message on my answering machine for you
from California and it was a technical director at All
American Racers calling from my resume and said they wanted
to talk to me. And man, I was on a
(20:54):
plane in California about two weeks later, and I was like, Yeah,
I'm in whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I didn't even have to pay me the stage. I
just want to go racing. So with the racing side,
is it like the competition? Is it the technical side?
Like what makes you want to get out bet in
the morning? Like what is it that motivates you?
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Certainly the racing thing is one thousand percent ego for
everybody involved, right, And it's just this desire to be competitive,
to outsmart or outthink the other folks that do the
same thing. It's high pressure. I'd say it's glamorous, but
it's not particularly that glamorous the actual job, right, it
(21:35):
seems like it's glamorous.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Song now, there's lots of travel.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
You see the inside of an airport and a hotel
room and a raceaurant.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yeah, I tell people said, the holiday inn in that
Copa Cabana Beach looks just like the holiday I can
assure you that. But you know it was going and
doing something something out of the ordinary for a technical person, right,
Not that I was the only engineer working on race cars,
but you know, you graduate from school and a lot
(22:03):
of folks go to big automotive or big industrial companies
and then you're like, oh, yeah, I work at a
place of one hundred people, and you know we designed
and build race cars and fly them all over the
world in race right.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
And it's gratification because you get to see the results
of your work, like on a weekly basis.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Yeah, I mean there's certainly you know, you get a
great card every time you put the car on the track,
and by the end of the weekend, that's like the
final exam, and you certainly know how you did when
it's done.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yep, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Okay, So fast forward from working with all American races,
I was not fortunate enough to know Dan. I know
a lot of people that worked with them, but I
didn't know him, but obviously he's a legend. How did
you transition from that to the stock car world, because
you went to stock cars before you came back and
worked to IndyCar with me, Right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
One of the things I was doing, the reason they
called me, was to come do simulation work. Of all things,
A kid that barely graduated with a bachelor's degree in
mechanic of engineering was doing simulation work at a time
when it was fairly cutting edge, brand new. Yeah, I
didn't even know how cutting edge it was. It's just
that I had done a project my senior year in
(23:15):
college where I had roughly written some very simplistic simulation
code for that little formula project. I included the paper
I wrote about that with my resume. Then I sent
out all over the world back when race car engineering,
you know, you go back in there and there was
all the addresses for race shops and sanctioning bodies things
like that. Anyway, they called me and they said, look,
(23:36):
we're getting into simulation. We need somebody to do this,
and it's not exactly a well known thing, but here
your resume has literally a paper written about the steps
to do it, and like how it works, so come
out there. And that's one of the things that I
did work in there for Journeys. So because that was
such a limited kind of project or expertise or whatnot,
(23:58):
there was a software company and Arbor, Michigan that wrote
a lot of the code that we used. And at
the time there were total of about seven users of
the motorsport product they wrote on the globe and we
all knew each other, right, you know, you at least
knew each other's first names, because like, you know, the
guy's developing the code to be like, oh, yeah, you
(24:19):
know Tom Jerman who was with Penske. Tom's running this problem,
and you know, so the guy Williams, he's running this problem,
and Brandon's running this problem and what So anyway, Journey's
was the Toyota deal was not going well with a
R and there was a lot of things way above
my pay grade going on there. But unfortunately, my desk
(24:39):
was in the front of the transporter, and so you know,
Dan would be sitting in there and he'd be talking
and then you know, folks from Toyota would come in
and I remember vividly we were an event and guy
from tr D comes in and they him and Dan
are obviously not on the same page with each other,
having a discussion. I returned to Dan, I say, would
(25:01):
you like me to get out? He said, nope, He's like,
you're trying to make the cars go faster right now?
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Keep going? I mean that's true, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
So I knew kind of early on that and I
was going to be it for us. And so I
told three or four of the other seven people that
did the same thing I did at the time, and
a friend of mine with the software company Mechanical Dynamics
was the company at the time, Nelson Cosgrove, said, Hey,
(25:31):
Penske Racing in North Carolina could use some help. They
used the same piece of software. They could use some help,
and he said, would you like to talk to them?
I said sure. That started happening pretty quick. They were
in the mood to make a move pretty quick. And
so I got the call, came out here in ninety
nine and talked to them, and it took about another
(25:52):
month or two months after that, and I accepted the
job and came to North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Okay, so then that's the Penske link, obviously, And then
what on earth made you decide to want to do
IndyCar and with me because we were both like brand new.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I wasn't brand new. I was just fourteen years out
of practice.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Same you know.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
I had a lot of fun. I would say moderate
level success stock car wise. Definitely successful as an engineer
on stock card teams with a lot of good drivers
and a lot of good teams. I jumped up into
crew chiefing a few times that went not well to
well to kind of well. I can look back on
it now and say, pretty media hooker myself at that.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
I don't know. You're well respected though.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
It's like you're doing a thing and you're well respected
at what you're doing, and you have a name within
the sport, and then you're like, yeah, I maybe want
to go and try this over here. Yeah, I mean
that's cool. That's what I'm doing right now, I guess.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
But yeah, you're right right to me. When my buddy
Craig called me about the Dragon deal, Craig Hampson, Greg Hamson,
they called me out of blue. I'd been at Red
stock Car and we'd shut down and I literally had
nothing going on. I built a car for Robbie Benton
to go attempt the Daytona five hundred and twenty twelve
and we missed the show with a fuel pump problem
(27:13):
in the one fifty. That was back when you know,
fifty to fifty five cars were choked to qualified for
Daytona amazing and you know, we were three of us
built this car, and I had a couple extra folks
that went with me down to the race. Robbie at
the time was running kind of Exfinity level shop nationwide
at the time, but you know, running in the Xfinity Series.
(27:36):
It was a great operation, but it was smaller and
he really wanted to do a Cup race, and so
we did this. We built a car and we missed
it on time by less than a tenth of a second.
And then we had a fuel pump issue in the
one fifty and missed the race, the only race I've
ever not qualified for. And so then literally was doing
nothing and helping sell some of the assets. Got a
(28:00):
red Bull racing for the Austrian still, and Craig called
me and said, do you want to do would you
like to come racing an Indy car? Yes? Yes I would?
Why not?
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:11):
And it was a very turbulent, traumatic, bizarre year for us.
Because we started with the Lotus engine and we made
a quick switch to Chevrolet, like we were we going to
do Indie. We were at Indy, and I remember being
so stressed that are we going to do it?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Are we not going to do it?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
And your demeanor is very calm and logical and level,
which balances me a little bit, And so you were like,
it will be what it will be. And I remember
feeling less stressed because you were like, well, we'll plan
for it and if it happens, great, and if it doesn't,
it doesn't. And then wasn't it. It was like no testing.
(28:50):
We just went out in the race with the Chevy.
I can't remember the time, but they rescued us. So anyway,
we weren't very good. We were pretty terrible because we
hadn't had any time with the car.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Tool.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Yeah, it was the first leval race of the season.
If I remember quickly, you hadn't done a lot of ols.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
No, I think.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Right, And I had been to Indy, I'd been in
Victory Land at Indy. I'd never gone two hundred and
twenty five miles per hour around Indy. Turned out stock
car goes quite a bit slower than an Indy Car.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
But Sebastian Bordet, who was my teammate, also sucked. Like
it wasn't just us, it was the team. We didn't
have a setup. We had aney testing right.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Well, we didn't even have specific speedway cars. So one
of the things you learn when you have nothing is
that everybody else has a lot more. And so you
had teams like Andretti at the time, obviously the Penske guys,
all the big outfits would take fully separate vehicles and
prep them for months, body fitting everything and like going
(29:51):
through the car and really making a nice speedway car
out of it, which makes one thousand percent you know,
sense to me, which makes it even more painful. Even
to this day of watching people yard sell it during
qualifying and things like that, you're like, oh man, you
just crashed the fast one. Yeah, the next one coming out,
it's not going to be the fast one, but you know,
(30:12):
I mean, it's uprights and gearboxes, it's all sorts of stuff.
We lightly stripped down the cars in that shop in
the northern part of Indy for two weeks and we
sanded it on them and tried to get them cleaned
up as much as we could. But that was the
same car we raised Brazil with. Oh wow, you know,
and it was the same car. You're going to go
on to Detroit with the same car the next week.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, yeah, that wasn't my favorite year, and would be honest,
but that wasn't because of you. I was very grateful,
but I had you in my corner. So how different
did you find it from working on stock cars for
a while. I must have been like almost a decade.
You're in the stock car world.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Then longer than that, I was from into ninety nine
through twenty eleven straight stock.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Cars, and then you get thrown into IndyCar world and
you have I mean, I mean to me, the cars
are very different because the error is very different. You
don't have side force, you have a lot more errow
obviously on an Indy car you have ground effects and erro.
You don't have chassis springs, we don't have track bars.
Like the geometry is totally different. Did you get into
(31:20):
it and everything fitted in your mind straight away? Like
you just kind of instinctively new or where you like
a deer in the headlights to start with when you
were figuring it all out.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
This is gonna sound probably more harsh. I don't mean
for it to sound harsh. Open Miel cars are straightforward.
Either're symmetric, b they are pretty well behaved in terms
of suspension, geometry, the overall vehicle dynamics. To it sounds
really crap, really rude. It's not difficult, right, I mean,
(31:54):
it is a pretty well fought out vehicle and has
been pretty well refined, you know, but IndyCar runs around
an oval is you know, not that it's not changed,
but it's just been evolving since you know, really the
mid eight in terms of what it is now. So
it's pretty predictable.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, it's logical, right. It's like zeros and ones.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
You know, you can go into the tunnel. You can
scan front wing angles and rear wing angles, and you
know all the little widgets and craft that you hang
on those things, and you can kind of build up
what the aero distribution looks like, and you know about
what the weight distribution should be. And you know that
the fuel tanks in the middle. So when I filled
it up full of fuel, that doesn't really change much.
(32:38):
It just gets heavier and you know it's going to
bottom a little bit more. But it's not nose weight
or tail weight or things like that. The stock car
is difficult, and especially what we went through, you know,
like when I started this stuff, we were still running
what we now historically call the Gen four car, which
was the old twisted you know, bodybuilds and things like that,
(32:58):
and the Carved Tomorrow, which is terribly unfortunate name came around,
you know, in two thousand and six. Began racing in
two thousand and seven. So we live through or I
lived through personally engineering becoming a big thing, simulation becoming
a big thing, the big power down force starting to
become a bigger deal. We were experimenting with different style
(33:19):
setups compared to where we were, and say late ninety
nine two thousand and so we evolved. All the teams
in stock cars kind of evolved into this new manner
of operating and got way more technical, but you still
had a solid axle housing in the track bar, and
you know, flexible rear suspension and like compliance is a
(33:40):
tuning tool in the old style stock cars. Like I mean,
we literally would build different style chassis for different amounts
of bend and flex and the geometry not just the bodies,
it was geometry. It was all sorts of things and
coil binding springs, you know, running around with the spring
slam completely shut. We were doing all sorts of weird,
mad sign of stuff. So you come back over to
(34:02):
an hindy car like this is not that.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
It's weird because perception is technologically that is more advanced
than Nascar, But in reality it seeps around.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
You know, I'll say this, it's all about what's behind
the curtain. And with stock cars, we don't want the
stuff in front of the curtain on the stage to
be the technology. It's the drivers. It is race cars
and drivers driving against each other. And yeah, I mean
(34:35):
because the people sitting in the stands don't really care
about that technology. There are some, don't get me wrong,
but that's not the big crowd that watches a stock
car race. They don't really care what wheelbearings are on it.
They don't care about you know, the gear ratios. They
don't care about a lot of those things. They want
(34:56):
to see their driver fight off the other drivers. Nobody
door to door, donuts on the doors, you know. Unfortunately,
they love crashes. Do you see what our product is?
And the technology behind the curtain is massive driving simulators,
vehicle dynamics, wheelforce transducer testing like there is nothing on
(35:18):
the planet nothing for another one does a lot of
cool things, all the driving simulator technology, and the planet
is within thirty miles of here.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I saw the new simulated that the building at GM
and it's bum because.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Yeah, well that's just one OEM out of three, and
they all have them and they are all well developed
and staffed by brilliant people.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Do you know what blows my mind is that these
were put together in this space of eighteen months or something,
and it looks like years and years and years of
hard work and like figuring everything out. But these guys
are so smart they made it happen in what seems
to me to be such a short amount of time.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Well that's not the first one they've built, right, Yeah,
that's true.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
That's probably still like I'm in all of it. I
don't know how any Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah, but we have other race series, you know, especially
like on our insa side like MS sells a lot
of technology as the product, which is really cool. You know.
There's a lot of interesting things going on between the GDP,
the GT cars things like that, and there's a lot
of really interesting things on the insa side, and we
love working with them, and a lot of those guys
(36:29):
are good friends of mine and I like to attend
their events when I can. But for us, it's just
a big, loud, routy V eight and a big muscle
car and you know, in your face, let's go race.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
I think one of the coolest projects ever is bringing
NASCAR to Europe.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
I am a huge NASCAR fan. I love it. I
am having so much fun driving it.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
I think that when you did Garage fifty six and
all the French people at Lamus loved it too. It
was so cool to see you chose some really great drivers,
some really cool drivers with personalities, which is, by the way,
another thing I love about NASCAR. Drivers have personalities. You
love them, you hate them. It's like marm They are
not the robotic, emoteless Formula one style drivers, right. They
(37:26):
evoke emotion and so you can get behind them, So
you can get behind the ohem that you like, and
you can get behind the driver. And I think that's
part of the reason why NASCAR is so successful. It's
because fans can relate to them and there is this
like you don't like who you don't like and you
want so and so to win.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And you know, I think that.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
When you chose the Laman drivers, you also chose one
with personality, and they weren't the emoteless European You know,
you can substitute A for B and they all look
the same, and they all are really good drivers. And
so to me that was really important to me. Seeing
that thing make noise around the sub was one of
the coolest experiences.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
You were heavily involved with that.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Did you get as many kicks from it as I
would imagine you would?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
More more than you could ever imagine. Jim France never well,
he did not tell me the true nature of the
project to start with. Not too long into next gen
design and development. He would ask questions like, what do
you think this thing would do around the IMSA road
course at Daytona? You know, what do you think it
would do here? What do you think? And so we
(38:33):
came back from COVID and we raced the rod course
at Daytona, but we raced it with an extra chicaine
come off of oval turn four because we did not
want to be doing one hundred and ninety miles an
hour into turn one with stock cars.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
So that what pit Lane entries.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Yeah, yeah, so we did a big chicane. It was
actually past pit lane. There was a chicaine kind of
there like before start finishing. It was a really tight
chicane on purpose. We raced the race in August of
twenty twenty down there. It was one of our show up,
no practice, just race during the COVID lockdown. We had
(39:10):
built a second prototype three next gen prototype vehicle, so
this is during the test phase, but we built it
with Action Express. Now, we did it that way because
we were trying to work through how would a team
that has never been a stock card team become a
stock card team, and so it was like, Okay, the
cars meant to be bolted together, and it's this, and
it's that, and so we worked through that process and
(39:32):
they gave us a lot of great feedback that really
helped Gary and Ian and Chris and those guys just
did an awesome job helping our process on that. But
we will built one with Action Express and we took
it down there and we tested day after the Daytona race,
completely unannounced, so there were still people in the infield
like packing up campers and at nine am, you know,
this black next gen car takes to the track and
(39:55):
is like running road course labs and so Austin Cindric
was one of the drive for US, who was driving
Thecinity at the time and the Piepo Dorani because he
really wanted to do a stock car race. And he
got out after the first few runs and said, oh,
that's the hottest, loudest thing I've ever been at. And
Austin got out said that's quieter and cooler than Mykecinity car.
(40:17):
So people, I think kind of reevaluated his future ambitions.
After that. We ran around DMPs of course a few times,
you know, skipping the Chicaine and whatnot, just as I see,
and we knew we were quite a bit slower than GT.
Daytona at that point in time. Then the project really
got hot and heavy in twenty one. By the end
of twenty one, we were actually starting to design parts.
(40:39):
By early twenty two, and we'd done a bunch of
simulator work in Dallara up in Indianapolis, and then by
twenty two we had done all of the wind tunnel work,
all the really big vehicle layout. Dallaara was working on
pieces and parts NonStop for us. We were, you know,
well down the path. We knew by that point time
it was Lamar.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Was it in the ext gen car?
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
The premise was, I want to take a stock car
to Lama. My dad took a stock car to it,
took two stock cars to Laman in seventy six. It
didn't go well. I want to take stock car to
Lamar and do well. Yes, it was an almost complete redesign,
but it was a complete redesign to lose weight and
to kind of tune the vehicle up a lot of downforce,
(41:23):
added things like that. But you literally the suspension parts
were off the shelf next ten parts. Some of the
parts that got redesigned basically were just lightened up. And
he was Adam, He's like, it's got to have a spoiler,
you know. So there's no rear wing, no GT wing
on the thing. And he said, I want a stock
car engine in it. So we met him halfway on
(41:44):
that one. I had the top half of a Catillac
DPI engine with the injection system on the valve train layout,
and then the bottom half was complete cast iron R
seven Chevrolet block. So yeah, we knew it was going
to be loud even before we started testing the first
dinal pool at ECR up and welcome. It's like, okay,
this is properly loud. This is going to be amazing.
(42:06):
But yeah, it was a great project. It was a
lot of work by a lot of people. You can
never under sell the amount of work the Goodyear guys
and the HINDERD guys GM put into it. But then
just the thing coming together with getting to know somebody
like Rocky still a great friend, like I love to
see him doing well in the Mustang. Jensen showed up
(42:28):
to a test at Seabring the week before Christmas in
twenty two and he's just standing around and I looked
at him. I said, man, we are in Seabring, Florida.
There's no chance you were just standing around in Sebring
with nothing else to do. And he's like, oh, the
wife and kids are at Disney World, Like when do
you get to hop in?
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:45):
I think I don't get to at this test. He's like,
but I wanted to come check it out. I said, well,
if you get to do this, I told him, I said,
this will be the most redneck American thing you've ever done.
And Jimmy coming on board. Jimmy really embraced it, and
it was awesome to see him get a chance to
be kind of celebrated like that on the world racing
(43:07):
stage for being a seven time champion of NASCAR, right,
And so these guys get in there and they've just
embraced the entire Lamar experience, and the team showed up
and did a great job, and it was just it
was awesome.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, it was so well received by all the sports
culf founds in France. Like, I didn't know how they
were going to take it, and were they going to
be like poo pooing it because you know, it's American
and it's.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Loud, and like what are they doing over here?
Speaker 1 (43:35):
But they loved it. They loved it so much, and
it was renowned and they wanted it to come back.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
The interesting thing was it was such a throwback to
what people really think of in Lamar Right. I'm not
particularly a Steve McQueen fan, like that's not a hero
of mine or anything like that, but the movie Lamar right, right,
I mean just the shots from that, the cars, the
things in there. You look at that and you say, okay,
(44:02):
I want to pay respect to this race. You know,
we as a group this project was not to go
over there and make a mockery of it. It was
to come back and say, you know, if you let
a pack of Americans come run this race, this is
how we would do it. And the vehicle was so
(44:23):
ridiculous in terms of its capabilities. You know, we were
we and we were being respectful and we were working
with with the ACO a lot. They were very helpful
and awesome to us and very very welcoming, which I
was surprised by that. And they said, hey, look, what
do you think the top speed is. We're like, well,
what do you want it to be, you know, because
(44:44):
we can make it whatever. And what do you think
the lap time is? And they told us, you know,
like we want you to run right in the GTE
lab time. And so we did that and that was
a lot of work and everybody put in a lot
of effort, a lot of engineering to get there. And
we got there, and they figured out that our version
of running the gt E lap time was a little
bit quicker than the gt cars down the streets. We
were a little off in some of the corners porscha
(45:06):
curves where they were going to be the most nervous
about us and we were actually fairly quick through porscha
curves because we had good downforce in the car. But
they came to us after the first half of that
Sunday test day and they said, okay, could you go
slower or could you go faster? We said, we'll pick faster,
and so we pulled some drag out of it, lowered
the spoiler a little bit, and then they said, just
(45:28):
don't pass the hypercars down the streetways because they said, what,
what realistically would this thing do? I said, man, you
know we talked about it like this thing, I'll do
two o five no problem. We'll probably do to ten
almost no problem, and still run, you know. So they're like,
we don't want that because those guys breaking distance was
(45:49):
so much shorter than ours. We're not here to mess
the race up. We're here to be respectful and put
on a show for you. So you know, we kind
of dropped right in faster than GT a little. But
off LMP two. We knew from the test day, like
the fans right off the bat and the test day,
every time it fired up, people gathered by the fencers
(46:09):
like what is that? And every time it came by,
people were taking pictures and yelling and screaming. I mean
this was on the test day, you know, when they
did the pit crew competition in pit lane. I have
a panoramic photo from my camera because I was tucked
around to the side and there were two hundred people
piled around our pit box for the hinder crew to
do that pit stop?
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Did you do like a weak pit stop? What did
you do a traditional NASCAR pitstop with the jack?
Speaker 2 (46:36):
And you did the cool one? Good?
Speaker 3 (46:38):
So we used a fueling rig that was mandatory and
we didn't fuel wild changing tires. We respected and had
heared all those rules. But yeah, they used a hydraulic jack.
We did left side first, in the right side second.
But yeah, they they literally well I think they were
first and GT and fourth overall in the pitstop competition
running around with a hydraul chat.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
That's bonkers.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
That's absolutely in saying to me, I didn't know that
is I mean, crudeous to those guys. I'm their next
level athlete.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
The funny thing was, you know, we had these guys
a GT team in the garage right behind us because
they put us at the far end of pit lane
like a pit out, and so we had this team
right behind us, and you know, they would wonder over
and they were great guys. They're standing around, they're getting
ready for the picker competition, and of course, you know,
everybody shoots up in their little fire suits or whatnot,
and they saw all the Hendrick mechanics and their fire
(47:28):
suits and head socks and thinking that's gonna be the
pick crew. And then these five dudes walk out that
look like they've just come off you know, NFL football team,
because they have, and they's like yes. I'm like, oh,
that's the actual pit group.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Which I love so much because it adds another element
to it. And you see all these guys like getting
ready and getting hyped up, and they're so good at
what they do. I've been to Hendrix and I've driven
the car and done pitst up practice, and it's one
of the coolest things I think about the sport is
you see these guys and they're all athletes and they
have a competition between themselves with each other, but they're
(48:03):
like one team and it's like this whole other sport
within the sport, which I love. What about driver change,
though it's really hard to get in and out of
a stock car let alone quickly.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
Yeah, they worked on that a lot, and you know,
it did not have doors. That was another kind of
we're keeping it a stock car, not a GT car.
Those guys, between Mike and Jensen and Jimmy worked on
that a lot, and they were actually very quick at it.
I had the little butterfly style steering rael in it.
It didn't have a big stock car. You're not fifteen
(48:33):
inches stream.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
To line it up and pull over and then like
make sure you got it on straight.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Do you like the next gen car?
Speaker 1 (48:40):
There's so much talk and I haven't been involved in
NASCAR long enough to know what's right and what's wrong
really when it comes to the opinions on that, but
like thirty thousand foot overview from your point of view,
from a NASCAR point of view, Like, how do you
feel the next gen car is compared to what was it?
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Gen five?
Speaker 3 (49:00):
In those Yeah, I certainly, I'm proud of it. I mean,
you know, our group period R and D, we put
a lot of work into it. It was it was
a big undertaking and we had a lot of pressure,
not purposefully applied, but certainly applied, you know, to get
it as right as you could get it, and I
mean it was a complete overhaul of everything. You know,
(49:22):
there's very few parts that are on that car that
were on the car previously. So our very first ever
test with the P one prototype was a Richmond and
we ran four hundred laps in two days and we
had a problem with a control arm monopole and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
How long was the design process leading up to that?
Speaker 3 (49:42):
So I started a NASCAR twenty nineteen into January twenty nineteen,
and we basically began the project late February, and we
had selected DeLaura to do the design work with us
by probably middle March, so March of twenty nineteen we
really get started on it. By October twenty nineteen, we
(50:03):
were on track with the first car.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Holy moly, that's so impressive. So how long traditionally did
the generations last?
Speaker 3 (50:13):
The lines are obviously blurred. It's easier to look backwards
than to realize while going through it. You know, the
Gen six thing was really the car of tomorrow. It
kind of came around. We ran it partial schedule in
seven and then full time and eight. It went through
some bodywork changes, some facial changes, arrow changes. It started
with a rear wing and then it ended up back
(50:34):
with a spoiler and things like that, but overall it
was it was fairly fairly calm platform for a better
part of fifteen years there, right, And Gen five, I
guess in the actual COT and Gen six was an
updated COOT. Gen four was previous to that, but that
had been kind of the same from the early nineties
(50:57):
through mid two thousands. But what you miss out on
is the chassis were radically evolving, the engines are radically evolving.
Everything was radically evolving. So it was the same car,
but it really it never was.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Why for the love of God did you not put
pit limitary in it?
Speaker 2 (51:16):
I tell you what.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
So, for those of you listening, in anything I've ever
driven before, IndyCar, sports cars, electric cars, everything has a
pit lane speed limited. So you break down to the
pitlane speed, you push the button, you do, you pit stop,
you pull off, you're at the limit. It's so difficult
to get the most out of pit lane in a
stock car because you don't have that. You're looking at
(51:37):
a line on a rev counter or this one's digital, granted,
but like, wouldn't you make everybody's life easier? And people
not having pit lane speed violations. If you put a
pit limitary.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
In it, would you spend your hard earned money to
sit in the grand stands and watch a race and
watch a bunch of lazy drivers push a button to
go down that line.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
That's bazy drive. I mean, how about that.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
Do you want to be the best? Do you want
to be the best?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yes? They do?
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Okay, So there's no shift cut in the ignition. It's
a fully manual gearbox.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
It is a fully manual pit lane speed control. It
is manual traction control, all driver, all driver.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
That's why I just find it difficult, so I want one.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
There are people that say, yep, that's probably the right
way to go. I'm not one of them.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
It's an art form that I am learning. But it's
easy to not speed.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
It's just not easy to get all the way up
to the speed limit.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
And not speed, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
And so there's a lot of people then you get
pushed down pit lane or there's a lot of people
that are very good at it. And it was one
of the first things I tried on the sim actually,
and there is definitely an art form to that. But
at the same time as looking down at the rip
count you're looking at the car in front, you're looking
for your board, you're looking for everything like it is tricky.
I will say it's one of the tricky things. But
I have taken up enough of your very valuable time.
(53:00):
I appreciate the chat.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
Thank you very much, Brandon, Thank you An, have a
great date.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
Thanks for listening to Throttle Therapy. We'll be back next
week with more updates and more overtakes.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
We want to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (53:14):
Leave us a review in Apple Podcasts and tell us
what you want to talk about. It might just be
the topic for our next show. Throttle Therapy is hosted
by Katherine Legg. Our executive producer is Jesse Katz, and
our supervising producer is Grace Fuse. Listen to Throttle Therapy
on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free
(53:34):
iHeart app and search throttle Therapy with Katherine Legg and
start listening.
Throttle Therapy with Catherine Legg is an iHeart women's sports
production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You
can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to this
(00:21):
week's episode of Throttle Therapy with Me Catherine Legg.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
And.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Although I was not racing this weekend, I have been busy.
I've been busy trying to get things for next year.
So did I know it sounds super early, but what
happens is you need to have everything in place sponsorship wise,
team wise, series wise, because now is the time that
everybody needs to get organized ready for next year.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
As you roll into the off season.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
You've only got a couple of months before the off
season starts, and everybody needs to know what they're doing.
So this is when you're shaking hands and kissing babies.
So I've been busy trying to put myself in the
best possible position that I can for next year. I'm
hoping to do Indie again, so I've been working hard
on that, and also obviously all the exciting NASCAR stuff
(01:07):
that I got to do this year is kind of
taking on a life of its own, and I'm hoping
to do the same thing again, if not expanded, bigger, better,
all those things. Super happy to have that opportunity. I
was talking to my friend and team owner about how
sometimes things fall apart to fall together. It was like
(01:28):
that this year, like I'm very grateful looking back that
I got all these opportunities in NASCAR and now I
have something that I'm desperate to pursue moving forward. So
busy training, busy doing business, which I think a lot
of people don't understand that. They think race cut drivers
have the best lives, and we do.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
We genuinely do.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
But I think we work really hard. I don't know
that people understand what goes into the back end of
it to make it plausible, Like we do debrief from
Watkins Glen and the pre race, so we spent a
bit of time looking at data debriefing from that, but
then it's really emails getting organized. But it makes me
(02:09):
happy to be able to do it, and I think
I'm learning in.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That aspect as well.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
With that being said, and with the NASCAR link that
I have formed this year, I would love to introduce
you to our guest on this big episode. He is
a good friend of mine. He is somebody I've known
for a long time now. We work together in twenty
twelve in the IndyCar paddock when he came over from
the NASCAR world to dip his toe in the water
(02:37):
of the IndyCar engineering worlds and is now one of
the big guys at NASCAR, designed the next gen car
and a bunch of other really cool stuff along with
his colleagues. Obviously, I'm not putting it all on his shoulders,
but I still think he's a bad ass and I
am proud to call him a friend and a colleague.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
It is Brandon Thomas this week.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I am excited to have somebody on the show that
has worked with me in the past.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
A long time ago.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
We worked together in the IndyCar space, but actually his
main bread and butter is in NASCAR, and I'm excited
to talk to him about how IndyCar is different to
NASCAR and a whole host of other things. So welcome
on the show, Brandon.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
How are you.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I'm good, I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
So I would like you to tell the story of
how we first met and we're working together, way back
when it was like twenty twelve.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Was it. Yeah, it's been a day or two ago. Yes,
we met at a Sebring test right where I showed
up completely unannounced, unexpectedly. It would be your race engineer.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I was asked by the team owner at the time, Hey,
have you heard of this guy?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And I was like, nope, who is this guy?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
But I'm very glad that you were in my race
engineer before we get into working with me, and how
awesome that must have been. How did you get into
being a race engineer in the first place? Did you
want to be an engineer when you were like twelve
year old Brandon Thomas?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I wasn't sure at that age. Probably I knew I
wanted to work on cars. I knew I specifically wanted
to work on racing cars. That was my big motivation whatnot.
And my dad did a great job of kind of
I didn't come from a racing family, so he did
a great job of asking around. He had a few
(04:37):
friends in the stock car business at the time. Morgan
McClure Racing was still in Abingdon, Virginia, and that was
not far from where I grew up thirty minutes or
so and one of the guys that flew their plane,
literally one of their pilots was a buddy of my
dad's who's also a pilot, and that guy told him
in you know, late eighties, early nineties, oh, he's got
(04:58):
to be an engineer. Engineering wasn't even popular in NASCAR
at that point in time. But I liked working on things,
so a mechanical engineer seemed like a pretty solid path
to go on. That.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
So you handy as well as being good on like
the computer and stuff, you can do all of the
stuff yourself mechanically wise.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
To you, I would have a lot of people in
this business say no. I would counter that with yes,
but yeah, I mean to me, when I interview an engineer,
let's say, for a role, I will tell them things
like I won't trust a mechanical engineer that can't weld.
You know, you can't be the one to make a drawing,
(05:37):
make a model, do whatever. Come up with how something's
going to get made, and go out to the shop
and tell folks how to do it if you yourself
can't also kind of do it. I'm a real big
proponent of, you know, engineers shouldn't hurt themselves with tools.
They should be able to go to the toolbox, grab tools,
work on the race vehicle, work on whatever. Just as
much as computer programming or analytics or simulation. You should
(06:01):
be able to walk up to the vehicle and say,
we're going to make a camera change. I know what
wrenches it's going to take and what the process is
going to be to make this cambrage what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I think the same with drive is I think we
should have a certain base knowledge of how the car works,
just so when you see the cambshims or whatever it
may be like, you also know what you're doing.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
That to me, as the race engineer type person is
a double edged sword.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Oh, because you don't want to be told what we
think the car needs.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
No, No, it's if you're so busy thinking about the
setup instead of driving the vehicle, then you're distracted. Right.
So I need to be able to look you right
in the eyes and say what do you need? Yeah,
and I don't need you to necessarily tell me. Oh, man,
(06:53):
you know half pound air pressure on the left for
your and you know one sixteenth of camber shim out
of the right. Like I need to be able to
trust this thing at this point in time, like I
need to be able to go down to the corner
and I need this or I need that.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
It's doing this. I needed to do this to be faster.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
So along that same vein of being able to work
on the car, did you ever get any experience in
a race car? No?
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I mean there was this stuff like Formula SAE when
I was in college. I drove quite a bit doing that,
but let's be clear, that doesn't count. Yes, I hold
a Virginia State Autocross Champion trophy from thirty forty years ago.
That doesn't count. That wasn't on the track with other
drivers and wheeler wheel type stuff. Had shiffer cart. When
(07:44):
I was in California my first four round in the
champ Car World Series, Alex Barron passed me on the
outside of the tightest hairpin at the Adams Cart Track
on the day off, and I said, this is why
I look at the squiggly lines and you hold the
steering wheel. I'm not good at driving. I enjoyed having
a nice vehicle. I enjoy driving faster than the posted
speed limits at times, but I would never call myself
(08:07):
a race driver for that.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
At all fair enough, we all have our strengths. I
don't ever call myself a race engineer, and I don't
I'm very, actually, very conscious of not saying what I
think it is. Sometimes I'll be like, I think it's mechanical,
or I think it's ero or whatever. But I will
never try and engineer the car because I know that
that's not what I'm good at, although I think in
another life I would have liked to have learned it
(08:29):
because it is fascinating, like how it all works together
and what you can do. And honestly, the engineer, in
my opinion, at this level, is more important than the
driver because if the car is good, our job is easy.
And if the car isn't good, then you have to
work together really fast, especially in NASCAR, to get the
car good because we don't have any testing. So I
(08:51):
honestly think that the car is more important. And that's
that's on you guys. So going back to where did
you go to college? And then what happened after college?
Speaker 3 (09:02):
I was a student and a graduate eventually at Virginia Tech.
And what happened in college was I learned about formul sae,
which was one of the reasons that we ended up
choosing that university. That's a student competition thing. You design
and build a single seat autocross style car.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
It seems like most people in racing have done some
form of Formula ESSA to get experience.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I'm old enough, I have enough gray hairs that it
was still a relatively young program amongst a lot of universities.
So I mean start in the eighties. I wasn't in
college until the early nineties. It was only let's say,
probably five, six, seven years old at my university when
I got there. They're still competing, you know, to this day.
One of my interns, she's a member team leader for
(09:49):
that team, and they dig up pictures, you know, literally
printout pictures young Brandon with mullets and things like that.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
I need to see these pictures. We need to put
them on the internet. Can we put that on your
hard cord?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
No, where I work, I get choose the picture that goes.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
On my heart exactly. I think that'd be true.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
But when I went to school, I discovered that. I
also discovered that I'm fairly social and that I do
enjoy beer. So when I got through with the first
half of my junior year, I found myself being invited
to leave university by the administration because I wasn't very
good at Point College. I was very good at the
(10:32):
extracurricular activities, but not the actual homeworking exams and things
like that.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
That sucks me because you are one of the most disciplined,
diligent people that I know now.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
But that's now, right, Yeah, you go to out your system.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Well, the first digital age now is a five, not
a one or a two. Right, But this is where
our stories don't cross geography, will actually cross very near
and dear to you. I went to twenty fire hours
of Daytona with a buddy of mine, because that's what
you do when you've been kicked out of school and
you're living in your college apartment with no classes. You
(11:09):
hop in a car and you drive overnight to go
to twenty fires at day time. He sneak in, no ticket.
He had a friend that later became one of my friends,
Anthony Lazarro No way. Yes, Anthony was getting ready to
drive his very first ever professional GT race.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I know Anthony very well. We do a little coaching together.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
And so we snuck down there, snuck in, literally snuck
into the Daytona International Speedway, hung out with the team
that he was driving for. He was in the second car,
you know, GT car. They needed a little bit of help,
so lent some hands and things like that. Just kind
of ran my mouth the entire weekend as much as
I could. Anthony says, why don't you He's like, what
(11:51):
do you do? I was like, well, right now, I do, undershit,
I'm being kicked out of.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
College and between employment.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
After the race, he said, why don't you guys come
back to Atlanta on your way back to Virginia. And
so we did. We crashed on Anthony's couch the next morning.
So the really Sunday night he finishes at twenty four
hours at Daytona. We hop in cars and drive back
to Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Done that and it's brutal.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
It is brutal. Yeah. And then Monday morning, I wake
up off his couch, take a shower, and I'm at
a little place called Primus Racing and coming Georgia.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
That's down the road for me.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Yeah, I know. And it was offered a job as
a race mechanic. I was twenty years old, okay, And
so I went back to Blacksburg. I picked up my
clothes and my computer and I drove back to Coming,
Georgia and I went to work as a mechanic on
a form of the four to two liter car. I
did that for a year and realized then that I'm
(12:50):
not a very good race mechanic. I'm okay, but I'm
not great. I had to be taught a lot of things,
which the guys around me did. But on the forward,
as you know from your past, there's a mechanic, so
when something goes wrong on the car, it was your fault,
like there wasn't all the front end guy screwed this up,
(13:11):
or you know, like your bikes got no you are
that right? That was great experience. We were driving Duley's
and big enclosed trailers all over the country, running Hooters
Pro Cup, running USAC Pro races, things like that, and
then late in the season we always had too many
things going on. The team owner of the Bethos brothers
that they would always have too many irons in the fire,
(13:34):
and so we would have a race promised at a
USACK race and a race promised at a Hooter's Pro
Cup race at the same time. Ended up that they
would let me go do Hooters Pro Cup races. With
some of our pay drivers that were very let's say
the lower rate pay guys, not the USAC pro level guys,
because that was like a track sweeper series for the
(13:55):
chat car guys. Right, you go out Friday morning, you
go out Saturday morning. Yeah, clean the track off for
everybody else. And so they would let me go to
some of the Hooters Cup races by myself, meaning I
would drive the truck with you know, a car loaded
in there, unloaded car when we got.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
There at twenty one years old.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah, yeah, start working on it, and then you know,
driver come up. We'd start running. You know, these are
little short track oval races, and Darby like, you know,
stop doing this, like okay, so we'll change the spring. Hey,
let's change the right hat. Let's do this. And the
race engineer that we had, John Hayes, who's still race
engineering and IMSA, he knew that I was an engineering student.
He knew I knew how to look at the data
system a little bit, and so he kind of coached
(14:36):
me along. He'd yell at me all the time too,
which you know, but that was fair.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I know somebody else does that.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. But he would give me enough
nuggets that I could go do that, and so it
really piqued my interest. I did go back to college
after that season, and strangely enough, after paying rent at
two different apartments when I was twenty one years old
and growing up a lot and having to buy tools
and toolboxes and pay bills and all that type of stuff. Man,
(15:05):
what a difference my grades when I finished college compared
to the screw off time at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
So you're a big proponent of somebody going to college
to have a year out and learn how to do
all of that before actually going to college, Then.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
I never discourage someone from taking time off like that
if they're going to do something of value. You know,
value is you kind of self impose that value, I guess.
But even doing something like traveling is valuable. Yeah, you know,
just like learn something. You know, you've got to grow
up a little bit and just going straight through school
(15:41):
and getting perfect grades. There's a lot of things you
don't learn on that journey.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, figure out who you are.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So during that time when you're working on the flood
cars and stuff, did you have a series that you
really liked? Did you have a Oh, I really like Nascar?
I really like MS IndyCars where it's at that you
watched religiously and wanted to be a poe.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Certainly champ Car so cart in the day, you know,
IndyCar didn't. So I got into this really the year
of the split. So nineteen ninety five, well, we ran
a race at IRP called the Night before the five hundred,
you know where we ran in Indianapolis at what they
call Lucas Oil Park, Lucas Oil. Yeah, yeah, So we
(16:34):
ran on the short track over there with Formula forwards
on Saturday night before the Indy five hundred and got
rained out and sitting in Indianapolis couldn't even watch the
Indy five hundred and nineteen ninety five because of the
local blackout. And that was the year like see, they'll
not wanted I guess that year. Then we had to race,
you know, I RP that night because of the rain.
(16:55):
But to me at that point, champ Card that was
where it was at. It was you raised all over
the world growing up little ridden at kidd in Tennessee.
I wanted to see the world. I wanted to go
do that type of stuff. I really, you know, I
would say coming through college I felt like, man, I'm
going to go to Formula one. That's what I'm going
(17:17):
to go do. And then, of course, you guys formed
that European Union about the same time, which basically pulled
up the drawbridge for going to that direction for people like me,
Like I wasn't I had terrible grade in college, right,
I wasn't a master's student. I wasn't PhD student. I
didn't have a specialty. So you could not prove to
(17:38):
the EU that you were exceptional or whatever, exceptional talent
right to come in like that and take a job
from somebody within the EU. And I didn't have any
real contacts on the Formula one side either. I didn't
have any real contexts other than one or two folks
I knew on chap Car side either. But as I
got into the Formula Ford stuff, we would race with
(18:01):
champ Car quite a bit, and you know, just hearing
those things go, and like you walk through the pits
and you see thirty people wearing the same shirt and
these massive machines, and you're like, yeah, this is what
I want, what I need to go do.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
I still have a massive amount of nostalgia about the
old champ Car before it went to the Panels. So
I was lucky enough to do like the last year
of the Lola, And those things were big and brilliant,
physical and brutal and they kicked you in them. But
when you got the turbo lag and it was just
I think they were the coolest cars ever that I drove,
(18:34):
and I'm so lucky that I got to experience it.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
So I was with Journeys in ninety eight ninety nine,
so the very first years of Toyota being in champ Car. Yes,
we built our own car at Journey's, you know, the Eagle.
I was fortunate enough to be the vehicle dynamics and
simulation guy on the last Eagles ever made, you know,
race engineer, be an assistant race engineer on the last
Eagles ever raced. You know that was Penske were building
(19:00):
cars Swift Reinard Journey, you know, four engines, you know, yeah,
it was it was cool.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
They had like a thousand horse power and they were
just the kickback in the wheel.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Gosh.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
I was in the gym like three times a day
every day just to be able to drive the things. Brutal.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yeah, we would, Yeah, we would play tricks with like
the steering geometry on those things, just to try and
calm it down at like Long Beach in Toronto and
places like that, because those manhole covers and some of
the bumps and the breaking zone so it would rip,
you know, wrists out of socket.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It seemed like, oh, I remember, so is that when
you left college then when you finally got your degree?
Is that what you went and did work for Gurney
or was there something before that?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Unfortunately, it took a few months before that, because when
you come out and you graduate in May, it turns
out and now the race teams are doing a lot
of recruiting in May. They're busy, yeah timing. Nobody in
the higher education understands that they don't graduate students in December.
But I ended up going to I worked for Volvo
Heavy Trucks in Greensboro, North Carolina, designing suspension and steering
(20:07):
systems for tractor trailers.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
That doesn't sound that fun.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
I needed that kind of kick in the face a
little bit as well, because I had this dream and
now I was out of college and there was no
dream motivation. Then well I didn't really know what to
do next. One of my professors kind of connected me
with them and made sure that job happened for me,
which was awesome. I got more help along the way
(20:33):
than I should have. But literally six seven months into
that job, my dad calls me at my apartment says, hey,
I got a message on my answering machine for you
from California and it was a technical director at All
American Racers calling from my resume and said they wanted
to talk to me. And man, I was on a
(20:54):
plane in California about two weeks later, and I was like, Yeah,
I'm in whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I didn't even have to pay me the stage. I
just want to go racing. So with the racing side,
is it like the competition? Is it the technical side?
Like what makes you want to get out bet in
the morning? Like what is it that motivates you?
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Certainly the racing thing is one thousand percent ego for
everybody involved, right, And it's just this desire to be competitive,
to outsmart or outthink the other folks that do the
same thing. It's high pressure. I'd say it's glamorous, but
it's not particularly that glamorous the actual job, right, it
(21:35):
seems like it's glamorous.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Song now, there's lots of travel.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
You see the inside of an airport and a hotel
room and a raceaurant.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yeah, I tell people said, the holiday inn in that
Copa Cabana Beach looks just like the holiday I can
assure you that. But you know it was going and
doing something something out of the ordinary for a technical person, right,
Not that I was the only engineer working on race cars,
but you know, you graduate from school and a lot
(22:03):
of folks go to big automotive or big industrial companies
and then you're like, oh, yeah, I work at a
place of one hundred people, and you know we designed
and build race cars and fly them all over the
world in race right.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
And it's gratification because you get to see the results
of your work, like on a weekly basis.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Yeah, I mean there's certainly you know, you get a
great card every time you put the car on the track,
and by the end of the weekend, that's like the
final exam, and you certainly know how you did when
it's done.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yep, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Okay, So fast forward from working with all American races,
I was not fortunate enough to know Dan. I know
a lot of people that worked with them, but I
didn't know him, but obviously he's a legend. How did
you transition from that to the stock car world, because
you went to stock cars before you came back and
worked to IndyCar with me, Right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
One of the things I was doing, the reason they
called me, was to come do simulation work. Of all things,
A kid that barely graduated with a bachelor's degree in
mechanic of engineering was doing simulation work at a time
when it was fairly cutting edge, brand new. Yeah, I
didn't even know how cutting edge it was. It's just
that I had done a project my senior year in
(23:15):
college where I had roughly written some very simplistic simulation
code for that little formula project. I included the paper
I wrote about that with my resume. Then I sent
out all over the world back when race car engineering,
you know, you go back in there and there was
all the addresses for race shops and sanctioning bodies things
like that. Anyway, they called me and they said, look,
(23:36):
we're getting into simulation. We need somebody to do this,
and it's not exactly a well known thing, but here
your resume has literally a paper written about the steps
to do it, and like how it works, so come
out there. And that's one of the things that I
did work in there for Journeys. So because that was
such a limited kind of project or expertise or whatnot,
(23:58):
there was a software company and Arbor, Michigan that wrote
a lot of the code that we used. And at
the time there were total of about seven users of
the motorsport product they wrote on the globe and we
all knew each other, right, you know, you at least
knew each other's first names, because like, you know, the
guy's developing the code to be like, oh, yeah, you
(24:19):
know Tom Jerman who was with Penske. Tom's running this problem,
and you know, so the guy Williams, he's running this problem,
and Brandon's running this problem and what So anyway, Journey's
was the Toyota deal was not going well with a
R and there was a lot of things way above
my pay grade going on there. But unfortunately, my desk
(24:39):
was in the front of the transporter, and so you know,
Dan would be sitting in there and he'd be talking
and then you know, folks from Toyota would come in
and I remember vividly we were an event and guy
from tr D comes in and they him and Dan
are obviously not on the same page with each other,
having a discussion. I returned to Dan, I say, would
(25:01):
you like me to get out? He said, nope, He's like,
you're trying to make the cars go faster right now?
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Keep going? I mean that's true, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
So I knew kind of early on that and I
was going to be it for us. And so I
told three or four of the other seven people that
did the same thing I did at the time, and
a friend of mine with the software company Mechanical Dynamics
was the company at the time, Nelson Cosgrove, said, Hey,
(25:31):
Penske Racing in North Carolina could use some help. They
used the same piece of software. They could use some help,
and he said, would you like to talk to them?
I said sure. That started happening pretty quick. They were
in the mood to make a move pretty quick. And
so I got the call, came out here in ninety
nine and talked to them, and it took about another
(25:52):
month or two months after that, and I accepted the
job and came to North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Okay, so then that's the Penske link, obviously, And then
what on earth made you decide to want to do
IndyCar and with me because we were both like brand new.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I wasn't brand new. I was just fourteen years out
of practice.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Same you know.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
I had a lot of fun. I would say moderate
level success stock car wise. Definitely successful as an engineer
on stock card teams with a lot of good drivers
and a lot of good teams. I jumped up into
crew chiefing a few times that went not well to
well to kind of well. I can look back on
it now and say, pretty media hooker myself at that.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
I don't know. You're well respected though.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
It's like you're doing a thing and you're well respected
at what you're doing, and you have a name within
the sport, and then you're like, yeah, I maybe want
to go and try this over here. Yeah, I mean
that's cool. That's what I'm doing right now, I guess.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
But yeah, you're right right to me. When my buddy
Craig called me about the Dragon deal, Craig Hampson, Greg Hamson,
they called me out of blue. I'd been at Red
stock Car and we'd shut down and I literally had
nothing going on. I built a car for Robbie Benton
to go attempt the Daytona five hundred and twenty twelve
and we missed the show with a fuel pump problem
(27:13):
in the one fifty. That was back when you know,
fifty to fifty five cars were choked to qualified for
Daytona amazing and you know, we were three of us
built this car, and I had a couple extra folks
that went with me down to the race. Robbie at
the time was running kind of Exfinity level shop nationwide
at the time, but you know, running in the Xfinity Series.
(27:36):
It was a great operation, but it was smaller and
he really wanted to do a Cup race, and so
we did this. We built a car and we missed
it on time by less than a tenth of a second.
And then we had a fuel pump issue in the
one fifty and missed the race, the only race I've
ever not qualified for. And so then literally was doing
nothing and helping sell some of the assets. Got a
(28:00):
red Bull racing for the Austrian still, and Craig called
me and said, do you want to do would you
like to come racing an Indy car? Yes? Yes I would?
Why not?
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:11):
And it was a very turbulent, traumatic, bizarre year for us.
Because we started with the Lotus engine and we made
a quick switch to Chevrolet, like we were we going to
do Indie. We were at Indy, and I remember being
so stressed that are we going to do it?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Are we not going to do it?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
And your demeanor is very calm and logical and level,
which balances me a little bit, And so you were like,
it will be what it will be. And I remember
feeling less stressed because you were like, well, we'll plan
for it and if it happens, great, and if it doesn't,
it doesn't. And then wasn't it. It was like no testing.
(28:50):
We just went out in the race with the Chevy.
I can't remember the time, but they rescued us. So anyway,
we weren't very good. We were pretty terrible because we
hadn't had any time with the car.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Tool.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Yeah, it was the first leval race of the season.
If I remember quickly, you hadn't done a lot of ols.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
No, I think.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Right, And I had been to Indy, I'd been in
Victory Land at Indy. I'd never gone two hundred and
twenty five miles per hour around Indy. Turned out stock
car goes quite a bit slower than an Indy Car.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
But Sebastian Bordet, who was my teammate, also sucked. Like
it wasn't just us, it was the team. We didn't
have a setup. We had aney testing right.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Well, we didn't even have specific speedway cars. So one
of the things you learn when you have nothing is
that everybody else has a lot more. And so you
had teams like Andretti at the time, obviously the Penske guys,
all the big outfits would take fully separate vehicles and
prep them for months, body fitting everything and like going
(29:51):
through the car and really making a nice speedway car
out of it, which makes one thousand percent you know,
sense to me, which makes it even more painful. Even
to this day of watching people yard sell it during
qualifying and things like that, you're like, oh man, you
just crashed the fast one. Yeah, the next one coming out,
it's not going to be the fast one, but you know,
(30:12):
I mean, it's uprights and gearboxes, it's all sorts of stuff.
We lightly stripped down the cars in that shop in
the northern part of Indy for two weeks and we
sanded it on them and tried to get them cleaned
up as much as we could. But that was the
same car we raised Brazil with. Oh wow, you know,
and it was the same car. You're going to go
on to Detroit with the same car the next week.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, yeah, that wasn't my favorite year, and would be honest,
but that wasn't because of you. I was very grateful,
but I had you in my corner. So how different
did you find it from working on stock cars for
a while. I must have been like almost a decade.
You're in the stock car world.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Then longer than that, I was from into ninety nine
through twenty eleven straight stock.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Cars, and then you get thrown into IndyCar world and
you have I mean, I mean to me, the cars
are very different because the error is very different. You
don't have side force, you have a lot more errow
obviously on an Indy car you have ground effects and erro.
You don't have chassis springs, we don't have track bars.
Like the geometry is totally different. Did you get into
(31:20):
it and everything fitted in your mind straight away? Like
you just kind of instinctively new or where you like
a deer in the headlights to start with when you
were figuring it all out.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
This is gonna sound probably more harsh. I don't mean
for it to sound harsh. Open Miel cars are straightforward.
Either're symmetric, b they are pretty well behaved in terms
of suspension, geometry, the overall vehicle dynamics. To it sounds
really crap, really rude. It's not difficult, right, I mean,
(31:54):
it is a pretty well fought out vehicle and has
been pretty well refined, you know, but IndyCar runs around
an oval is you know, not that it's not changed,
but it's just been evolving since you know, really the
mid eight in terms of what it is now. So
it's pretty predictable.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, it's logical, right. It's like zeros and ones.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
You know, you can go into the tunnel. You can
scan front wing angles and rear wing angles, and you
know all the little widgets and craft that you hang
on those things, and you can kind of build up
what the aero distribution looks like, and you know about
what the weight distribution should be. And you know that
the fuel tanks in the middle. So when I filled
it up full of fuel, that doesn't really change much.
(32:38):
It just gets heavier and you know it's going to
bottom a little bit more. But it's not nose weight
or tail weight or things like that. The stock car
is difficult, and especially what we went through, you know,
like when I started this stuff, we were still running
what we now historically call the Gen four car, which
was the old twisted you know, bodybuilds and things like that,
(32:58):
and the Carved Tomorrow, which is terribly unfortunate name came around,
you know, in two thousand and six. Began racing in
two thousand and seven. So we live through or I
lived through personally engineering becoming a big thing, simulation becoming
a big thing, the big power down force starting to
become a bigger deal. We were experimenting with different style
(33:19):
setups compared to where we were, and say late ninety
nine two thousand and so we evolved. All the teams
in stock cars kind of evolved into this new manner
of operating and got way more technical, but you still
had a solid axle housing in the track bar, and
you know, flexible rear suspension and like compliance is a
(33:40):
tuning tool in the old style stock cars. Like I mean,
we literally would build different style chassis for different amounts
of bend and flex and the geometry not just the bodies,
it was geometry. It was all sorts of things and
coil binding springs, you know, running around with the spring
slam completely shut. We were doing all sorts of weird,
mad sign of stuff. So you come back over to
(34:02):
an hindy car like this is not that.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
It's weird because perception is technologically that is more advanced
than Nascar, But in reality it seeps around.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
You know, I'll say this, it's all about what's behind
the curtain. And with stock cars, we don't want the
stuff in front of the curtain on the stage to
be the technology. It's the drivers. It is race cars
and drivers driving against each other. And yeah, I mean
(34:35):
because the people sitting in the stands don't really care
about that technology. There are some, don't get me wrong,
but that's not the big crowd that watches a stock
car race. They don't really care what wheelbearings are on it.
They don't care about you know, the gear ratios. They
don't care about a lot of those things. They want
(34:56):
to see their driver fight off the other drivers. Nobody
door to door, donuts on the doors, you know. Unfortunately,
they love crashes. Do you see what our product is?
And the technology behind the curtain is massive driving simulators,
vehicle dynamics, wheelforce transducer testing like there is nothing on
(35:18):
the planet nothing for another one does a lot of
cool things, all the driving simulator technology, and the planet
is within thirty miles of here.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I saw the new simulated that the building at GM
and it's bum because.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Yeah, well that's just one OEM out of three, and
they all have them and they are all well developed
and staffed by brilliant people.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Do you know what blows my mind is that these
were put together in this space of eighteen months or something,
and it looks like years and years and years of
hard work and like figuring everything out. But these guys
are so smart they made it happen in what seems
to me to be such a short amount of time.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Well that's not the first one they've built, right, Yeah,
that's true.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
That's probably still like I'm in all of it. I
don't know how any Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah, but we have other race series, you know, especially
like on our insa side like MS sells a lot
of technology as the product, which is really cool. You know.
There's a lot of interesting things going on between the GDP,
the GT cars things like that, and there's a lot
of really interesting things on the insa side, and we
love working with them, and a lot of those guys
(36:29):
are good friends of mine and I like to attend
their events when I can. But for us, it's just
a big, loud, routy V eight and a big muscle
car and you know, in your face, let's go race.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
I think one of the coolest projects ever is bringing
NASCAR to Europe.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
I am a huge NASCAR fan. I love it. I
am having so much fun driving it.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
I think that when you did Garage fifty six and
all the French people at Lamus loved it too. It
was so cool to see you chose some really great drivers,
some really cool drivers with personalities, which is, by the way,
another thing I love about NASCAR. Drivers have personalities. You
love them, you hate them. It's like marm They are
not the robotic, emoteless Formula one style drivers, right. They
(37:26):
evoke emotion and so you can get behind them, So
you can get behind the ohem that you like, and
you can get behind the driver. And I think that's
part of the reason why NASCAR is so successful. It's
because fans can relate to them and there is this
like you don't like who you don't like and you
want so and so to win.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And you know, I think that.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
When you chose the Laman drivers, you also chose one
with personality, and they weren't the emoteless European You know,
you can substitute A for B and they all look
the same, and they all are really good drivers. And
so to me that was really important to me. Seeing
that thing make noise around the sub was one of
the coolest experiences.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
You were heavily involved with that.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Did you get as many kicks from it as I
would imagine you would?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
More more than you could ever imagine. Jim France never well,
he did not tell me the true nature of the
project to start with. Not too long into next gen
design and development. He would ask questions like, what do
you think this thing would do around the IMSA road
course at Daytona? You know, what do you think it
would do here? What do you think? And so we
(38:33):
came back from COVID and we raced the rod course
at Daytona, but we raced it with an extra chicaine
come off of oval turn four because we did not
want to be doing one hundred and ninety miles an
hour into turn one with stock cars.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
So that what pit Lane entries.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Yeah, yeah, so we did a big chicane. It was
actually past pit lane. There was a chicaine kind of
there like before start finishing. It was a really tight
chicane on purpose. We raced the race in August of
twenty twenty down there. It was one of our show up,
no practice, just race during the COVID lockdown. We had
(39:10):
built a second prototype three next gen prototype vehicle, so
this is during the test phase, but we built it
with Action Express. Now, we did it that way because
we were trying to work through how would a team
that has never been a stock card team become a
stock card team, and so it was like, Okay, the
cars meant to be bolted together, and it's this, and
it's that, and so we worked through that process and
(39:32):
they gave us a lot of great feedback that really
helped Gary and Ian and Chris and those guys just
did an awesome job helping our process on that. But
we will built one with Action Express and we took
it down there and we tested day after the Daytona race,
completely unannounced, so there were still people in the infield
like packing up campers and at nine am, you know,
this black next gen car takes to the track and
(39:55):
is like running road course labs and so Austin Cindric
was one of the drive for US, who was driving
Thecinity at the time and the Piepo Dorani because he
really wanted to do a stock car race. And he
got out after the first few runs and said, oh,
that's the hottest, loudest thing I've ever been at. And
Austin got out said that's quieter and cooler than Mykecinity car.
(40:17):
So people, I think kind of reevaluated his future ambitions.
After that. We ran around DMPs of course a few times,
you know, skipping the Chicaine and whatnot, just as I see,
and we knew we were quite a bit slower than GT.
Daytona at that point in time. Then the project really
got hot and heavy in twenty one. By the end
of twenty one, we were actually starting to design parts.
(40:39):
By early twenty two, and we'd done a bunch of
simulator work in Dallara up in Indianapolis, and then by
twenty two we had done all of the wind tunnel work,
all the really big vehicle layout. Dallaara was working on
pieces and parts NonStop for us. We were, you know,
well down the path. We knew by that point time
it was Lamar.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Was it in the ext gen car?
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
The premise was, I want to take a stock car
to Lama. My dad took a stock car to it,
took two stock cars to Laman in seventy six. It
didn't go well. I want to take stock car to
Lamar and do well. Yes, it was an almost complete redesign,
but it was a complete redesign to lose weight and
to kind of tune the vehicle up a lot of downforce,
(41:23):
added things like that. But you literally the suspension parts
were off the shelf next ten parts. Some of the
parts that got redesigned basically were just lightened up. And
he was Adam, He's like, it's got to have a spoiler,
you know. So there's no rear wing, no GT wing
on the thing. And he said, I want a stock
car engine in it. So we met him halfway on
(41:44):
that one. I had the top half of a Catillac
DPI engine with the injection system on the valve train layout,
and then the bottom half was complete cast iron R
seven Chevrolet block. So yeah, we knew it was going
to be loud even before we started testing the first
dinal pool at ECR up and welcome. It's like, okay,
this is properly loud. This is going to be amazing.
(42:06):
But yeah, it was a great project. It was a
lot of work by a lot of people. You can
never under sell the amount of work the Goodyear guys
and the HINDERD guys GM put into it. But then
just the thing coming together with getting to know somebody
like Rocky still a great friend, like I love to
see him doing well in the Mustang. Jensen showed up
(42:28):
to a test at Seabring the week before Christmas in
twenty two and he's just standing around and I looked
at him. I said, man, we are in Seabring, Florida.
There's no chance you were just standing around in Sebring
with nothing else to do. And he's like, oh, the
wife and kids are at Disney World, Like when do
you get to hop in?
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:45):
I think I don't get to at this test. He's like,
but I wanted to come check it out. I said, well,
if you get to do this, I told him, I said,
this will be the most redneck American thing you've ever done.
And Jimmy coming on board. Jimmy really embraced it, and
it was awesome to see him get a chance to
be kind of celebrated like that on the world racing
(43:07):
stage for being a seven time champion of NASCAR, right,
And so these guys get in there and they've just
embraced the entire Lamar experience, and the team showed up
and did a great job, and it was just it
was awesome.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, it was so well received by all the sports
culf founds in France. Like, I didn't know how they
were going to take it, and were they going to
be like poo pooing it because you know, it's American
and it's.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Loud, and like what are they doing over here?
Speaker 1 (43:35):
But they loved it. They loved it so much, and
it was renowned and they wanted it to come back.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
The interesting thing was it was such a throwback to
what people really think of in Lamar Right. I'm not
particularly a Steve McQueen fan, like that's not a hero
of mine or anything like that, but the movie Lamar right, right,
I mean just the shots from that, the cars, the
things in there. You look at that and you say, okay,
(44:02):
I want to pay respect to this race. You know,
we as a group this project was not to go
over there and make a mockery of it. It was
to come back and say, you know, if you let
a pack of Americans come run this race, this is
how we would do it. And the vehicle was so
(44:23):
ridiculous in terms of its capabilities. You know, we were
we and we were being respectful and we were working
with with the ACO a lot. They were very helpful
and awesome to us and very very welcoming, which I
was surprised by that. And they said, hey, look, what
do you think the top speed is. We're like, well,
what do you want it to be, you know, because
(44:44):
we can make it whatever. And what do you think
the lap time is? And they told us, you know,
like we want you to run right in the GTE
lab time. And so we did that and that was
a lot of work and everybody put in a lot
of effort, a lot of engineering to get there. And
we got there, and they figured out that our version
of running the gt E lap time was a little
bit quicker than the gt cars down the streets. We
were a little off in some of the corners porscha
(45:06):
curves where they were going to be the most nervous
about us and we were actually fairly quick through porscha
curves because we had good downforce in the car. But
they came to us after the first half of that
Sunday test day and they said, okay, could you go
slower or could you go faster? We said, we'll pick faster,
and so we pulled some drag out of it, lowered
the spoiler a little bit, and then they said, just
(45:28):
don't pass the hypercars down the streetways because they said, what,
what realistically would this thing do? I said, man, you
know we talked about it like this thing, I'll do
two o five no problem. We'll probably do to ten
almost no problem, and still run, you know. So they're like,
we don't want that because those guys breaking distance was
(45:49):
so much shorter than ours. We're not here to mess
the race up. We're here to be respectful and put
on a show for you. So you know, we kind
of dropped right in faster than GT a little. But
off LMP two. We knew from the test day, like
the fans right off the bat and the test day,
every time it fired up, people gathered by the fencers
(46:09):
like what is that? And every time it came by,
people were taking pictures and yelling and screaming. I mean
this was on the test day, you know, when they
did the pit crew competition in pit lane. I have
a panoramic photo from my camera because I was tucked
around to the side and there were two hundred people
piled around our pit box for the hinder crew to
do that pit stop?
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Did you do like a weak pit stop? What did
you do a traditional NASCAR pitstop with the jack?
Speaker 2 (46:36):
And you did the cool one? Good?
Speaker 3 (46:38):
So we used a fueling rig that was mandatory and
we didn't fuel wild changing tires. We respected and had
heared all those rules. But yeah, they used a hydraulic jack.
We did left side first, in the right side second.
But yeah, they they literally well I think they were
first and GT and fourth overall in the pitstop competition
running around with a hydraul chat.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
That's bonkers.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
That's absolutely in saying to me, I didn't know that
is I mean, crudeous to those guys. I'm their next
level athlete.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
The funny thing was, you know, we had these guys
a GT team in the garage right behind us because
they put us at the far end of pit lane
like a pit out, and so we had this team
right behind us, and you know, they would wonder over
and they were great guys. They're standing around, they're getting
ready for the picker competition, and of course, you know,
everybody shoots up in their little fire suits or whatnot,
and they saw all the Hendrick mechanics and their fire
(47:28):
suits and head socks and thinking that's gonna be the
pick crew. And then these five dudes walk out that
look like they've just come off you know, NFL football team,
because they have, and they's like yes. I'm like, oh,
that's the actual pit group.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Which I love so much because it adds another element
to it. And you see all these guys like getting
ready and getting hyped up, and they're so good at
what they do. I've been to Hendrix and I've driven
the car and done pitst up practice, and it's one
of the coolest things I think about the sport is
you see these guys and they're all athletes and they
have a competition between themselves with each other, but they're
(48:03):
like one team and it's like this whole other sport
within the sport, which I love. What about driver change,
though it's really hard to get in and out of
a stock car let alone quickly.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
Yeah, they worked on that a lot, and you know,
it did not have doors. That was another kind of
we're keeping it a stock car, not a GT car.
Those guys, between Mike and Jensen and Jimmy worked on
that a lot, and they were actually very quick at it.
I had the little butterfly style steering rael in it.
It didn't have a big stock car. You're not fifteen
(48:33):
inches stream.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
To line it up and pull over and then like
make sure you got it on straight.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Do you like the next gen car?
Speaker 1 (48:40):
There's so much talk and I haven't been involved in
NASCAR long enough to know what's right and what's wrong
really when it comes to the opinions on that, but
like thirty thousand foot overview from your point of view,
from a NASCAR point of view, Like, how do you
feel the next gen car is compared to what was it?
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Gen five?
Speaker 3 (49:00):
In those Yeah, I certainly, I'm proud of it. I mean,
you know, our group period R and D, we put
a lot of work into it. It was it was
a big undertaking and we had a lot of pressure,
not purposefully applied, but certainly applied, you know, to get
it as right as you could get it, and I
mean it was a complete overhaul of everything. You know,
(49:22):
there's very few parts that are on that car that
were on the car previously. So our very first ever
test with the P one prototype was a Richmond and
we ran four hundred laps in two days and we
had a problem with a control arm monopole and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
How long was the design process leading up to that?
Speaker 3 (49:42):
So I started a NASCAR twenty nineteen into January twenty nineteen,
and we basically began the project late February, and we
had selected DeLaura to do the design work with us
by probably middle March, so March of twenty nineteen we
really get started on it. By October twenty nineteen, we
(50:03):
were on track with the first car.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Holy moly, that's so impressive. So how long traditionally did
the generations last?
Speaker 3 (50:13):
The lines are obviously blurred. It's easier to look backwards
than to realize while going through it. You know, the
Gen six thing was really the car of tomorrow. It
kind of came around. We ran it partial schedule in
seven and then full time and eight. It went through
some bodywork changes, some facial changes, arrow changes. It started
with a rear wing and then it ended up back
(50:34):
with a spoiler and things like that, but overall it
was it was fairly fairly calm platform for a better
part of fifteen years there, right, And Gen five, I
guess in the actual COT and Gen six was an
updated COOT. Gen four was previous to that, but that
had been kind of the same from the early nineties
(50:57):
through mid two thousands. But what you miss out on
is the chassis were radically evolving, the engines are radically evolving.
Everything was radically evolving. So it was the same car,
but it really it never was.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Why for the love of God did you not put
pit limitary in it?
Speaker 2 (51:16):
I tell you what.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
So, for those of you listening, in anything I've ever
driven before, IndyCar, sports cars, electric cars, everything has a
pit lane speed limited. So you break down to the
pitlane speed, you push the button, you do, you pit stop,
you pull off, you're at the limit. It's so difficult
to get the most out of pit lane in a
stock car because you don't have that. You're looking at
(51:37):
a line on a rev counter or this one's digital, granted,
but like, wouldn't you make everybody's life easier? And people
not having pit lane speed violations. If you put a
pit limitary.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
In it, would you spend your hard earned money to
sit in the grand stands and watch a race and
watch a bunch of lazy drivers push a button to
go down that line.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
That's bazy drive. I mean, how about that.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
Do you want to be the best? Do you want
to be the best?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yes? They do?
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Okay, So there's no shift cut in the ignition. It's
a fully manual gearbox.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
It is a fully manual pit lane speed control. It
is manual traction control, all driver, all driver.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
That's why I just find it difficult, so I want one.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
There are people that say, yep, that's probably the right
way to go. I'm not one of them.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
It's an art form that I am learning. But it's
easy to not speed.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
It's just not easy to get all the way up
to the speed limit.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
And not speed, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
And so there's a lot of people then you get
pushed down pit lane or there's a lot of people
that are very good at it. And it was one
of the first things I tried on the sim actually,
and there is definitely an art form to that. But
at the same time as looking down at the rip
count you're looking at the car in front, you're looking
for your board, you're looking for everything like it is tricky.
I will say it's one of the tricky things. But
I have taken up enough of your very valuable time.
(53:00):
I appreciate the chat.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
Thank you very much, Brandon, Thank you An, have a
great date.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
Thanks for listening to Throttle Therapy. We'll be back next
week with more updates and more overtakes.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
We want to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (53:14):
Leave us a review in Apple Podcasts and tell us
what you want to talk about. It might just be
the topic for our next show. Throttle Therapy is hosted
by Katherine Legg. Our executive producer is Jesse Katz, and
our supervising producer is Grace Fuse. Listen to Throttle Therapy
on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free
(53:34):
iHeart app and search throttle Therapy with Katherine Legg and
start listening.
Host
Katherine Legge
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