NASCAR gives new meaning to the phrase 'tire pressure'

RICHMOND

Jeff Burton's No. 31 Chevy thundered down pit road as a spotter called to the pit crew over a two-way radio: "Five, four, three, RIGHT HERE!"

Men leaped over the wall, power tools buzzed - zzzzt, zzzzt, zzzzt.

Tracy Ramsey, Burton's tire specialist, reached into the pit and started grabbing hot tires as they came off the car.

"All the way! All the way! All the way!" the spotter called to Burton to get back on the track. "Clear!"

A few feet behind the pit, Ramsey and other crew members stood the tires on brackets and began prodding them. Burton's car, in 13th place at the time, wasn't handling like it should, and whatever Ramsey could learn from the old tires might help the team adjust.

On one tire, the right rear, the tread had melted then congealed, like hot fudge poured on ice cream. Ramsey stuck a thermometer on each tire. The right rear was 240 degrees - too hot for even a race-car tire.

Though seemingly simple, just rubber and cords melded together, the tires on a NASCAR Sprint Cup car often prove crucial, the difference between finishing first or 15th. They are one of the few pieces of the car that can be adjusted during a nine-second pit stop.

So the Goodyear tires used during a NASCAR race are treated like a newborn baby: They are coddled, poked, measured, pricked with thermometers, and their rims wiped with cleaners.

And much to the frustration of almost every team at some point, racing tires are like newborns in other ways: They act however they want to act, and only so much can be done about it.

Burton's car had used six sets of tires by lap 300 of the Rock & Roll 400 last Sunday, and whether it was something else on the car or the Goodyears, it had been a spotty day.

"Got no front grip at all," Burton called over the two-way radio on lap 33.

"10-4," crew chief Scott Miller told him as Burton prepared to pit. "We're going to do some air pressure here."

Then Miller instructed Ramsey and the crew: "Two rounds in the right rear, please. Two rounds in the right rear."

Ramsey took the tires that had just come off the car, grabbed an acetylene torch and a putty knife. Flames rose as he heated the surface of the tires where Goodyear builds in tread depth holes and scraped the knife over them, as smoking chunks of rubber fell away. He carved three side-by-side rows, like a lawn mower's swat h through grass, then measured the depth holes and wrote them on the tires with a paint pen.

Maybe the tires' wear would offer a clue about how to adjust Burton's car so it would handle better.

The tire crew had done everything it could to make sure the tires were right for the race. Ramsey had arrived at 8 a.m., when the garages opened, and began assessing the eight sets his team was allotted for the race.

Ramsey, who grew up in Fredericksburg, is 39 years old, married with a son and a daughter, and has been working for Richard Childress Racing as a tire guy the past six years. He's clean-cut, matter-of-fact. Someday he would like to work his way up to car chief, a step below crew chief.

For now, he's a tire guy, which in the pecking order of a race team puts him "at the bottom," he joked.

Four hours before this day's race, more than 1,000 tires were laid out around the raceway. The teams lease the tires for $1,600 a set from Goodyear, which embeds a radio-frequency ID chip in each one so NASCAR can track them and teams can't switch them out illegally.

Ramsey and his tire assistant, Mike Nishimoto, who they call "Sushi," worked their way through the Burton team's 32 tires.

Ramsey measured each tread hole on each tire and wrote the depth next to it with a green paint pen. Usually, he enters the numbers into a Palm Pilot, then downloads that information into a database for the team's engineer to evaluate.

Today, he had to write the numbers on a sheet of paper.

"This morning, the Palm was in my shirt pocket," Ramsey explained. "I picked up one of the tires and it was full of water, and it went right into my shirt pocket."

The Palm Pilot was trashed. Putting the data into the computer by hand set Ramsey behind by half an hour.

Next, Ramsey took a tape measure and "rolled out" each tire, determining the circumference down to the millimeter. Less air pressure and tire circumference on the left side helps the car turn left all day. In Richmond, the "stagger" was about an inch and a quarter between the left- and right-side tires. Ramsey's team started race day with six sets of tires with a 32-millimeter stagger, and two sets with a 31-millimeter difference for Burton's AT&T Chevy.

A millimeter is four-hundredths of an inch.

"One millimeter makes so much difference," Ramsey said.

Nearby, crews for the Jack Daniel's, Cheerios and Lowe's cars did the same thing. The sound of air compressors came from all around: tssst, tssst, tssst.

Ramsey and Nishimoto squatted, stooped and twisted their frames over the tires. Ramsey sat in the well of one tire, then drooped his back and legs over the sides to try to stretch his creaky back.

"You're done with all that info, right?" Nishimoto asked.

"Yeah, all the lefts," Ramsey said. "We need to start stacking them and moving them over."

By the time the tires were moved behind the team's pit, each one looked like its own spreadsheet. Ramsey had noted the spring rate - the bounciness - that Goodyear had marked on each tire.

He had written the circumference with the green pen on each one and jotted the tread depth next to each of the five impressions, alongside the " 31" mark to designate the car.

And he wasn't done. He'd take that information to the engineer, who would then use the computer to assign each tire to a set.

They'd have to weigh one other factor for this race: Tropical Storm Hanna had forced the race to be moved from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon, from cooler night air and track surface to hot.

For a night race, Ramsey explained, he might put more air pressure in the tires and let them cool down during racing. For the day race, he might put two fewer pounds of air in, then let the heat of the track bring the pressure up.

The Richmond race was the last one before the top 12 teams would compete for the Chase for the Sprint Cup, a sort of playoff round for the championship that NASCAR started four years ago.

Burton stood in sixth heading into the race, with no chance of running so poorly that he would get knocked out of contention. So he didn't have to drive conservatively; he could go for it and try to get his second win of the season.

He started the race in the fifth position, in the third row, but by a mandated pit stop in the 35th lap he had dropped to 13th.

A set of tires is designed to last one tank of gas during a race, or about 100 laps, but all the teams switched tires during that first pit stop.

"Car's quite a bit better," Burton said over the two-way. "Still need a little bit of turn and need some grip."

But Burton could now pass other cars and moved up to eighth place.

Before the race, Ramsey and the crew had worked to remove any surprises the tires might present.

Adam North and three crew members used a power drill to make sure the openings where lugs bolt to the tires were big enough. Then they used a power drill with a brush on the end to clean out the holes.

North wiped down the wheels with glass cleaner, and his partner followed him with degreaser, leapfrogging around by sitting on one tire then the next.

North pulled a wad of aluminum foil out of his pocket, peeled it back and started eating his breakfast with one hand as he sprayed cleaner with the other.

"You eating a baked potato?" a crew member asked him.

"Yup."

Ramsey returned with a print out from the engineer and wrote once more on each tire with a paint marker: "RR9," "LF9," "RF7," "RF10," to designate right rear, or left front, and which set it would go with.

North and his crew then glued lug nuts over the holes, and Ramsey began one of his last pre-race tasks. After carefully measuring the pressure, he purged the tires of all air, and he and Nishimoto filled them with nitrogen.

Nitrogen is drier than plain air, and moisture in the air can change how fast a tire expands when it heats up. At tracks where the outside air is less humid, in California and Arizona, Ramsey leaves air in the tires.

He had debated doing that for Richmond, when it was a night race, but now he decided to switch it out.

"It rained a lot," he said, "and that's a lot of moisture, so I just don't want to take the chance."

In lap 298, Brian Vickers drifted up high on the track and scraped the wall, bringing about another caution flag.

Burton and the other teams again roared down pit road, maybe for the last time of the day. One-quarter of the race remained, and the Burton team finally seemed to have the car handling like it wanted.

"That was definitely better," Burton called over the radio. "Still need a little grip in the rear."

"The stagger change helped a lot," Miller said into the two-way. "We got some more sets of these, guys?"

They did. Ramsey had two sets of tires with a slightly different stagger than the other six.

Zzzzt, zzzt, zzzt - the crew bolted those onto the car.

"All the way! All the way! All the way!" the voice called over the two-way. "Clear!"

Burton had just 100 more laps to work his way higher in the standings. If the car kept running like it was, he had a shot at a top-five finish - or better. When the caution flag turned to green, Burton was in third.

He held that spot for six laps, then was passed, held fourth place for a few laps and was passed again and soon dropped back to sixth.

"Popping up and down and chattering the front tires," Burton radioed in. "Hurts the br aking, too."

"I don't know what to do," Miller called back. "Turns your world upside-down when we put new tires on."

Burton drove like mad over the final laps, with Kevin Harvick right behind him trying to steal sixth place.

"Twenty-nine's moved to the bottom," the spotter called to Burton. "Twenty-nine 's sneaking inside."

Burton held him off, but at every corner Harvick tried again.

"Inside! Inside! Still there. Still there...."

"Clear! Clear!"

Ramsey looked hot now, his face red from the heat of the track, his fireproof suit unzipped and hanging loose, his undershirt soaked in sweat.

He was disappointed to finish sixth, but he'd done what he could.

He long ago learned: You can change a diaper, you can change a tire, and sometimes they still stink.

Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, lon.wagner@pilotonline.com