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Dale Jarrett, driver of the No. 88 UPS Taurus, is in 13th
place in the NASCAR Winston Cup point standings heading into
tomorrow's Pocono 500. Last week, he finished in fifth place
at Dover - his fourth top-10 in the last seven races. In 30
career starts at Pocono, he has two victories and 16
top-10s.
DALE JARRETT-88-UPS Taurus-DOES LAST WEEK MAKE YOU FEEL
BETTER? "Yeah, definitely. We were at least competitive for
the entire race, and that's what you're after. I mean, it's
hard to build on something if you're running 15th to 20th,
but when you make yourself competitive then you can go back
and say, 'Okay, this is what we did,' and we can adjust from
there. We were at a point where a small adjustment may have
gotten us to second - I'm not sure we would've caught the 48
car - but, yeah, that felt a lot better."
HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO GET ANY HELP FROM THE 28 TEAM'S TEST?
"Yeah, I think we've worked together and I think that we
found out that a lot of our problem was the aero side of it.
We've been at the wind tunnel some, but I think that we
weren't looking at the numbers exactly right. I think that
we found something else that we happened to look at there,
and their on-track testing has given us a better idea of
what we had to do. So, we were scheduled to come here and
test, and I was excited about that, but the rain had the
track messed up, so we didn't make that. We did go to
Kentucky on Tuesday, and we learned a lot there in a day.
That's a great race track. I think that we're headed in a
much better direction. But, the teams working together,
yeah. We realized that both teams were struggling. To make
this a quicker process, we've got to work together."
DID YOU HAVE THE SAME PROBLEMS IN TESTING HERE THAT THEY DID
- RAIN ONE DAY AND SEEPING THE NEXT? "We ended up not even
coming because the 32 car was here the day before, and they
called us and told us what was happening, so instead of us
sitting here, we stayed at home. They were going to call us
if things got better, but that's exactly what they explained
to us what was happening with the track. A little bit in
two, more in three, that the track was just seeping, and
they said they sat here with the sun out all day and never
did get to run."
SINCE TODD PARROTT HAS RETURNED AS CREW CHIEF (PRIOR TO THE
TEXAS RACE), YOU HAVE FOUR TOP-10S. WHEN HE RETURNED, DID
THE TEAM PICK UP WHERE IT LEFT OFF LAST YEAR, OR DID IT TAKE
A WHILE? "I don't even know that we picked up there. I mean,
we may be back there, but everybody has improved, so we have
a ways to go yet. It's just continuity. This business is no
different from any other business - it's about people, and
having the people in the right places and everybody working
within themselves and with somebody that's in charge. And
when you get too many people maybe trying to be in charge,
then that creates problems. It's just a continuity deal, and
Todd and I work well together. I mean, we have our
struggles, too, and sometimes it's almost difficult to see
exactly what the problem is, why we're not running better.
We're doing a lot of the same things, why aren't we running
better? But, just like the aero side of it, if you don't
have a good aero package in this business right now, you can
find yourself in trouble. It doesn't matter how good of a
setup you may have or how good your chassis may be or how
good your engine may be, you're not going to get the job
done."
IF YOU HAVEN'T YET TURNED THE CORNER TO GET THIS TEAM BACK
TO WHERE YOU WANT IT TO BE, CAN YOU AT LEAST SEE THE CORNER?
"We're making progress, but we're still - a race or two here
and there is not what's going to make us back to the team
that we were. So, we got a ways to go yet. It's something
that's going to be an ongoing process for us, to get more
than one car capable of doing that. That particular car that
we ran last week was a car that has run well everywhere that
we've had it. Unfortunately, we hadn't taken it to a lot of
places - maybe we should've been using it more often. But I
think that it gave us a better direction. We know we have
good race tracks coming up for us. This is a place that we
normally perform well, and this should be something that
could be good medicine for our team."
WITH ALL THE SUCCESS THAT YOU'VE HAD WITH THIS RACE TEAM,
DID THIS YEAR SNEAK UP ON YOU, OR WAS THERE SOMETHING IN THE
BACK OF YOUR MIND THAT LED YOU TO BELIEVE THAT LED YOU TO
BELIEVE THIS YEAR WOULD BE MORE OF A STRUGGLE? "I didn't
really feel, I can't say that I had a tremendously good
feeling - other than I thought, maybe, we'd bring Jimmy
Elledge on board that things might get done and get turned
in a right direction. But we kind of fell off the last
quarter of last year, and I didn't see anything that we had
done over the winter that was really going to pick that up.
And, so, when this happened, it wasn't by total surprise. I
had seen this kind of coming, and you want to head it in
another direction, but until you're out there competing week
in and week out, it's hard to say we do need to do
something. And, unfortunately, it's taken it's toll on us,
it's put us back in the points, but we can make our gains
and we can rebuild this and get it back to where we need to
be. Other teams have done similar things over the years, and
we at least have that experience to draw off of. We know
what we can do and what we're very capable of doing."
HAS THE AERO SITUATION GOTTEN OUT OF HAND? "I guess we have
because it's become so critical, but I don't know how we go
back now. I don't have any idea what we can do because it's
such a big part of our racing. It's hard to say that, 'Well,
we can do this to the bodies or do that,' we've become so
dependent on that that the car drives so totally different
when you're out front. When I got to the front last week at
Dover, at that particular time I was the quickest car by a
tenth of a second - just by being out front. Hadn't been
there all day so we didn't know that we had that good of a
car. But then once I got back in the pack, I was like a lot
of other guys, I was struggling. It would be nice if we
weren't so dependent on that, that we could have everything
involved. It still takes, even if you've got a good aero
package, you still have to have a good chassis, and you have
to have a good engine to make all of that work, but it seems
that if you have that really good aero package and you can
get yourself placed at the front, you can make a lot of
things happen."
WITH CARS BEHIND YOU, YOU'RE JUST TOO LOOSE, AND WHEN A
CAR'S IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU'RE JUST TOO TIGHT? IS THAT IT?
"Yeah, most of the time. If you've got that air on the nose
of your car and then you get somebody behind you then you
are in trouble. There's only one guy that's going to be out
front all the time or part of the time, so you have to get
your car set to where you're going to be in traffic. And,
knowing that, if you get your chassis tight, then you've got
an aero-push that comes into play there, too, then your
car's extremely tight. So, what you have to do is free the
chassis up so that you can try to get yourself in that
position to get to the front. And when you get a car stuck
up behind you then, it just makes you extremely loose.
There's a very fine line there of what you can do and what
you can't."
HOW DID IT GET TO THIS POINT? "I don't know. We just kept
making changes to the cars, and obviously with these teams
being exposed to more wind-tunnel time we saw things that
would help our cars, and just kept working in that
direction, harder and harder, and before you know it, we've
got the cars so aero dependent that a lot of people quit
worrying about chassis as much and went to work on the aero
side. It's nothing that anybody's done intentionally, it
just kind of evolved. I don't know where we go from here,
honestly. I think it's just going to be a part of our
racing. How big of a part will certainly depend on if NASCAR
decides to make any changes rule-wise in the near future -
I'm not talking about just for this year, but looking into
the next few years."
WHAT HAS TODD PARROTT'S RETURN TO THE TEAM AS CREW CHIEF
BROUGHT TO THE TEAM? "Just continuity to the race team. You
have to have one person in charge of this, and Todd's the
guy that is in charge here, and I think that's what's been
important for us, is everybody looking to the same person."
WHERE THE TEAM IS NOW. "We have a long way to go. I think we
are headed in a better direction right now. We've got a
better handle on what we need to be doing. Before, we didn't
exactly have that. Even when Todd came and was in charge, we
still didn't have that idea. But because of some hard work
and effort on our crew, on Todd's part, on Robert Yates'
part, that we finally find ourselves heading in that
direction now. We're still a ways away from being a
contender every week, which is what we expect to be."
IS THAT FRUSTRATING? "It's always frustrating when you're
accustomed to winning and you're not doing that, or at least
giving yourself a chance to win. We haven't been doing that,
so, yeah, that makes it difficult. When everybody get
frustrated then you start doing things to try to make it
happen quicker, and anytime you start trying that, then
you're probably just tricking yourself into thinking that
you may be headed in a good direction. So we had to sit down
and say, 'Look, this is not going to a fast process. This
could take literally months to really get ourselves back to
the point that we need to, and we're willing to do that.'"
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