Adapting to this track

• Take a good motor to Kansas, with some torque, of course, but you really need top-end horsepower. There are some long green runs, which is hard on the motor guys and which brings gas mileage into play.
• As a crew chief, you have to make sure your team knows that you must take care of your tires. The right front tire really takes a beating, so you have to stay on your driver to be careful, especially after a green-flag pit stop. Under caution, the tire will have time to warm up and slowly work its way into the track, but under green, the tires do not have that slow warm-up. Your driver goes all out as soon as the flag flies. The teams have to be conservative with air pressure, camber and the A-arm.
• The only straight part of Kansas Speedway is its back stretch. It is a 1.5-mile trioval with 15 degrees of banking in the turns. You run around the track down low right around the corners. The back stretch has no banking, and the front stretch is basically flat. Kansas really is treated as a flat track.

Plotting strategy

• The Kansas cars are very similar to the ones you take to Chicagoland, Indianapolis and Pocono. You need a clean car with low drag. The biggest thing is downforce. You want to pull that car as low to the ground as you can get it. Bring the fenders out, get a lot of tape on the nose and get that spoiler up in the air.

Where the action is

• You'll see action in any of the corners, especially between Turns 1 and 2 and between Turns 3 and 4 when drivers get up out of the groove and cause some trouble. Another place for action is on the exits of the corners. You carry so much speed there that if you run out of track, you'll pinch off your competitors.
• Where we don't want to see action is going into the corners. You come off the straights at really high speeds going into the corners, and if you have trouble or lose your right front tire, you will hit the wall hard.