Marlin starts in the eighth spot for today’s Dodge Dealers 400.
DARLINGTON, S.C. – Like a moody child bugging a parent, racing sometimes frazzles Sterling Marlin. Just when he’s feeling good, he finds out just how little he knows.
Take Friday, when he almost crashed before getting up to speed during the first practice session at Darlington Raceway.
“We qualified good last year, so we started practice on the same setup,” Marlin said Saturday. “I came off Turn 2 and almost spun out. I went through the next corner and almost hit the fence. It’s weird and crazy how quickly stuff changes out here.
“In 2001, we were first and third at Michigan. We went back last June and ran 21st with the same setup. We went back in August and ran sixth with a totally different setup from the others. I don’t know if it’s aero or tires or tracks changing over the winter. I just know that what used to work sometimes doesn’t work.”
Marlin qualified eighth for Sunday afternoon’s Carolina Dodge Dealers 400. It’s his 39th career Cup start at the narrow, treacherous 1.366-mile track, which was built in 1950 for 100-mph cars.
He has two poles, two victories, 10 top-fives and 16 top-10s at Darlington, including a victory after starting 43rd last spring.
He already had one other victory, three other top-10s and led the standings when he got here last spring. Today, he’s ranked 20th with only one top-10 in four starts. Disappointed? Certainly. Discouraged? Hardly.
“There’s a lot of ifs, ands and buts in racing, but we could be top-five in points with three top-five finishes,” Marlin said. “We’ve got a good race team, but we’re off in a couple of areas. It’s nothing we can’t fix. We can fix it and we will.
“We’d led a lot of laps coming in here the past few years. We might have led one or two laps (three, actually) this year. We’re off in two or three areas. Pick up a tenth (of a second) here and a tenth there, and we’re right back on top. We lost some downforce and we’re a little behind on motor, but (team owner) Chip Ganassi is working on it.”
Marlin’s team isn’t alone. Almost every team has scrambled this spring to regain whatever magic it had last year. NASCAR’s new “aero-matching” rules forced engineers and crew chiefs to reposition their cars’ bodies to fit new templates. Teams had far more creative leeway last year, but new rules have trimmed the gray areas in the inspection bay.
“We put a completely new setup under my car for qualifying,” No. 3 starter Jerry Nadeau said. “Very few things this year are like they used to be. People are trying some pretty unusual new things because the old ones don’t work. I had no idea our setup would work (Friday) because it was different. But it was fine.”
In Marlin’s mind, the new rules forced everybody to return to Car Building 101. “Cars now have to have the same body location, front to rear,” he said. “Last year, everybody offset their rear-ends to the right, then twisted the bodies to get downforce. This year, for some reason, we’ve lost rear downforce.
“We cut up all our cars and went with a different chassis setup. Really, we didn’t know if it would work. I thought it was crazy, but it’s working good.”
What’s also working is Marlin’s relationship with teammates Jamie McMurray and Casey Mears. As rookies, McMurray and Mears get seven in-season tests, two more than veterans get.
Mears tested here and returned with valuable data that McMurray and Marlin used on their cars.
“We’ve gotten good information from them,” Marlin said of the rookies. “Casey came here with our last year’s notes, didn’t like some of them, so he tried something different. He found that his stuff was better than our stuff last year. Like I said, you can’t be stubborn. You can’t say, “This is what we ran last year, so this is what we’re running again this year.’ You have to look at the stopwatch and say, “Them guys found something better.’ You’ve got to be open-minded about these things.”
Hmm – sort of like a parent with a moody child.
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