The Georgetown basketball team is an elite squad, and has been for years. But the team isn’t so good that everyone on it can make a living playing basketball. Some go on to the NBA, some do Europe. Most have to find something else. When Brendan Gaughan (MSB ‘97) played for the Hoyas, he knew he wasn’t among those destined for the pros.
“By no means did I ever expect to be a professional basketball player,” he says. “I was fortunate that there was a hole available for me. Worked my ass off for it.”
That hole was a unique job on a team blessed with a superstar. He was the guy whose job was to guard Allen Iverson, to concentrate all his energies on countering The Answer’s crossovers, fakes and flashes, to keep the star on his toes in practice and before games.
Now Iverson is in pro basketball, and Gaughan is not. But he has a similarly unique job, one that is even more intimidating than guarding Iverson. Gaughan is a NASCAR driver. Specifically, he is a NASCAR truck driver, if you’ve heard of such a thing. And he is one race away from winning the championship.
But it’s not as if he just walked onto the track. NASCAR doesn’t recruit at the career fair. Gaughan, 28, started racing in his early teens. Before he even had a driver’s license, Gaughan would ride in a dune buggy with his father, Michael, a Las Vegas casino magnate and former desert truck racer. Brendan won the first race he ever entered, in 1991. By the time he was in college-he was actually recruited to be a kicker for the football team by Head Coach Bob Benson-Gaughan already had several years under his belt with a team that raced trucks and dune buggies across the deserts of Mexico and the Southwest.
In 1999, two years after Gaughan graduated from the business school, his father founded Orleans Racing, and he jumped from off-road racing into stock car racing. He spent several seasons in NASCAR’s Winston West series, a lesser-known regional race series, winning the championship in 2000 and 2001. In 2002, he moved up to the Craftsman Truck Series, a national race series that usually tours alongside the Winston Cup, won two races, and was named rookie of the year. This year he has a strong chance to win it all.
Speaking hours before the third-to-last race of the season in mid-October at the Advance Auto Parts 200 at Martinsville Speedway in southern Virginia , Gaughan was excited. He is a friendly guy, and speaks with a mishmash drawl, maybe because he lives in Las Vegas, went to school on the East Coast, and now spends his weekends touring the South with drivers, crew members and other NASCAR hounds. With a few hours to go, he was jovial, energized. He tries to get loose before a race.
“I just hang out with the team, make sure everybody is loose, everybody is up and ready. Everybody’s got their shit ready to go.”
Some drivers get into a highly focused mode; others are relaxed, just like athletes in any sport. “Take Georgetown basketball,” he says. “Allen Iverson was loose before a game.” Gaughan, like Iverson, gets loose.
He insists he has no pre-race superstitions, but he does have one habit:
“I put my old Georgetown jersey on, underneath my race suit.” Gaughan wore number 13 when he played for the Hoyas. “Not because of any superstition, it’s just comfortable. I spent a lot of years in that thing. I got a few I rotate through. Its not like I wear the same one.” Over the jersey goes a fire-retardant race suit, which is definitely not comfortable, especially in the heat, but may come in handy in a crash.
With the race just hours away, he took over an hour to carefully explain the ins and outs of tuning and driving race trucks, until a low thunder appeared behind his words. He explained that Winston Cup practice was starting, and conversation was about to become impossible. He hung up and stayed loose while the carbureted exhaust screamed at triple-digit decibels, so loud that the only normal conversations took place between people using radios with special noise reduction technology, under huge protective earmuffs.
Georgetown University definitely falls well to the north of the traditional NASCAR line, which falls off just past the Richmond International Speedway in Richmond. Va. But that line has moved-jumped, actually-so that NASCAR fans can now be found across the country. But the divide remains, even if it is now more broadly cultural than geographical. Seldom do sports as popular as NASCAR inspire such a heated split between those who love it and those who don’t understand the appeal in the least, and don’t care to. Just as music fans outside of the South often describe their tastes as “everything but country,” sports fans from the other side of the divide tend to classify NASCAR somewhere between professional wrestling and cockfighting.
But at its roots, NASCAR isn’t that different from other sports. It has speed, strategy, drama and competition. It is thunderingly loud. It is, at the insistence of its sponsors, family friendly. It is also ruled very tightly by its parent organization, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (the term NASCAR refers to both the sport and its governing body).
NASCAR the association was founded in 1948 to organize the growing sport of stock car racing. A passion for racing cars-not special cars, just straight-from-the-factory stock cars-had taken off in the South as a kind of day job for guys whose chief source of income came from running whiskey from bootleg distilleries to distribution points all over Appalachia and the South. The practice began with Prohibition and continued for years afterwards because of heavy taxes on whiskey, with drivers making late-night runs at high speeds over dirt-covered back roads. In 1949, racing, without the whiskey, became a full-fledged sport. Car manufacturers soon realized there was advertising to be had if your cars were winning. The competition ratcheted up, and the cars became a little fancier, a little more modified, a little faster, and the crowds got bigger and bigger.
Five decades on, NASCAR has changed a lot. The crowds are now huge-100,000 people regularly show up to watch any given race. The events themselves are much larger, with three national racing circuits-Gaughan’s Craftsman Truck Series, the Busch Grand Nationals, and the famed Winston Cup (soon to be the Nextel Cup)-backed by a dozen-odd regional circuits. The money is huge, with the best drivers making NBA-level incomes between their salaries and their winnings.
But two big things have remained true: The cars, despite being far from stock, are still “old-fashioned,” in a sense. They have high-tech components; they are tested in wind tunnels; and they are designed to be driven at more than 200 mph. But they lack a basic engineering innovation of the modern automobile-the computer. Before computers, cars used a carburetor, a system of mechanical valves, to release the proper amounts of gas and air into the engine. Computers are far more efficient and reliable, and they have been used in most cars made since the early ‘80s. But NASCAR, in a quest to retain credibility as a down-home racing sport without any flashy tricks, has barred them. NASCAR cars and trucks still use carburetors, and they don’t have a single computer. They don’t even have digital gauges. Any beater import from the ‘80s onward contains more advanced technology than Gaughan’s race truck, though not 700 horsepower.
A by product of this quest for credibility is NASCAR’s other distinctive characteristic: an obsessive need to keep all the competing teams on as equal a footing as possible. The basic difference between teams in car racing, as in all sports, is money. Other professional sports have dealt, in various ways, with the financial discrepancies between teams. In racing cars, a sport so based in technology, the effects of these discrepancies are far more pronounced. A baseball player who doesn’t make as much money as someone who plays for the Yankees can still hit long homers, and make great infield plays. In car racing, on the other hand, if your car’s engine makes it go faster than the other cars, then you pretty much always win. So unless the racing is organized to prevent this kind of a gap, the team with the most advanced cars, produced by the manufacturers who spend the most money, will probably always win. And it makes the sport boring.
NASCAR, concerned above all with keeping fans interested, has developed an incredibly intricate system for regulating teams and keeping their cars on equal footing. Everything, from the weight of the cars to the type of suspension to the shape of the cars’ hoods to the size of each individual hole and valve in the entire engine block is regulated by NASCAR, which publishes a huge book each season filled with all of these rules. Cars are checked and re-checked by race officials, and after the race they are checked again, to make sure that no secret levers, false surfaces or other tricks were used to modify the car during the race, making it lighter and faster.
The result is a constant game of catch-up, as manufacturers find ways to design better cars that are still within the rules, and NASCAR regulators eventually fill the hole with a rule specifically designed to eliminate that advantage, or at least share it with every other team. Teams that design good cars are definitely rewarded-Gaughan, who has been very successful, almost gives more credit to the truck than to himself-but the advantage can vanish in no time at all. In NASCAR, though speeds sometimes approach 200 mph, racing remains a competition of inches. It is a contest between fractional suspension adjustments, minor aerodynamic changes and drivers trying to find and hold the perfect, absolutely fastest way to drive around an oval several hundred times.
It is at this stage in the game that Brendan Gaughan has entered stock car racing, and it is at this stage that he is helping change NASCAR a little bit more. Finding that perfect fastest route around the oval is “not an exact science,” in Gaughan’s words, but it is the goal of NASCAR teams. The challenge, as in all car races, is in the turns. Going fast on the straightaway is easy. In the turns, the goal is to go as fast as absolutely possible without flying off the track, spinning out and heading out towards the wall or into the track’s infield.
The first step is to make sure that the car is balanced.
“You have different weights in each corner, different spring weights, which depend on how hard the tires are going to push back against the ground,” explained Gaughan. If the car’s weight is balanced improperly, say, with too much weight on the front, the rear tires will tend to loose traction first, wobble and eventually break, pointing the car infield. This is called being loose, and the opposite problem, a front end that tends to lose traction first and send the car out to the retaining wall, is being tight. Ideally, the car will be neither, and will favor turning exactly through the radius of the turns.
“That’s what makes one team faster-how well they understand springs, roll centers.” The problem changes with each racetrack, as they each have different turns, with different degrees of banking, and different speeds. But the problem also changes to match a host of other conditions. The weather can be a huge factor; when temperatures are high, a drop of a few degrees can affect the grip on a track. “Charlotte is one of the funniest places in the world to race,” said Gaughan. “Last week, Winston Cup raced there at night. Everybody knows that as track temperature drops, that place changes. You can qualify, a cloud can come over, and it can change. Then the cloud goes away and it changes back.”
NASCAR teams are consequently always changing their setups, always trying to find the fastest way to approach each track for each set of conditions. On race day, they will set up the car to make it easier to modify during the race. If it looks like they want a 700-pound spring on one corner, they’ll put in a slightly smaller spring and add a “ring rubber,” which allows them to adjust the spring weight on that corner in a few seconds instead of having to take the whole spring out and put another one in. Pit stops have to be fast, so the car has to be able to be modified on the fly.
Making all these decisions about spring weight and suspension is the inexact science of NASCAR. Gaughan and his team have adopted a high-tech approach to the problem: “We have a whole CAD [computer-assisted design] program that helps us decide what to run each weekend,” says Gaughan. “We have our own engineers, who spend a lot of time with geometry and front-end angles, and all the stuff that makes these things turns. The way we build our cars, the way we approach a racetrack have a lot of things to do with what they do. It’s all done on a computer nowadays.” Using laptop-toting engineers may seem anathema to the ethic of NASCAR, but it can help cars go faster, and in the meantime Gaughan’s team is exploiting the resistance to adopting engineers.
”’Lotta teams aren’t willing to do those things. That’s the new NASCAR-engineers. A lot of teams still aren’t comfortable doing that.” Gaughan estimates that in his series, the Craftsman Trucks, only a half-dozen teams have engineers, and only three really know how to use them. Those three, Gaughan included, are all in the top five.
The challenge of coordinating all the people involved in this process-Gaughan’s touring team has 13 people-makes NASCAR a team sport. Here, Gaughan makes use of his experience with basketball and football. His pit crew, seven mechanics who jump into the pit lane during a race to change his tires, adjust his suspension, and do whatever else is needed within the space of a few seconds, is determined each week in the same manner other teams he has played on have used to pick who plays and who sits.
“We have enough people that we have practice every day at the shop. The day before the team leaves, we have basically our last practice. And whoever is fastest, that’s who’s your starter that week. You have your starters, but each week the backups are practicing to take that spot,” he explains. “It’s a whole team to make this stuff work.”
Gaughan’s basketball past gives him at least one other unique edge. Racing cars is not entirely a game of weights and banking and aerodynamic profiles. It is also physically hard. The engines do most of the work, pounding out 600 thoroughbreds worth of power for hours on end. But the drivers aren’t exactly on a Sunday jaunt. Racing is long, uncomfortable, and requires total concentration and occasional terror. But worst of all, it is unbearably hot.
How hot, exactly, depends on the conditions of the day. At a race in inland Alabama, in the peak of the summer, the ambient temperature is usually already in the 90- to 100-degree range. Sitting inside a steel box in the middle of a wide stretch of asphalt, the temperature is even higher. But the real heat comes from the engine, a 423-cubic-inch, eight-cylinder beast revving at 7000 rpm. The exhaust runs right underneath the driver and out the left-hand side of the car so it doesn’t shoot straight back on the car behind. When exhaust leaves the engine, its temperature is well over 1000 degrees. By the time it has made its way halfway down the pipes, the temperature has dropped considerably. But it is still unbearably hot, well past the sauna range, and it runs right underneath the seat, heating up the truck’s metal floor to the point where all drivers wear heat-shielded boots to keep their feet from blistering. That engine and exhaust heat can keep the inside of a race truck up to 120 degrees.
Air conditioning isn’t very useful in an exposed racecar, so a lot of teams use a fan system to blow air on the driver and into their helmet. During a 1998 race at Martinsville, Winston Cup driver Ricky Rudd’s fan system gave out, and when he was hauled out of his car after the race, he had blisters and burns on his back and was so dehydrated he needed an IV. Amazingly enough, he won the race that day.
But for most drivers, the fan is not enough, and the day always takes its toll. But Gaughan is tougher than that. After a particularly hot race in Kansas City in early July, Gaughan told a reporter, “I go to Kansas City where people are being taken out of their trucks after the race because of the heat. I didn’t have any water in my car. I didn’t have any air blowing on me, and I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t sweating. I jumped out of the truck ready to do another hundred laps. Those are the things that give me what I feel is a mental edge over people.”
The season’s final race on Nov. 14, the Ford 200 at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida, is the 25th race of the year. After so many races, each hundreds of miles long, you would expect the field to have widened out. But the competition remains fierce, and Gaughan’s lead over second-place Ted Musgrave, is only 26 points, a slim margin in NASCAR. There are four drivers who still have a shot at capturing the championship, but Gaughan, in the lead, has the edge.
If he wins this year, Gaughan will have turned a lot of heads. Last year, he was named rookie of the year. To win it all in his second season would be a big victory, one that would give him some serious momentum for moving further up the NASCAR ladder. At the top is the Winston Cup, home of Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart. But for now, Gaughan has announced he will race trucks next season, with a few possible starts in stock cars. He isn’t delaying; he’s is just trying to take his time and find a proper sponsor for his team.
Having found a sport where he is a top-level competitor, he plans on going all the way to the Cup.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “That’s the NBA. That’s the top level, man.”
