Greg Biffle sits quietly in his race car, listening to the voices in his head.
The helmet, driver suit, and body-hugging race seat insulate the Vancouver native from the chaotic choreography that surrounds him, while 10 uniformed crew members crowd around his car in a garage so small there is barely enough room to pump the handle on the floor jack.
The men talk to one another on radios, calling out what needs to be done and what has already been accomplished . . . and what they might try if the current round of changes doesn’t make Biffle’s car any faster.
Biffle hears it all through the earbuds in his helmet as he sits, seemingly passively, strapped into the driver’s seat.
There is little he can do but wait until the work is completed and he heads back to the oval for another few laps to see if the changes make the car better . . . or worse.
Two men change the front shock absorbers beneath the raised hood. Another pair work under the rear, checking how high it is off the track surface. Two additional crew members move blocks of lead weight in and out of the car’s frame rails as they try to adjust the chassis to compensate for the worn out surface at Phoenix International Raceway.
Every change, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is documented.
It is Friday of a three-day race weekend at Phoenix, another stop on the NASCAR Sprint Cup schedule. Some say it is the first race of the “real season,” contending that the Daytona 500 is so different from any other race that it is a season unto itself.
Biffle, 41, is beginning his ninth full year in NASCAR’s top series and his 14th since Jack Roush plucked the talented youngster from a tin-roofed shop on the east side of Vancouver, where he built his own stock cars. It took Biffle three years to win the Craftsman Truck Series title for Roush, and another two to take the championship in the Busch Series. In 2005, he won a season-high six races in the top series and finished in second place, just 35 points behind the Cup series champion.
But past performance is no guarantee of success. Consider that 20-year-old Trevor Bayne won the biggest race of his career on the last lap of the 2011 Daytona 500. Five days later, on the first lap of practice at Phoenix, he slammed the outside wall and his Ford came back into the garage area on the business end of a wrecker.
“There are no guarantees,” says Biffle, recognized as among the hardest-charging drivers in the garage.
Style and substance
That hang-it-on-the-fence driving style hasn’t diminished with age or experience, and it is among the reasons Biffle has developed a cadre of fans who will wake up at 5 a.m. to be first in line at his souvenir trailer to get an autographed T-shirt, or stand for hours in the Arizona sun hoping to get his signature on a “hero card.”
Larry Norman says he spotted Biffle about five years ago when the driver was competing in the former Busch series at Phoenix.
“He’s a hell of a driver,” says the Phoenix fan as he stands in the garage area, hoping to get an autograph.
“I like the way he drives, and I like him because he’s a ‘duner’ who takes his toys out in the sand dunes to play. I also got the chance to meet him at Las Vegas. We played craps with him.
“He didn’t have a good night,” Norman says with a smile.
Fans and sponsors, the lifeblood of auto racing, can consume a great deal of a driver’s time and energy.
“A lot of people figure we have a pretty easy schedule . . . we just get to work weekends,” Biffle jokes. But the reality is that the pressures to build solid relations with sponsors and fans can be a huge distraction for a driver.
Retired driver Kyle Petty once said it is the hidden schedule — the Monday post-race meetings, the Tuesday flight across the country for a sponsor appearance, and the Wednesday test session before packing up to leave on Thursday for the next race — that is the real reason many drivers burn out.
And the more successful you become, the more people want a piece of your time.
A few years ago, NASCAR dismissed complaints from drivers that too many fans were clogging up the garage area and presenting a safety issue.
When NASCAR ignored the pleas for tighter controls, Dale Earnhardt Jr., the most popular driver in the series, simply sat down on the tailgate of NASCAR’s mobile office, and smiled as hundreds of fans surrounded the trailer. The crowd of eager autograph seekers brought all official work to a halt.
NASCAR caved in with tighter requirements to get into the garage area when work is being done.
While Biffle isn’t as popular as Earnhardt or Jeff Gordon, he can’t cross from the team hauler to the garage without being stopped for an autograph. He tries to accommodate every fan.
The popularity is a part of racing that didn’t come comfortably for Biffle.
In his early years in NASCAR, he often was considered aloof by other drivers, the media and race fans. While racing at the now-defunct Portland Speedway, all he had to do was show up, unload the car and put on a good show. In NASCAR, it took him years to grow comfortable in his role as a driver/personality.
But he has. Over the years, he has emerged as among the most quoted — and most quotable — drivers in the garage.
“He’s one of the good ones,” says Patti Ennis, a producer for NASCAR’s Media Group. “He’s a good interview and makes himself available.”
He’s also articulate and not afraid of tackling some subjects other drivers shy away from.
A look at the future
Biffle is in the last year of a contract with Roush-Fenway Racing, and he’s enjoying some of the attention that comes with being a free agent.
While there has been no speculation about him and Roush parting ways, the driver has been quoted saying that the days of rich contracts and big sponsor checks are over, at least for now. Sponsorship money is harder to come by, and drivers and teams must be willing to extend themselves to keep the checks coming in.
Racing has done well by Biffle, even though he gets to keep only a portion of the millions of dollars he has won. The money has allowed him to live the life most drivers can only dream about.
He has a beautiful wife, a huge home in North Carolina, and a shop filled with high-speed and high-priced toys. He also owns a mountain retreat within easy flying distance from home, using his own plane or helicopter. Biffle also is part owner of Sunset Speedway in Banks, Ore., west of Portland, and Grays Harbor Raceway in Elma, both small dirt-track ovals.
His passion — one shared by his wife, Nicole — is animal rescue. They have their own nationwide foundation, and each year he and Nicole foot the bill for a calendar featuring NASCAR drivers and their pets. The calendars are made available at no cost to participating shelters, which sell them to raise funds.
The cars, the homes, the planes and the race tracks are the benefits of success, both by Biffle and the team that surrounds his car.
The crew is as tight-knit as any military squad. They travel together, work together, live together. Members are expected to be perfect in the routine of preparing the race car weekend after weekend. Each knows that any failure could spell an early finish on race day, or worse.
Biffle goes out for a couple more laps, radios to crew chief Greg Erwin how the car feels, and then hustles the Ford back into the garage for the next round of changes.
“Greg is very, very good in the car,” Erwin says. “We can’t use any data collection while we are at the race track, so we have to rely on him to tell us what is going on.”
During simulations and testing, the crew can equip the car with sensors that measure every nuance as the car corners, brakes and accelerates.
“What we learned during the times that we can use data sensors, is that Greg will feel really minor things in the car that the sensors will confirm,” Erwin says. “If there is a problem with Greg, it’s that sometimes he is too sensitive.”
Last season, a conflict emerged between what a driver feels and what the data said, and the Ford teams struggled at the early races.
The problem was an issue with the computer simulation used in testing. It said one thing; the drivers said something else.
It was a case of no data being better than wrong data.
“When you get false information and you go to a track — the track’s real green and has a lot of grip — and you go and figure out here’s the right bump stop, here’s the right shock, here’s the right spring. You come back, it’s hot, it’s sunny, it’s slick — all those things are wrong,” Biffle explains. “We would have been better off with no data.”
It was difficult, according to Biffle, not knowing when to trust the computer and when to trust his own instincts.
Looking for an edge
This afternoon, the team is trusting Biffle’s instincts.
On the track, he’s pressing hard to find the limits. With about 10 minutes left in the session, he brings the car back into the garage with a four-foot long scar on the right rear fender, when he kissed the wall.
Roush comes by for a look, grins and says, “That was close. It could have been a lot worse.”
The crew ignores the damage and scurries around the car for one last round of swapping suspension pieces, making adjustments, and checking tire temperatures and pressure. How a tire looks and feels after a hard run is one of the major predictors of how a car will handle on race day.
Then they send Biffle back out for one last round of laps on the oval. At the end of the session, he is 10th-fastest of 44 cars.
It’s good, but not good enough.
They have the rest of the afternoon and most of the following morning to take what they’ve learned and try to make the car better. Erwin and Biffle will trade information with other Roush drivers and crew leaders to learn what they tried and what worked.
The objective isn’t to have the fastest car in qualifying, but to come up with one that will be quick throughout the entire race. To do that that takes experimentation, testing and developing a platform that a crew can work with as the oval changes personality over the duration of the race. While starting up front is nice, finishing there is even better.
