Saving the brakes, engine vital at New Hampshire

New Hampshire Motor Speedway is what it is, and that's flat, mean, tough and a drain on all of a race team's resources.

It's also the place where the Chase for the Sprint Cup begins.

Ryan Pemberton, crew chief for David Reutimann's No. 44 Toyota, said that solving "The Magic Mile" is a matter of luck as much as it is preparation.

"We all talk about track position, but that place there has been pretty stubborn, making up ground, even if you're a superior car with better tires," Pemberton said of the 1.058-mile track. "It does seem to be one of the harder places to go from the back to the front. Depending on how the cautions work out and how all the other stuff plays out ... you saw the No. 2 car [Kurt Busch], with not a very good car there last time, I think he was in the 15th to 20th range and he ends up winning the race when the rains came and he stayed out.

"It's very difficult. It's kind of a frustrating place. You want to run good, but you'd rather be lucky than good at that place, more so than other places. Lucky usually pays off more than being good at most places, but it sure seems like timing plays a bigger part there. It's weird, because you can run a lot of laps, and if it goes good, sometimes you only pit a few times. We have seen somebody lead every lap."

That's New Hampshire in a nutshell. Throw in the long straights and flat turns, and you have a genuine dilemma, especially with the top-heavy new car.

How does Pemberton work on giving Reutimann a piece he can work with?

"It's a combination of brake balance -- braking is a big part of running well at Loudon," Pemberton said. "You have to brake hard, and accelerate hard to get up off the corner, get it to roll the center and turn well in the middle. Those are the elements.

"It's the same thing everywhere, but this place here ... it's a mile racetrack, and most of our tracks are higher-speed in the corners. You have to work on a lot of balance issues. It's a flat track, so you do a lot of sliding around and messing with different grooves to make it all work."

As has been the case most of the year, you'll hear a lot of reports that go, "I'm loose in, tight center and loose off." Pemberton said that's an every-week occurrence. (Continued)