Columnist Rusty Wallace: Teammate Newman helped open our team’s eyes to laws of physics

Rusty Wallace

Thursday, Feb. 27, 2003 | 10:13 a.m.

Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Penske Racing Dodge Intrepid, is writ' ng a daily column exclusively for the Sun in conjunction with Sunday's UAW-Dai' lerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

I'm real lucky to have a teammate like Ryan Newman on our Penkse Racing team. In addition to being a real nice guy, he's a heck of a racecar driver. Last year, Newman won a race, had a whole bunch of top-10 finishes and won the Rookie of the Year.

People have tried to give me credit for helping Ryan last season but the truth is, I probably learned more from Ryan than he learned from me, that's for sure. The big thing that I learned was the approach toward setting the car up that they do on the No. 12 Alltel team. They rely a lot on what he calls physics -- the normal physical things a car is supposed to do.

Ryan went to college at Purdue to be an engineer and he relies on his schooling a lot. It's all instrumentation now -- at all the test sessions, they look at the data and they set the car up 100 percent off what the data says. I'm more of a seat-of-the-pants guy; I've done this, I've done that, I've tried this spring, that spring -- that's how I came up with my setups in the past and it's won me a ton of races doing it that way.

But I've got to tell you, it's like a big switch flipped on last year watching Ryan and his team. Last year, the big supercomputer kicked in for a lot of us and I'm relying a lot more on what we're learning from our instrumentation, our wind-tunnel data and a lot of the data we receive from a lot of things. It's much more of a technology-driven sport now than it was in the past.

Someone asked me not long ago to compare my rookie season in 1984, when I won Rookie of the Year, to Ryan's rookie season. Well, you can't compare them. First of all, I had a decent -- at best -- first year when I won the Rookie of the Year. I was literally a rookie; I was brand-new in that car. I didn't do any ARCA racing, I didn't do any Busch racing, I just got right into the Cup car right out of an ASA car and, trust me, that was a huge change. I hit just about everything out there; I had a lot of wrecks.

I had many great performances and many miserable performances. Ryan came right out of the batch running real good. I think we gave him equipment and trained him to get him ready for Winston Cup. We really did a lot of work preparing him for that first year by running him in some ARCA races, some Busch races and a few Cup races in 2001.

Nowadays, you just can't do it the way I did it. You've got to come out the box flying and you've got to come out of the box with a driver that you feel can win because these big sponsors that we've got on the cars expect immediate performance. The sponsor is the big difference because if the car doesn't perform, it's ridiculous for the sponsor to stay with the car with the money they're giving the teams these days.