By Brian Hilderbrand

Tue, Feb 26, 2008 (2 a.m.)

The most valuable members of Jeff Gordon’s race team this weekend might not be the ones who service his No. 24 Chevrolet Impala during the UAW-Dodge 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but the ones who deliver his race cars to the track.

Because of an unusual set of circumstances surrounding this week’s race, the men who drive the tractor-trailers for Gordon’s Hendrick Motorsports race team will be as crucial to the team’s success as Gordon or crew chief Steve Letarte.

Last year NASCAR built a week off into the Sprint Cup Series schedule between the second race of the season, in Fontana, Calif., and the Las Vegas race. NASCAR eliminated that week off this year and, to make matters worse, added a test session at Phoenix International Raceway on the Monday after the Las Vegas race.

Although all teams faced the same time constraints in terms of shuttling race cars from their shops in North Carolina to Southern California, Las Vegas and Phoenix, Gordon’s team found itself with yet another challenge that will result in three eighteen-wheelers crisscrossing the country for six days with a total of 12 race cars (Gordon’s six and another six for teammate Jimmie Johnson).

“Not only do we lose the weekend off between these two races, but we run two separate paint schemes,” Letarte said of the additional wrench thrown into his plans. Gordon’s car carried its familiar DuPont sponsorship for the race in Fontana but will sport primary sponsorship from Nicorette this weekend in Las Vegas.

Although NASCAR’s new car, previously known as the Car of Tomorrow, is designed to be run at all the tracks on the NASCAR circuit, Letarte said most teams aren’t at the point where they were able to bring their California cars to Las Vegas.

“The one thing NASCAR has done with the new Impala and the whole new concept of what used to be called the Car of Tomorrow is that your California car is the same as your Vegas car — there really isn’t any difference anymore,” he said. “I don’t think we really have got the full benefit of that now but I think in the long run, in a few years from now, we’ll definitely see our car counts going down, and that will make schedules like this a little bit easier.”

Although most teams use transporters, or haulers, that carry two race cars (a primary and a backup) to every race, Hendrick Motorsports broke out a specially designed hauler that carries four race cars for the Fontana and Vegas races. Because both Jeff Gordon’s No. 24 team and Johnson’s No. 48 team operate out of the same shop in Charlotte, N.C., both teams will be using the four-car hauler.

That transporter left North Carolina over the weekend and was scheduled to meet the No. 24 and the No. 48 haulers in Las Vegas after the California race, which was delayed by rain until Monday.

“The Jeff Gordon driving school has a facility (at Las Vegas Motor Speedway), so we’re going to borrow a little bit of shop space from it,” Letarte said. “We’ll swap out cars and then that four-car hauler will come straight home (to Charlotte) and unload the cars that we had at California, and we will swap those cars out for our Phoenix test cars, and then our Phoenix test cars will go back across the country, and we’ll test out of that four-car hauler in Phoenix.

“The transportation department and the truck drivers are going to earn their keep that week, for sure. They’re going to be the souls of the race team.”

Hendrick Motorsports has five drivers to pilot the haulers, but has had to add drivers for this stretch of the schedule and for the Texas and Phoenix races, which are held on consecutive weekends twice a year. Letarte said he keeps a notebook with the names of several long-haul drivers from across the country who are more than willing to help out one of NASCAR’s most successful teams a few times a year.

Letarte, 28, has been Gordon’s crew chief since late in the 2005 season and has guided Gordon to nine career victories, including six last season. He began working for Hendrick Motorsports as a part-time employee in 1995 and has been a crew member on all four of Gordon’s championship teams.

He said he is especially looking forward to this weekend’s race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where Gordon finished second (to teammate Johnson) last year and has five top-five finishes in 10 starts, including a victory in 2001.

“I was extremely happy with how we ran last year at Las Vegas, and I was real happy with the test, so we’re excited to go back,” Letarte said, referring to a two-day test session at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in January.

Although life was much easier for Letarte with the week off between the California and the Las Vegas races, he said he welcomes the challenge this schedule presents his team.

“It’s a lot of cars going a lot of miles in a short period of time, but I prefer it,” he said. “Our race cars were fortunate last year and ran well, but I can tell you the depth of our team goes much beyond drivers and crew chiefs.

“I like when a schedule gets challenging like that because I feel our shop foreman, the head of our transportation department, our motor room — everybody does an over-the-top job of organization. The harder the schedule gets, I think it falls into our hands as an advantage because we’re going to be more prepared than the other teams.”