Inside the Penske camp
One of the story lines of the 2005 Cup season was the Ryan Newman-Rusty Wallace feud. The Roush and Hendrick teams made a fetish out of sharing information. Newman and Wallace, however, wouldn't share the time of day with each other. (The much passed-along story that Newman wouldn't take part in the standing-O that Rusty got at the driver's meeting at Homestead appears not to be fiction; go here and scroll down to the Nov. 21 entries.)
I always chalked it to stubbornness: Wallace didn't want to be upstaged by the young star, and Newman didn't want the old guy to tell him what to do. The generation gap theory seemed to make sense in the lack of anything specific.
The real reason might be something more simple: Rusty Wallace had a big mouth, and Ryan Newman didn't appreciate it.
Here's Kurt Busch from Wednesday's interview session at Daytona. (Busch replaced Wallace in the No. 2 and is Newman's new teammate.)
HOW HAS IT BEEN WORKING WITH RYAN AND HOW CLOSELY TO YOU EXPECT THE 2 AND 12 TO WORK THIS SEASON?"I think it will take some time, but already I've seen movement out of some of the meetings. Matt Borland actually scheduled a meeting with Roy McCauley and Ryan Newman and myself and two engineers. The six of us had a little pow wow. I stayed quiet the whole time.
"I just listened and tried to absorb what the problem was, which was obviously Newman is a new school guy and Rusty is an old school guy. The two just clashed a little bit. When Newman would have good information and new things found by his team, Rusty was available to that, but Rusty didn't quite keep it in house, and I think that's the main reason the two didn’t quite get along. Rusty has grown up in the Cup garage, and he's got friends like Mark Martin. He's got friends like Darrell Waltrip. He’s got friends all over the place where they would just chit chat about setup. That’s changed recently, and that’s where the two I thing were somewhat imbalanced. My new crew chief and his engineering frame of mind, it's the new school way of doing things.
"Ryan and I have talked about that. It'll take some time to develop, but I've already seen some of the actions take place. They came back from their test here at Daytona last week and told my crew chief what they learned, what they saw and what they didn't get a chance to run. Here we are this week helping out with some of his setups and what he thought would work that they didn’t have time to get to. We'll go to Vegas in a couple of weeks and just keep rolling from there. I don’t see Ryan as a problem at all to work with. It's just a matter of blending into the program. Now with Penske restructuring and having an engineering-based group, I've got to step up to that program because I'm used to the old school with Jimmy Fennig, where he was the veteran and had things his way. It's going to be a great challenge for me to step up, too. Overall I think it will be better for the program once the two of us run parallel with one another. I don't see a problem at all."
That seems to explain a lot.
Comments (2)
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Hey,
I just saw Rusty at an event in Ohio: http://www.racingspeakers.com/h/press.php and he actually had nice thinks to say about Penski and Kurt Bush. He was real excited about his son coming along into the Bush series.
The most interesting thing was how well his team had come along last year and how he thought Kurt would be very successful in 2006. So much for not liking the guy.
NASCAR FAN 22
Posted on January 21, 2006 12:41 PM
My guess is that Rusty seems a little of him in Kurt Busch. The strange thing, Newman is probably a lot more like Wallace -- my impression of both is that they're talented, successful, stubborn and convinced his way is the right way.
Posted on January 23, 2006 7:11 PM