By Greg Spotts | |
On the trail of the Black Swift Why are some Swifts swifter than others?
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Shortly after the season-opening race at Homestead, Speedcenter posted a feature story called "To Share or Not To Share." In that story we wondered aloud why the Swift chassis looked golden in the hands of the Newman/Haas team and leaden in the hands of anyone else: "Have the Newman-Haas mechanics gained some special knowledge from their two years of exclusive experience with the chassis? Is owner Carl Haas able to leverage his position as Swift's exclusive distributor to get a sneak preview of experimental parts? Are there top-secret aspects of the Newman/Haas setup that are unknown to Swift and Firestone, and therefore unavailable to the other Swift teams?" We promised to follow up as the season unfolded, and now we're ready to deliver, having interviewed Carl Haas (owner of Newman/Haas and Swift distributor Haas Motorsports,) Jim McGee (general manager of Patrick Racing,) John Della Penna (owner of Della Penna Racing,) Mike Held (co-owner of Team Gordon,) and Hiro Matsushita (chairman of Swift Engineering.) In pursuit of the secret recipe for Swifts running swiftly, we eventually stumbled upon a fascinating conspiracy theory. We intend to let the key players do most of the talking, so join us as we follow the Trail of the Black Swift. John Della Penna was the first customer of Haas Motorsports, running a Ford-Swift-Firestone package for Richie Hearn in the 1998 season. Things looked promising at the final race of that season, when Richie qualified fourth and finished eighth at Fontana. But upon taking delivery of the 1999 Swift, Della Penna was immediately concerned. "The car was actually pretty good last year. We could deal with it in most cases. There were two or three tracks, mainly the permanent road courses, where the car was very difficult to tune. Even for Newman/Haas - it was difficult for them also. But this year [Swift] just somehow introduced a lot more understeer in the car, I don't know where that came from. I think that the car is particularly bad with the Toyota installation because of where the engine sits and the physical size of the engine. It's probably more suited to the Ford, in fact I know it is, because it was designed around the Ford installation. We had a pretty good idea that the car was in trouble the first time we put it on the track at Homestead." Meanwhile, similar pre-season concerns had prompted Patrick Racing and Team Gordon to forgo the Swift at the first two races of the season, running leftover Reynards at Homestead and Motegi. Patrick Racing ran Ford-Swift-Firestones for the first time at Long Beach, and lead driver Adrian Fernandez gave Swift their best customer-team qualifying performance of the season, starting sixth and finishing fourth. However, Fernandez was a championship contender and he felt more comfortable in the Reynard. So Fernandez spoke up, and he never had to run the Swift again. Nevertheless, at the next race of the season things were looking up for the Swift at Patrick Racing, when PJ Jones qualified eighth and finished second at Nazareth. PJ also had a good race at Rio, qualifying 16th and finishing 7th. However, the decision to run two different chassis would soon create inevitable problems, as explained by general manager Jim McGee. "We decided early on that we were going to split up our team. That has been a real problem within our organization because you cannot really do justice to both cars because you've split your engineering force down the middle, you've split your database down the middle. It's very very difficult to be running two different cars, because the feedback that you get from a two-driver team running the same car is at least 50% better." By Rio, the other two customer teams were at their wits' end. Della Penna had been running the Swift for the first five races of the season and failed to qualify in the top 15 even once. Team Gordon hadn't been doing any better with his Toyota-powered '98 Reynard, only cracking the top 15 at Motegi by qualifying 14th. Something had to give, and the leaders of the two teams put their heads together, as explained by John Della Penna: "Actually what we did [after Rio] is Robby decided he was going to stay with Swift because of the relationship with Panasonic, [Swift Chairman Hiro Matsushita is also the heir to the Panasonic fortune.] I decided that was a good opportunity for us to make a swap. Robby had a '98 Reynard and I had a bunch of Swift stuff, so we decided to swap." So as the teams rolled into St. Louis for the sixth race of the season, Adrian Fernandez and Richie Hearn had given up on the Swift entirely, leaving exclusive distributor Haas Motorsports with only two of their original four customers. The growing disparity in performance between Newman/Haas and the customer teams was highlighted by Michael Andretti winning the race. Four races later, a pattern had emerged where Newman/Haas drivers Andretti and Fittipaldi were consistently qualifying top 10 and finishing on the podium, while Jones and Gordon were qualifying back the 20's and finishing well out of the points. It didn't seem to matter that Jones had the same Ford engine as Newman/Haas and Gordon was running the underpowered Toyota. Both drivers were qualifying behind similarly-powered cars race after race. The morning of the Toronto race, we interviewed Carl Haas about the Swift's performance:
SpeedCenter: How do you feel about the development of the Swift?
SpeedCenter: The ones you're using as a car owner are killing, and the ones you're selling to everybody else are way in the back. How come?
SpeedCenter: Do you think, for example, if Mo Nunn was running it without any custom parts, he could run it competitively?
SpeedCenter: What happens as a distributor, if the paddock starts to feel that without whatever Newman/Haas is doing to the Swift, the chassis just can't be competitive?
SpeedCenter: Can it be fast without the custom Parts that NH is building to add onto it?
A day earlier we had interviewed Swift Chairman Hiro Matsushita. Hiro directly contradicted his distributor's claim to have passed the Newman/Haas development information back to Swift Engineering. SpeedCenter: Do you know why NH is so good?
SpeedCenter: Do they share that data with you?
SpeedCenter: So you can't pass it on to other teams.
SpeedCenter: Can you put any pressure on NH to give you some of that data?
Matsushita professed a similar lack of knowledge about the custom parts that Newman/Haas might have developed for their own exclusive use: SpeedCenter: Are there a lot of custom parts that NH is putting on the car?
While Hiro appeared to be woefully in the dark about the Newman/Haas development program for his own chassis, Patrick Racing's Jim McGee was confident he was getting full access to the Newman/Haas information.
SpeedCenter: So actually you feel like a satisfied customer?
SpeedCenter: Do you think that if things had panned out differently, and you guys were applying your full effort to the Swift, would you be having pretty good season with it?
SpeedCenter: So you don't think they have anything that nobody else can get.
SpeedCenter: Were those relationships one of the reasons you went with Swift in the first place?
Team Gordon co-owner Mike Held had a completely different perspective on his experience as a customer of Haas Motorsports, claiming zero access to Newman Haas setup information. SpeedCenter: Nobody seems to be getting anything out of the Swift other than Newman Haas. We're trying to figure out why.
SpeedCenter: Do you think Newman/Haas has access to something you don't?
SpeedCenter: Do you think that Swift could be doing a better job of giving you what you need to at least get started in midpack with it?
At this point it started to appear as if Carl Haas has largely taken control over the ongoing development of Hiro's chassis, able to share or withhold the Newman/Haas propriety information at will. It seemed strange that while one of Haas' customers, Mike Held, knew nothing about the Newman/Haas setups, the other customer, Jim McGee, knew virtually everything, far more than Swift Engineering itself. Seeking to find out more about the particular nature and value of the Newman/Haas proprietary data, we asked ex-customer John Della Penna for details on the challenge of running a Swift successfully.
With the Swift, it has a high center of gravity, it's a car that does not like to run very stiff springs, and that kind of compounds itself with the Toyota engine, the phase 5 that we've been running for the last year and a half or so. That engine has a higher CG than the Ford, so then you get into a situation where all this stuff starts stacking up against you. The Swift wants to run at a particular height from the ground as well. Lower is not better for that car. Where on the Reynard, lower is better, stiff is better, it's a car that's more straightforward, common sense. You lower it, it goes better. All those things make sense. For example, the Swift I had instances where if the car was oversteering, or losing rear grip, you have to raise it. Because the design of the undertray is such that if you run it too low, it chokes the air that goes to the tunnels and then it loses downforce. It's almost like a reverse principle to what a race car should really be like.
SpeedCenter: So it's counterintuitive to adjust it very often?
SpeedCenter: Do you think that the off the shelf Reynard out of the box with a standard setup is a lot more competitive than the same thing with the Swift?
Jim McGee verified that managing ride-height sensitivity was at the heart of successfully running the Swift. SpeedCenter: What's the most difficult part, technically, of running this package well?
If keeping the Swift undertray at the proper ride height is so vital to the car's performance, it would seem logical that the Newman/Haas edge might be in the area of shocks, dampers, and other related parts. It was Mike Held who first mentioned this possibility to us. SpeedCenter: A lot of the Reynard teams are building custom parts. Are you building any parts? Do you think Newman/Haas is building custom parts?
It took John Della Penna, unencumbered by any ongoing relationship with Swift Engineering or Haas Motorsports, to specify the likely Newman/Haas edge.
SpeedCenter: Do you think that without those special parts that Newman/Haas has an exclusive on, the Swift just isn't the same Swift that they're getting the great results out of?
When asked about the exclusive Ohlins dampers, Jim McGee simultaneously confirmed the existence of such a system and dismissed its importance. SpeedCenter: John Della Penna told us that NH had some exclusive Ohlins dampers that solve a lot of the problems with the ride height on the Swift, do you know anything about that?
As one of the elder statesmen of the paddock and the winningest GM/Chief Mechanic in the history of CART, McGee shows an admirably sporting attitude. But what if those exclusive Ohlins dampers really are the difference between Michael Andretti qualifying on the pole position at Elkhart Lake and PJ Jones qualifying 21st? What if the factory Swift is simply not capable of performing competitively without the addition of a sophisticated ride-control system to maintain the exact ride height for maximum downforce? We're finally ready for the conspiracy theory. Flash back to 1996. Carl Haas is fed up with the poor performance of the Lola, and wants a new chassis. Meanwhile, Hiro Matsushita is preparing to retire from driving and looking for another way to spend his millions to stay involved with CART. Haas has a brilliant idea: why not offload the capital intensive wind-tunnel testing and carbon-fiber fabrication work onto the deep-pocketed Hiro, while purchasing the chassis at a steep discount as Swift's charter customer and exclusive distributor. Put the money saved into an intensive engineering program to develop exclusive parts for the car. That way Haas Motorsports can eventually sell Swifts at a profit to other teams while retaining the exclusive parts necessary to run the car competitively. You end up with a fast car that nobody else has, at a fraction of the cost of creating and maintaining an entire car-building operation. Pretty clever! SpeedCenter: How does Carl Haas' role work as your distributor. Why do you need a distributor? You know everybody, there's only 26 drivers right?
SpeedCenter: Does it cost the same for a team owner to buy a Swift, a Lola, or a Reynard?
SpeedCenter: What happens if without the Newman/Haas special fairy dust that nobody else has, you can't be competitive with the car?
Our sentiments exactly.
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©1999 Greg Spotts and SpeedCenter
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