Brakes Prove Costly for Best Buy Racing Team at Martinsville 

MARTINSVILLE, VA (April 1) – Anytime a broadcaster talks about what it takes for a race team to be successful at Martinsville Speedway, one item always tops the list– brakes, brakes, brakes.

At the tight confines of the .526-mile paperclip-shaped track, a driver’s brakes must last through all 500 laps to bring home a strong finish.

For driver Jeff Green, the brakes on his No. 66 Best Buy Chevrolet played what can only be described as a bad April Fool’s joke on Green and his team Sunday, helping him move all the way into the top-15 before they began failing midway through the event.

Denied the ability to slow his car heading into the incredibly tight turns at Martinsville, Green found himself having to let off the car’s throttle much earlier than normal, causing him to quickly drop back through the field.

The brake troubles resulted in Green dropping some 13 laps to the race leaders before the checkered flag was displayed, leaving the No. 66 Haas CNC Racing team with a 36th-place finish.

“The only way I can describe it is frustrated,” Green said. “Our Best Buy Chevrolet was great early on. We had a top-10 car, no doubt.

“The brakes started getting ‘mushy’ pretty early on. We weren’t even to halfway before the (brake) pedal was going all the way to the floor. We got in a long green flag run situation, the brakes got really hot, and that was it. We lost something like 10 spots in about 20 laps, went a lap down, and that was all she wrote.”

The finish was definitely not what the team had hoped for, especially after how well Green finished in the very first car of tomorrow (COT) race last weekend in Bristol. This weekend’s race was the second

“I’m very upset at how things turned out,” Crew Chief Harold Holly said. “With this new car, we’ve obviously got some work to do on the brakes. We won’t have this problem again.” 

Starting from the 32nd position, Green demonstrated his car’s strength in the early stages of the 500-lap event, working his way through the field to 26th position after just 34 laps had been completed.

Three laps later, a car spun out to bring out the caution flag, and Crew Chief Harold Holly elected to bring Green in for a two-tire pit stop (right side tires only) instead of the usual four tire stop, to help improve Green’s track position.

Green restarted the event in 19th position, moving up to 17th by lap 83. After another pit stop, Green restarted the race in 16th position, and steadily worked his way up to 14th position by lap 134.

Even as he was moving up the leaderboard, Green was advising his team that he was trying to take it easy on his brakes, as he could tell they were getting “soft,” indicating the brakes were overheating.

Around lap 196, Green radioed his crew and told them the brake pedal was going all the way to the floorboard of his Best Buy Chevrolet, and his brakes were failing. Over the next 20 laps, Green fell 10 spots to 26th position before a caution flag allowed Green to come to pit road.

NASCAR rules state that only cars on lead lap may pit the first time by once pit road is open. Unaware that he had gone a lap down during the last period of green flag racing, Green came in for service with the lead lap cars. As a result, Green was penalized by NASCAR, and had to restart at the tail end of the longest line of cars.

By the time all was said and done, Green came back in to allow his team to fill his master (brake) cylinders with more fluid, ending up four laps down to the leaders by the halfway point of the event.

As the laps ticked by, Green’s brake problems persisted, dropping the No. 66 more laps down to the frontrunners.

Just past lap 353, both Green and his brakes both got an opportunity to cool down when the race was red-flagged due to rain. After a 40-minute stoppage, the race resumed, and the Best Buy team took it as a matter of pride to finish the event and bring its car home in one piece.

Brakes were a big question mark for many teams heading into the weekend. Martinsville is known as the toughest track on the NASCAR circuit in terms of brake wear, and the new COT design is still very much a work in progress for many teams in terms of learning how to best run the duct work to the car’s front brakes.

“I’m beating myself up right now,” Holly said. “We took this car to south Georgia a couple of weeks ago to test. Afterwards, I told my guys the brakes probably wouldn’t last the race here. I thought we had the situation resolved, but obviously we’ve still got some work to do, and we will fix the situation.”

The No. 66 crew was just one of a number of teams up and down pit road complaining of brake issues, including Green’s Haas CNC Racing teammate, Johnny Sauter, driver of the No. 70 Chevrolet.

In his post-race comments, driver Greg Biffle talked about his brake problems, and went so far as to say that of the teams that had brake issues, all were using the same brand of brakes, including the Haas CNC Racing teams.

With the finish, Green drops four spots to 31st-place in the NASCAR drivers’ points standings, and team owner Gene Haas now occupies the 31st spot in the owners’ points.

While the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series has no race scheduled for next weekend due to the Easter holiday, the No. 66 crew has more work to do before they can enjoy some downtime. Virtually every NEXTEL Cup team will visit Richmond International Raceway on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 3-4, to test in preparation for the upcoming NEXTEL Cup race there (scheduled for the first weekend in May).

After two races with the new car of tomorrow, the NEXTEL Cup teams will use their “traditional” cars for the next race on the NEXTEL Cup Series schedule at the 1.5-mile Texas Motor Speedway (TMS) near Fort Worth (the COT is being phased in over a period of time. This year, the COT is only being used at tracks under 1.5-miles in length, the two road course races, and at Talladega Superspeedway in October).

The No. 66 crew wants to do well at the event, as one of the team’s associate sponsors, Samsung, is the title sponsor of the race, through its mobile phone division. Last April, Green and the No. 66 team qualified fourth at TMS, the team’s best starting position of the 2006 season.

The Samsung 500 will air live from TMS on Sunday, April 15, beginning at 3:30 p.m. EDT, on FOX and Performance Racing Network (PRN) Radio affiliates.