Captain's Corner: Greg Erwin leads Xfinity team in title quest

NASCAR’s experiment this season with flange-fit composite body cars in its Xfinity Series has been a successful one for Team Penske, one it hopes will continue this weekend at Phoenix and provide the springboard to a fourth series car owner’s championship.

The new composite bodies feature 13 separate panels attached by flanges which can be replaced in sections when necessary. The designs were made optional this season at the fall Richmond, Dover and Phoenix races.

Team Penske has run the design each time, winning with Brad Keselowski at Richmond, Ryan Blaney at Dover and Blaney will again be in the car this weekend at Phoenix. Next season, the flange-fit composite body will be optional at all tracks except superspeedways.

We talked with Team Penske Xfinity crew chief Greg Erwin about working with the composite body cars and his team’s chances to capture this season’s owner’s title.

What have you seen as the primary differences in utilizing the flange-fit design compared to the steel bodies?

Erwin: The first difference has been that the cars are about 100 pounds lighter. That changes what we call our lead map – the adjustability that we have in the car to move the weight forward and backward to get the static weight percentages that we’re looking for. You take 100 pounds out of the frame rails of a car and it really changes things. The second thing that has come up is although they have tried really hard to get these body parts as close to what they call their “gold surface,” there are some panels that we believe quite fit the tolerance that they had intended to meet the gold surface. That has caused a little bit of confusion between the teams and NASCAR officiating. Some of the panels as they are purchased from Five Star, without any modifications on our part, don’t quite fit the templates in the way that we all had intended. That’s been bit of challenge. In the steel-body car, if there is something that didn’t fit, we could pretty much look back at ourselves and say, ‘Well, we built it that way. We’re responsible.’ With these panels there are still some areas where they don’t fit as intended and we continue to work with NASCAR to address that.

Despite the challenges, Team Penske has won both of the races held so far in which composite bodies could be used. How does that speak to your team’s work?

Erwin: The two races have been very different. We really went back and completely our thought process and set-up after the first Richmond race. That was one of our weaker races of the year and we kind of went back to the drawing board and came back with something completely different. We appeared to have a better long-run car than (Kyle Busch) and that was quite gratifying. At the spring Dover, us and Kyle Larson were probably the two best cars. We had a very good Dover set-up, so we took it and put it in the flange-fit car went back and the good thing was we had Blaney in the car both Dover races. Right off the track, the set-up worked well. It looks like we hit on it with the new car but in the first race we reworked the set-up and the second race, we were very, very good in the first race and basically brought that set-up back.

What remains as one of the big question marks for the flange-fit cars?

Erwin: We have not carried that car to a true intermediate track yet, where the aerodynamic characteristics are dominant. Both tracks we have raced so far, even on the Xfinity side, we would consider they are slow tracks, corner entry speeds are not as high. The aerodynamic forces are not as much in play as they would be at a Charlotte, Texas or Atlanta. That was all by design. Even the teams that I know that have bothered to take them to the wind tunnel, they have had very limited information in what they’ve been able to generate in comparison to the steel-body cars. How that car drivers in a pack, or in the draft, or with someone on your quarter-panel – I think we’re all going to have to wait until the first intermediate race before we draw any conclusions on that.

You’ve had Brad in the car and Ryan in the car. Has there been any specific driver feedback regarding the different body style?

Erwin: Not really, certainly not from Dover. Brad really tried to compare the two. In his postrace interview at Richmond he was asked about how the car drove. I think he may have commented on the fact that he could kind of tell that it was lighter. Maybe it stopped a little better, maybe used a little less brake. I don’t think anything significant aerodynamically would have shown up on the car in either race. Blaney was just very happy with how the car ran and was thrilled to get a win at Dover.

Your team is in a very good position to advance to the Championship 4 at Homestead to compete for the owner’s championship. How focused are you on that?

Erwin: We are extremely focused on winning that title. We’ve led the points for the majority of the season with the exception of just a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, we were unable to capitalize on either Texas or Kansas with a win that would have locked us in at Homestead. So, we find ourselves in a situation at Phoenix where we need to run smart from a points-standpoint. We ran very well at the first Phoenix race and had the opportunity to win the race. I feel good about this car we’re taking back to Phoenix this time. We have to protect against a DNF but we need to do there with the mindset we’ve had all year – run up front and try to win the race, especially for Discount Tire, it’s in their backyard.