Hampton, Ga. — Last week Jack Roush held auditions for the next up-and-coming Roush Racing star. The process for candidate selection was the famed Gong Show with this episode staged at North Wilkesboro Speedway.
As www.teamfordracing reported last week, Roush took a pair of NASCAR Craftsman Trucks and several truckloads of tires to see how 24 drivers would stack up against each other. With so much in place for the test, Roush only had one fear—weather.
“We had three days scheduled with 24 drivers and we got two days in and the third day rained out, so it was incomplete in that we didn’t get through all the candidates,” Roush reported of his biggest concern of the test.
Despite the weather, the tests went well for those who had a shot behind the wheel of the high-powered F-150; and at the end of two days quite a number of drivers made their laps, completely incident free.
“They all did a nice job,” reported Roush. “You have to be slow to feed the throttle and everybody did a good job with it. We didn’t put a wheel on it [the wall]—we didn’t hurt a car. Or truck, as it were.”
Roush wasn’t able to be there for every step of the way, but with the talent pool at Roush Racing that wasn’t too much of a concern.
“Fact is, I didn’t spend much time with them, I wasn’t there until 4 o’clock Monday,” said Roush, who had to take care of a dental problem early that day. “As it turned out they lost Monday morning due to weather. We went from noon Monday until 6 o’clock.
“I hadn’t seen everybody; I presided over the chief judge, Pat Tryson. Of course Mark [Martin] was there Tuesday and Cowboy [Kevin Starland] and Tony Price were the two crew chiefs for the truck series and they were paying attention,” Roush added. “I was just there paying attention and dealing with the engineering people that were there.”
The engineering side of the exercise was interesting as Roush loaded the trucks up with Pi data acquisition systems to see how the drivers would handle themselves.
“We had data acquisition on the vehicles so we could see brake trace and throttle trace and steering inputs,” Roush said talking about the tools that helped take the guesswork out of the driver feedback they’d get after a driver made his runs. “That was very interesting when you compare one driver to another in the same vehicle on the same day.”
Adding a twist to the Gong Show, this test at North Wilkesboro was just the first of two tests that will take place in the talent culling process.
“That was our first venue for our event,” Roush said of the new and improved Gong Show. “That was the challenging short track, not too much speed but finesse being the order of the day. We’re going to go to Charlotte or Kentucky and try the same thing again.
“There‘s at least eight or 10 candidates that are really standing out. We plan to take eight to Charlotte to see what we can figure out.”
Asked if he liked what he saw, Roush just shook his head grinning as he answered. “The amount of talent that’s out there, young people vying for success running in series that can be viewed as feeder series for the Trucks, Busch and Cup is just incredible.”
There was no word on when the next test is scheduled, but with Carl Edwards destined for his fulltime Cup ride in 2005, too much time cannot pass without a replacement being chosen to take over the No. 99 Roush Racing Ford F-150.
