BY TEAM FORD RACING CORRESPONDENT

Martinsville, Va. — Ford has made tremendous advances in providing engineering support to the Ford NASCAR Nextel Cup teams this year, but there are definite lines drawn on what Ford engineers can and will do to help the teams, said Pat DiMarco, the vehicle dynamics and chassis supervisor at Ford Racing Technology.

What the engineers share among the teams is how to tackle problems and find solutions. What’s closely protected is the specifics of the setups each team runs.

“We share processes and simulation tools, the development of those to make them better, so if some of the stuff that the Roush guys are working on makes our simulation tools better, that gets applied across the board,” said DiMarco, who has Ford engineers working in every Ford NASCAR shop lending help to individual teams. But those engineers who work on behalf of specific teams aren’t allowed to compare notes with the engineers at other Ford teams.

“They won’t take a setup—and I won’t let ‘em take a setup and go say, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys go try something like this?’ I pride myself on ethics, that my guys don’t go do that,” said DiMarco. “We do not take things off the car on race weekend … it’s more the tools and the methodologies, the processes that we share across the teams. All the teams know that going in.”