As you watch Winston Cup cars race around the track, listen for one of the announcers to mention "sheet metal."
It's a term race fans hear all the time, so often that they rarely think about what it means.
Sheet metal is just that a flat sheet of metal. Look at a Winston Cup car. How many flat sheets of metal do you see?
The job of shaping that metal into what makes up a modern race car is done by people called fabricators. If there are true artisans among the men who build NASCAR's equipment, fabricators are those people.
Tim Suggs and Greg Carpenter used to work as fabricators at Hendrick Motorsports. When the Hendrick operation agreed to help another team with its bodywork, Suggs and Carpenter started doing that work on the side to earn extra money.
Today, they're in business for themselves, hanging bodies for Winston Cup and Grand National teams. Their company, Body Dynamics Racing, is already enjoying success on the track.
The body on the car in which Ryan Newman won the season's first Automobile Racing Club of America event at Daytona was built on one of the seven surface plates at the Body Dynamics shop. So, too, was the body on the Dodge that Stacy Compton drove to a front-row starting position in this year's Daytona 500.
It takes the company five or six working days to hang a body on a race car. The cost for a car that will race at a place like Rockingham is about $10,500 and about $12,500 for a car set to run at Daytona or Talladega. Each set of templates to build a car costs $2,000 to $3,000, and the company must have one for each make of car it might build and buy new templates when NASCAR changes the rules.
The Body Dynamics shop has all the tools fabricators use to shape metal into the cars that will travel at close to 200 mph at tracks like Atlanta.
One such tool is a contraption called the English wheel. It's a tool that, frankly, looks as if it has been designed for use by a cartoon character. The metal frame is shaped like a large, squared-off "C." On the open side of the "C," there is a wheel on top and a place for a roller on the bottom.
A sheet of metal is moved back and forth between the wheel and roller, and depending on the size and shape of this roller and the amount of pressure applied, the metal is transformed into various shapes.
"You just have to learn how to use it,"
Carpenter says of the "C" tool. "Everybody has his own style."
Suggs and Carpenter have more modern tools at their disposal, of course. They use hammers pneumatically powered as well as human powered ones and mallets and various other kinds of equipment that allows them to turn a flat piece of metal into virtually any shape.
If you went to the shop and somebody asked you to go to the metal shrinker/stretcher, you might be suspicious that somebody was trying to send you on a snipe hunt. But the tool is real. It flattens out or gathers up the metal in a way that helps give it shape. To understand how it works, tear a 2- or 3-inch piece of foam off of a drinking cup and mash it down against a hard surface. Pick it up and the foam will be longer than when you started.
It's the same idea.
Better yet, if you have Internet access, go to www.bodydynamicsracing.com and watch how the experts do it. Suggs and Carpenter have wired their shop with Web cameras that are up and running all day as their crews are working.
At night, those cameras rerun tape of the work that took place during the day. One of the reasons Suggs and Carpenter went out on their own, and one of the reasons they can hire expert fabricators to work for them, is that they don't work the kind of around-the-clock hours some race teams do.
Suggs and Carpenter get to the racetrack when they can, partly to see old friends and partly to check out what other people who are hanging bodies might be doing differently. "There's a lot of monkey-see, monkey-do in this business," Suggs says.
For that reason, not everything that happens at Body Dynamics can be seen on the Web cameras. When they're working on something that a customer would rather not see assembled in front of the world, Suggs and Carpenter have an area of the shop where there's a little more privacy.
Racing might be a family, but nobody shares all of their secrets. Not even with family.
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