Mike Ford still has to fight off a grin just about anytime the 2002 Brickyard 400 comes up in conversation.

As crew chief for Bill Elliott’s Dodges that season, Ford celebrated along with his driver and car owner Ray Evernham barely 24 hours after Elliott had almost tipped his team’s hand.

Late Saturday afternoon, in a final practice before that year’s race at the historic Indianapolis track, Elliott’s car shot to the top of the speed chart. It’s very unusual for a car to turn its fastest laps at the end of a final practice, since it’s usually running on worn tires by that point.

But not only did Elliott go to the top of the board as he began his final run, he went faster again later in that run. Anybody watching closely that day had to figure Elliott to be a car to watch the next day.

Sure enough, Elliott started second and led 93 of 160 laps to win the race. One week earlier, he’d also won at Pocono Raceway, a track that is similar to Indy in that it has turns without a great deal of banking.

What had Mike Ford found?

“Yeah, the guys were really guessing at that,” Ford said two weeks ago at Pocono Raceway, looking back on that victory.

Crew chief Mike Ford, left, and Nextel Cup driver Denny Hamlin celebrate their victory in the 2006 Pennsylvania 500 at Pocono Raceway.

Some of the same people are doing the same guessing as the cars are preparing for this year’s Nextel Cup event at the Brickyard, where the race is now called the Allstate 400.

That’s because Ford now works at Joe Gibbs Racing with rookie driver Denny Hamlin, and because Hamlin completed a season’s sweep at Pocono with a dominant victory the last time Cup cars were on the track.

Hamlin and Ford have talked about how they struggled when they tested at Indianapolis last month, but nobody’s falling for that. The car that Hamlin used to wax the field with, twice, at Pocono this year was not at the Indy test.

But it’s at Indy this weekend.

Ford knows that if Hamlin’s No. 11 Chevrolet is anywhere near as strong at Indy as it was at Pocono, he’s going to have his peers wondering if he’s gone back into the bag of tricks that worked so well for Elliott.

Mike Ford was the crew chief for driver Bill Elliott, above, when he won the 2002 Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

He doesn’t mind that one bit, either.

“I don’t really worry about what anybody else thinks,” Ford said of all those who might be guessing about some “secret” he might have. “You work on your own stuff. I’m a gearhead and I try and think about our car. If I’m worried about what other people think, it’s just a distraction taking away from our program.”

There may even be those who believe what Ford put under Hamlin at Pocono is, shall we say, up against the edges of the rules. Again, Ford doesn’t care.

“Whenever you run good and you kind of nail something down, people are going to cast stones at you and make accusations,” he said. “I think it’s good from the competition side because, you know, it’s taking their mind off of what they really need to be thinking about, and that’s catching up.

“At Joe Gibbs Racing, we don’t have any gimmicks, we just have good race cars and good race car drivers and good people working on them.”

Elliott was 46 when he won at Indianapolis in 2002, making him the oldest winner of a NASCAR race at that track. Hamlin, at 25, would not be the youngest winner if he went to victory lane on Sunday, but he’d be close. Jeff Gordon was just 23 when he won the inaugural Brickyard 400 in 1994.

“Denny enjoys sitting in the race car every day,” Ford said of his young driver. “He gives good feedback, and we talk a lot the same language. … You could make small adjustments, and the car would react to it, so you know he’s putting the car on the edge. You know, for a crew chief, that’s very rewarding, the fact that you know when you make an adjustment that you’re going to see a result.

“Denny also is very patient. … He knows that he needs to finish in order to move forward. That always comes first. When it comes time to race, you know, he always saves a little bit for the end. So that’s a good combination to have in a young driver.”