Clipped Wings: Interview with AJ Allmendinger

AJ Allmendinger has been through the wringer this year. One of the fastest, most exciting open-wheel racers in the US quit Champ Car at the end of last season to become a Red Bull Toyota driver in the squad's inaugural year in NASCAR.

It hasn't been easy: several times Allmendinger hasn't made the races, a snowball effect from not getting enough seat time. But he has earned respectability among his peers, and there have been signs of real progress.

Autosport.com caught up with him on Sunday morning at the season finale in Miami-Homestead. Unfortunately he had nothing to do, having chalked up a DNQ for the Cup race.

The motorhome-altering temper of the day before had subsided. Now he was back to the charming, honest, intense and funny young race driver that we once thought of as the USA's Next Big Thing in single-seaters. Thankfully, a frustrating debut season in stock cars hadn't changed that.

Q: Obvious question first. NASCAR - as tough as you expected, or tougher?

AJ Allmendinger: "Tougher. The races themselves are about what I expected. But tougher to get in the races? Oh, yeah... I think if you ask anybody that question they'd probably say it's tougher.

"I don't think Brian [Vickers, team-mate] expected to miss 14 races this year, or Michael Waltrip to struggle to make races. Those are good drivers."

Q: How much of that is down to Red Bull Toyota being a start-up team? If you had been with Hendricks Motorsports this year, would you expect to have made all the races?

Allmendinger: "Yeah. To be out of the top 35 and make every race is tough. But would we make more? Sure. That's not rocket-science. Hendricks is a team that has been here 25 years and they've got the best stuff right now. We're still learning."

Q: What I'm getting at is that obviously you're learning how to drive these cars too. Would you have learned quicker in another team, because you'd have been starting with a car that was dialled-in better?

Allmendinger: "I doubt it. There would still have been my own mistakes during qualifying that would have prevented me getting in. You know, what started the year off bad was that some of the deals Red Bull had worked on for the Busch car and the Trucks fell through, and I really didn't have that much time for six months in a car.

"And that's the thing - people don't see that. They just come to the race track and see that you didn't make another race. If I had been in a Busch car or a Truck every weekend, whether I was testing the Cup car or not, I would have made more Cup races.

"It's part of racing - stuff falls through, deals don't happen sometimes. You can bitch about it all you want, but you just have to get down and do it."

Q: How hard is it on your ego? Single-seaters came naturally to you - your first ever Champ Car race, three times the horsepower of what you'd been used to in Atlantics, and you qualified eighth!

Allmendinger: "I don't know if I look at it as a hurt to my ego, but more the frustration of not getting it right away. These cars are so tough to drive. It's not like, 'Oh I used to be The Man, and now I'm low down the totem pole'. It's sitting there thinking 'Hell, there's something here I'm just not getting and I need to get better at.'

"That's where that comes from. You're right, open-wheel racing are similar in the way they react, they just have different levels of power. Well this is a different beast that is completely new to me."

Q: Did you expect to go better at Sonoma and Watkins Glen given your road-racing background?

Allmendinger: "Yeah, that was disappointing. At Sonoma we were as bad as we could be. The cars were. Again, I come back to testing. I only had half a day of testing on a road course before we went there.

"The guys were saying 'Oh you're a road course guy, you'll be fine', and I'm saying 'Yeah I'm a road course guy with a car that's 1600 pounds with about six times the downforce. My hand doesn't have to do this on the gearshift lever at the same time [he scribes a giant capital H in the air gripping a lorry-sized gearstick]- I mean, what is that?!'

"At the school at Virginia with a late-model car, the instructor there told me - maybe he was just blowing smoke up my ass - that the only guy who he had seen adapt that quickly to it had been Tony Stewart.

"I was six tenths quicker than Juan [Montoya] and I thought we were gonna be fine. But then we weren't very good at all - we had carburettor problems, and I only got three laps of practice.

"At Watkins Glen, again I got a few laps in during practice before it rained, and I still thought I'd be okay, but then it rained in qualifying too and I never had a chance.

"But just before that, I did get to test the car at Road Atlanta, which I'd never been to before. And I tell you, that is a ballsy track in a stock car! Trying to get that thing stopped for a corner, coming down the hill sideways... phfff... That was the most fun I've had in a stock car so far."

Q: I heard Jeff Gordon's been helping you. Is that right?

Allmendinger: "Yeah, here and there, in the little time I've got to speak to him he's been really helpful, and really nice about it. He's not been 'look, get outta my way, rookie'; he's been saying 'Hey AJ, just follow me around the track, see what I'm doing'.

"But it's funny when he tells me to follow him, because I get to see that my car's not doing what his is doing, either! At Martinsville he was telling me 'You just roll down the corner, drill the brake a little bit and then you go', and I'm thinking, 'Not in my car you don't.'

"But Jeff, and Mark Martin and Kyle Petty have been saying really kind words about me and helping me out."

Q: You've been doing well relative to Brian, given his experience and track record?

Allmendinger: "Yeah, I'm an ex-open-wheel guy so I want to compare myself to Brian. And these last two weeks I was quicker than him in practice but because of a shitty draw, I didn't make the race otherwise I reckon I'd have been quicker than him in qualifying too.

"When you're having a bad year, it's the little things that matter and how I compare to my team-mate is important. If he had made 34 out of the 36 races, I'd be thinking 'Wow, I've got a lot of work to do'.

"But I think he'll end with six races more made, three of those were to do with us getting rain. So like I say, we'll take the little stuff. But... it still sucks!"

Q: Jeff Gordon recently said that he looks at what [team-mate] Jimmie Johnson is running and he can't see how it works at all, and he realises that there are major differences in driving style. How different are yours and Brian's set-ups?

Allmendinger: "We have different set-ups at times, but there have been multiple times, especially in the second half of the year, where we're switching between each other's set-ups.

"It happens a lot in Happy Hour, where I'm trying something out and I say to my engineer, 'I don't know, let's just go to Brian's'. Everybody favours something in the car so there'll be little differences, but we all use each other's set-ups at times."

Q: How different is a NASCAR car's handling from the start of a stint to the end? Does the fuel weight going down balance out the fact that the tyres are going away?

Allmendinger: "Oh no... No, no, no. And that's still the thing that most frustrates me: the fact that you go out with a new set of tyres and you realise 'Okay, that's the fastest I'm going'. That's hard.

"I was speaking to Pat [Carpentier] about it, and I've spoken to Dario [Franchitti] about it. We're all like 'How do these guys go so fast at the end of a stint?' We're just hanging on and sliding around, and that's one of the toughest things to learn: knowing you're going to go slower but working out how to go less slow than everybody else.

"Coming from open-wheel, you're so use to, five laps before you pit, dropping the hammer and running out your five quickest laps. Here you're just trying not to go slow."

Q: I'd imagine these cars are a nightmare after a long full-course caution period and you restart on cold tyres. Does your previous experience of driving fast on cold tyres help you here in NASCAR?

Allmendinger: "Yeah, but it comes and goes. Last night in the Busch race I was really on it after cautions and went from 29th to 21st in three laps. In fact, I don't think there was a single restart in which I got passed or I didn't pass someone. But then there are times when I'm struggling too. Part of it is the set-up of your car.

"But yeah it's tough. I mean, when we were on street courses in Champ Car, after a yellow flag even if you were struggling to get your tyres up to temperature, it was still hard for someone to pass you. You could suck but still not be passed. Here, if you struggle in a four-wide pack, you start thinking 'uh-oh'."

Q: How different are the Busch cars?

Allmendinger: "They're different. There's less horsepower and the wheelbase is shorter so they're more twitchy and darty the whole time."

Q: Does that suit you better? You were running great out there last night - apart from Jeff Burton [winner] you were running the same pace as Carl Edwards and co...

Allmendinger: "I don't know if it suits me better. I'm just getting in the flow of things. We were looking pretty good until we got hit, and then we got off-sequence with tyre changes. Yeah, we were hanging in there - we should have been top five, top six kinda material. But that's the story of the year, isn't it?

"The other thing is that Ganassi run a good car. We've shown just as much promise in our Cup car when we've hit the set-up right. Problem is, in a Cup race there are 43 guys who are fast, whereas in Busch there are still a couple of guys out there who don't have such good cars.

"But run top 15 in Busch and it's like running top 15 in a Cup race - all the same guys against you."

Q: Which is your favourite of the tracks, and is that tied in with how your car ran there?

Allmendinger: "No, not at all. Bristol! For sure. And Richmond. We made both those races, and though we didn't have great finishes, they were still amazing. Bristol is just badass! To walk in to this sorta Coliseum and look around - you just stand there wondering 'What the... what am I doing in here?'

"The worst mistake is to watch them run before you drive, because you're watching them thinking, 'That's what I've gotta look like driving round this place?' And then when Dale Earnhardt Jr's name gets called pre-race and 180,000 people just erupt into cheers... Awesome.

"Richmond's just a cool place, but the track's real fun: there's three lines to run. And where your car works is something that changes every five laps."

Q: What's the driver discipline like with fenders?

Allmendinger: "[Long pause] Sometimes it's a little over the top. At any point that you don't like somebody, you can wreck 'em. But you do know that some day it will come back and bite your ass. They'll come and find you.

"But let's be honest, it's all part of what the fans love. They love to see drivers leaning on each other, tapping each other, wrecking each other. And I think NASCAR lets it police itself, because if someone wrecks you, you can just go out and wreck them. And until it gets out of control where guys are doing it week after week, they let it police itself."

Q: In Champ Car last year, you had a 'Unique Selling Point' which is that you were the only American in the series. So you come over here and your USP is that you're recently from US open-wheel. But now a bunch of famous open-wheelers have joined you. Does that piss you off, or does it convince you that you made the right move?

Allmendinger: "Neither. I may have had a USP in Champ Car, but I still got fired by RuSPORT! Did my nationality help me get hired by Forsythe? Don't think so... My USP after that was that I went out and won. That's the only reason my name was mentioned. Before that, I was just American who was quick but wasn't winning.

"What's convinced me I made the right move is that Champ Car, unfortunately, is really struggling. This doesn't make me happy: it's sad to see, but that is why I made the choice.

"It had nothing to do with money. Am I making more money? Well, barely. But is Champ Car going to be around next year? Who knows? The fans cussed me out, and you media guys cussed me out and there were rumours I was making $3m. That made me laugh: I wish I was. I could get a bigger bus for $3m.

"But the thing I was looking at was longevity. Yeah, okay, it's a big chance, and I could get fired and be looking for a ride next year. Or I could go out and run well and know that I could have a job possibly for 20 years, know that the series is gonna be around. That's ultimately why I made the decision."

Q: So is that the plan? You'll do this for 20 years?

Allmendinger: "I've found in racing and in life you never know what's going to happen. Two years ago if you'd said 'AJ, you're going to go and do NASCAR with Red Bull' I'd have said 'You're freakin' crazy'.

"So I don't know, but jeez, there's a plan in place for this thing to be around another 100 years, at least. With Champ Car, you're just hoping it'll be there in a couple of years. And I do hope it'll be around. I watch it on TV and I still miss driving the cars, and the fans deserve a lot better than what Champ Car's giving them in that sense.

"It is an awesome product, really awesome: the racing's great, most of the venues are great, the cars are the coolest sounding things on this planet. But... either they don't know how to sell it, or they haven't sold it. And that's the reason I'm not there.

"In the long run, can I make a lot more money? Sure. This year, I probably broke even or maybe made a little less than I could have made over there. But it's longevity.

"When I had the ride offered to me, I looked at it in so many ways and spoke to so many people about it. 'Do I take this chance of a lifetime and maybe not get it, or do I stay in Champ Car and maybe two or three years down the line it won't be there?'

"And every driver I spoke to about it - even Paul Tracy, whether he wants to admit or not - said 'If you don't go, you're the biggest idiot on this planet'. Every driver told me that. Even Sebastien [Bourdais] told me that."

Q: Does it worry you that in a couple of years' time there will probably be no going back to open-wheelers? If, for instance, the Red Bull or Toyota F1 squads were looking to replace one of their drivers, your name isn't even going to be mentioned in two years' time because you'll just be seen as NASCAR for life.

Allmendinger: "That's two years down the line. You don't know what's going to happen. You just don't know. All I'm focused on is working as hard as I can in the off-season to get ourselves in the first five races next year so we don't have to live through this hell of a year that we've just been through.

"I think we've got the tools necessary to do the job. You ask me about two years down the line. All I'm worried about is now."

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