Story by Jacob Seelman & Adam Fenwick

If there’s one word that drivers, race fans and auto enthusiasts across the world know, it’s speed.

Merriam-Webster defines speed as “a rate of motion, such as velocity, or the act or state of moving swiftly.”

There are those in the racing industry who will tell you speed is all that matters. It’s certainly a statistic and a category that has been paid attention to since the dawn of auto racing more than a century ago.

Indy car racing watched speeds exceed the century mark at Indianapolis Motor Speedway as early as 1919, then top 150 mph in 1962 and finally eclipse 200 mph in 1977 following a repaving project.

In NHRA drag racing, speeds regularly soar above 300 mph in the tour’s two nitromethane-powered classes — Top Fuel and Funny Car — and NASCAR fans talk about the 200 mph barrier when it comes to the sport’s two fastest tracks in Daytona (Fla.) Int’l Speedway and Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway.

But does speed matter to the drivers themselves? Is it something they pay attention to? Or is it even still cool?

We discussed the topic of speed with a cross-section of drivers and received a wide variety of opinions and thoughts on speed and its importance.

Mat Williamson

“I don’t even look at it (mph). You go to some places that you can put on a show and you’re not going that fast. A good example is Cornwall (Ontario) Motor Speedway. You’re not really going that fast, it’s just a little quarter-mile bullring. We go there and you race three or four wide and it’s fun to race at. Then you go to places like Charlotte in the heat races where the fans really get ripped off for how good the modified stuff is because you’ve got that big mph and you hold these things to the board and they don’t really get the good show that they deserve.”

Tyler Erb

“I think so. When you qualify, 99 percent of the time the guy with the highest mph at the flag stand is the fastest car. I would say it’s definitely still a major component. But as far as consistency, that’s where you win bigger races. You don’t have to turn the fastest lap to win the race, but if you’re the guy that turns the fastest lap or the fastest mph, then you’re more than likely going to win the race. So in a sense it does matter, but in the sense that your car is very balanced and you can run 50 laps within the same two tenths of a second range, you’re probably going to do better than the guy that can run one fast lap and 10 slow laps. It just depends on which way you look at it.”

Jonathan Davenport

“I don’t think the mph matters because we don’t have speedometers or anything like that. I don’t ever get an average of our speed, just the time for that race track. If we can get a half a tenth or tenth better, that’s the only thing we look for.”

Kyle Strickler

“Winning is everything to me. The game has changed so much now. People could be going in a direction to try to do something that was completely wrong from two years ago. The game has changed so much. Especially on the late model side of it, we can all drive race cars very well and everybody is so close that some of it is so situational. If you don’t qualify well, it’s so much harder to pull yourself out of a hole. You’ve almost got to put a whole race together. We can put cars out there and all of us can be running very similar laps with clean air, then you get to where you’re in racing situations and you can have a really good car in clean air, then be absolutely terrible in dirty air. There is a lot more to it (than mph), there is a lot more to the mental side of it, especially on the late model side and even on the modified side, too. You can have a really, really fast race car and if you don’t get that one lap of good qualifying, it’ll really, really hurts you the rest of the week.”

Jack Beckman

“You can keep all the green hats. I’d trade 10 green hats for one yellow hat. If you qualify No. 1, you get a green hat. To me, that’s a crew chief award. You know what it means? I didn’t screw up the tune-up. That’s what that means. I rode a fast horse that somebody else prepped. But, now that there are those small (bonus) points, the green hat means you’ve got at least eight points for qualifying and at least three in one session for being low (qualifier), so that’s at least 11 bonus points. So it is important, but to me it’s all about the trophies.

“When I started racing, it was all for the time slip. I’d take my car to the track, I’d change everything on it and my measure of success was if that piece of paper had a quicker E.T. (elapsed time) on it, that I did something cool. One day I’m loading my car up and I hung around and watched a guy get done. After he got done loading his car up, he went to the shack and got his trophy. I was like, ‘I want one of those.’

“So I started keeping the car consistent and trying to race for trophies. One day I won a race and I’m in line to get my trophy at the end of the night and the guy behind me says, ‘You know, I think I made $5,000 this year.’ Are you kidding me? So I started slowing my car down to make it even more consistent racing for money. It’s come full circle. For me it’s all about the time slip and the trophy right now.”

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