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Carpentier adjusting to NASCAR

Submitted by SHNS on Tue, 02/05/2008 - 15:51

Patrick Carpentier is all smiles -- for the moment. He has a great deal, a full-time ride for the first time in a couple of years, with a top-notch NASCAR operation, the George Gillett-Ray Evernham Dodge operation. And he's having a blast.After 500 miles of drafting at Daytona International Speedway -- if he goes the distance -- he might have more to say about life in the stock-car world, after having spent most of his driving career in Indy-cars and sports cars.But right now he's all smiles. Even in NASCAR's new car. Of course, he's so new to NASCAR he doesn't even know that much about the old car.Carpentier is from Montreal, but he has called Las Vegas home the past several years, so during last week's big NASCAR tests at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and California Speedway, he was right at home, literally."It is nice to sleep at home, and come back testing the next day," he said.Even with the new car?"It's been not too bad," Carpentier said. "We struggled a bit at the beginning of the test. But it's been a little bit better. I'm working with my teammates quite a bit."That's Kasey Kahne and Elliott Sadler, a diverse threesome, to say the least. "Kasey drove my car, and we changed a few things," Carpentier said. "It's been wonderful. They've been working with me, helping quite a bit."Carpentier faces a difficult learning curve, so he has spent most of the offseason, such as it is, testing at various tracks."Every track is different," Carpentier said. "When you leave one track, you're like, 'I think I've got it down.' Then you come to a different track, and you've got to learn again."But it's been fun, it's been good. We've been improving. So far so good."Carpentier plans to commute to NASCAR races, rather than move to the Mooresville area. How long he can keep that up remains to be seen."This year, I'm not moving," he said. "We love Vegas. Been here since '99. My daughter and my son were born here, they got a lot of friends here, they're still going to school, and I don't want to take my daughter out of school."There are direct flights from basically everywhere in the States back to Vegas, so for this year we're going to definitely stay in Vegas."Carpentier is no stranger to the Las Vegas track. In fact, he raced there, in Indy-cars, in 2004."The grandstands were packed for our race ... because there was the Truck race before us, and everybody was still there," he recalled with a laugh.NASCAR and the NASCAR life is quite different, for drivers as well as fans."It's very different from what I'm used to," Carpentier said, reflecting on the few NASCAR races he's been in so far. "There are a lot of people. Went to Phoenix last year, and Homestead, and it's unbelievable to see the motorhomes lining up outside the track, and the stands packed."Out on the track, it's a lot of hard work, and the verdict is still out on whether he can do this or not."It's such a big learning curve," he readily conceded. "I mean -- in the way you describe the car. We (in Indy-cars) are so used to having a car that's stuck to the track when you go through the corners -- you know the car is going to be there."But with these cars it's how much on the edge you can drive them, and how much you can push them toward that direction."When they put Kasey's setup on the car, I think it might be pretty loose for me. Because once you get that setup, you really have to drive in almost all the way the middle of the corner full-throttle and just keep the back end of the car down."Maybe that's what I need to get used to."Despite the newness of it all, Carpentier isn't going to complain. After all, it's a full-time job, and he has factory backing.So he's upbeat."The difficult part to me is just understanding what I need with this car to really get it up to the top of the chart," he said. "It's going to take some time, just driving it, getting used to it."And so will everyone else on the tour, which puts Carpentier on a bit more even footing.(Contact Mike Mulhern at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.) (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)