By Caleb Whisler, Staff Writer
When NASCAR rolls into Talladega Superspeedway and Daytona International Speedway, each OEM – Ford, Chevrolet and Toyota – has come in with a plan for every team to work together to win.
At the 2016 Daytona 500, Toyota elevated the mentality of oneness with Ford quickly garnering that mentality. Unfortunately, Chevrolet struggled to get every team under the oneness mentality.
That all changed in the GEICO 500 at Talladega when Jim Campbell, Chevrolet US vice president of Performance Vehicles and Motorsports, gathered every team. Ultimately, the Chevrolet plan worked as Chase Elliott was pushed to the lead by Alex Bowman in the final laps to win the race.
“For them to step up and say, ‘This is what we want’ … we’ve all been looking for that in little ways. I appreciate Jim Campbell and all the Chevrolet staff leading us as a whole. That was awesome. Hopefully we can do that more,” Ty Dillon said about Chevrolet’s new approach. “It is successful, and it is calming that if you have a teammate behind you so if you are loose and not handling well, you have some patience behind you. Any time you can have any kind of plan at a superspeedway always helps.”
Winning crew chief Alan Gustafson believes that orchestrating the communication and laying out the plan up front was what Chevrolet wanted.
“The execution today was just, you know, staying calm and sticking to our guns and staying committed to the cause, Gustafson said. “Fortunately, everybody did that and it worked really, really well. The plan went really pretty much how we laid it out.
“You don’t get those all
the time, so we’ll certainly take it. Proud of everybody at Chevrolet and
all the Chevrolet team members. We needed to win this. We needed to
consolidate our efforts. We needed to break the streak that one of our
rivals has here”
With the laid out plan, Chevrolet was able to garner six of the top-10 positions.