HAMPTON, Ga. -- A $250 part is worth millions in misery and aggravation.
That's roughly the cost of a rear axle used in Sprint Cup cars, the kind every team purchases and builds into machines worth hundreds of thousands of dollars representing sponsorships worth millions.
One of those uniform $250 axles went bad on Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s No. 88 Chevrolet at Fontana, Calif., a few weeks ago, knocking him out of the race and sending a more than mild wave of anxiety through Hendrick Motorsports engineers, who had built identical parts into the team's other three cars. Jimmie Johnson's rear axle showed extreme wear, according to team officials, but survived long enough to take him to Victory Lane.
But what about the cars already built for the next three races? Las Vegas passed without incident, but Atlanta Motor Speedway, where the Kobalt Tools 500 is scheduled today, is another issue.
The inexpensive parts and pieces that make up the expensive whole have a way of coming undone. Sometimes it's something silly, like in Phoenix in 2006, when a pocket-change window net fastener broke on Kurt Busch's No. 2 Dodge as he ran with the leaders, prompting NASCAR to black-flag him, sending him from the lead pack to a lap down and a 24th-place finish.
Sometimes it's something critical, something that takes a car out of the race.
It's the maddening aspect of the sport for drivers, owners, mechanics and engineers, perhaps more so than the bizarre variables they cannot hope to control, like hot dog wrappers on grills and potholes in Turn 2.
Machines break. Parts fail. The humans who build and install them are fallible. It happens on small teams where quality control is a second glance by a pit crew member or fabricator, or on large ones, where often several engineers are tasked to vet each of those parts and pieces - whether crafted internally or purchased from outside vendors - before they are fashioned into a race car.
It happens although parts managers spend hours inspecting threads on lug nuts with a watchmaker's attention to detail. No one is immune, not Busch's meticulous Penske team, not Hendrick Motorsports, which has dominated the sport since 2005.
Few race tracks expose those lapses in metal and mettle like Atlanta Motor Speedway, where today a 1.54-mile crucible of long, smooth banking will create high RPMs, high speeds, long green-flag runs and incredible stress on parts - and the people in charge of making them work flawlessly. The 500-mile part almost makes it cruel.
"It's very fast. Vegas was fast, only it was 100 miles shorter," Duchardt said. "So you see guys who find different lines and get up in that high line and the engine wound up ... it can definitely be hard on engines. The weather is cool, so you're making more power. It's bumpy. It's hard on all the components."
Said Johnson: "It's no doubt a demanding track with the G-forces the cars experience here."
Teams attempt to attain quality control by creating as many parts as possible within their own shops, a trend that has cost millions on machines that fashion metal parts with jets of pressurized water. But teams cannot make everything themselves. Spark plugs, alternator belts, window net fasteners, rear axles and more are purchased from outside vendors.
Sometimes the catch is made just in time to prevent a debacle. According to Toyota Racing Development president Lee White, a catastrophic flaw in a vendor part used in every Toyota Sprint Cup engine - including those built independently by Joe Gibbs Racing - was discovered during routine durability testing two weeks before Speed Weeks.
White, who would not identify the part because it is made by a tiny group of companies, said TRD's 180-engineer staff at its engine facility in Costa Mesa, Calif., morphed into a massive quality control team to identify the problem, test it, pass the information to JGR and rebuild engines for customers Red Bull and Michael Waltrip Racing.
"We ran into an issue with components from a vendor that causes a huge amount of heartache," he said. "One hundred and eighty people were working around the clock, seven days a week."
Duchardt doesn't have that long to figure out if those axles are going to hold.
"Atlanta is different than Vegas," he said, "so I'll tell you Sunday afternoon."
