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Cleveland Brothers was honored to have special guest Ryan Newman of Cat® Racing join us as we opened the new Wilkes-Barre/Scranton branch. Attendees had the opportunity to meet Ryan and listen to him speak about his experience with Caterpillar equipment and driving a compact track loader on his farm as well as his time on the race track.

Check out the video below as Terry Baumgarten of Cat Racing moderated the Q&A session.

Terry: So Ryan first time you’ve been a grand marshal, if you will, of a grand opening.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s really cool. I love this area. Pocono has a great race track. I have a lot of great friends in the area. It’s cool to be here at Cleveland Brothers. Caterpillar does things big. Big equipment, first class machinery. You can see here, it’s a great facility and I’m proud to be here to open it up.

Terry: Now, we’ve been involved with you now for about a year and a half, are there any surprises in a year and a half, something you didn’t know about Caterpillar, the dealers, the customers?

Ryan: I wouldn’t say it surprises me, but just the loyalty of the Cat emblem and Caterpillar,  in general. It’s pretty impressive to see how loyal people are to a product. It obviously goes without saying the equipment is great; it does its job whether that’s moving dirt, carrying it or whatever else.

Terry: You talked a little about the equipment; you actually run a piece on the farm. Tell us a little bit about what you do at home; off the track.

Ryan: I have cows and buffalo at home. For the winter, just like us, they’ve got to eat, too. But when there’s snow on the ground, they need hay. I spend a lot time making hay using a 259B compact track loader that’s really nice. The enclosed cab is really nice when it’s 100 degrees down in North Carolina. I use it for stacking a barn full of hay. Actually, Monday, I put in about 95 bales, so we’re good for the winter now; everything else is a bonus.

Terry: Those are the big round bales, you’re not talking squares.

Ryan: Yeah, the big round four-by-four bales; stacking them three-high.

Terry: You talked about comfort…How does running a 259 compare to running the 31 car?

Ryan: Well it doesn’t go as fast, but it is nice to have a button to make it go faster. I wish the race car had a button to make it go faster sometimes. I mean, it’s a totally different piece of equipment but in the end, your still trying to get a job done. We’ve been fairly successful with our 31 Caterpillar Chevrolet. We finished second last year in chase for the championships, so we’ve been close. That was a good year. We look forward to this weekend because it’s Cat colors on the race car here at the Pocono and we haven’t been in the victory lane yet. It would be no place better than for Cleveland Brothers to be on the deck lid  and get a first victory.

Terry: We heard a little bit of history, the first race that Jay went to which was Rockingham in 2001 and the Caterpillar car won that race.

[Laughs] We know what Jay’s doing on Sunday.

Terry: And we better know what you’re doing, too.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s the plan. It’s a big fun race track. All three corners are a little bit unique. They repaved the tunnel turn for this race, so it should be a lot smoother. It’s going to be different for everybody. It’s kind of combination of road course and oval and I like it.

Terry: You talked about them repaving the tunnel turn and if anybody watched the first race of the year, that was getting pretty rough. So you’re going to go in without any practice, how do you guys approach that when they change the tracks and you don’t have any time on it?

Ryan: A lot of the work is done with simulation, but the biggest thing is that they made the race track better by making it smoother. So, what we would have done as far as preparing for a rougher race track had we come back, now we really don’t have to do. It’s actually way easier with the change that they made to come back and be prepared, as we were surprised for the first race to how rough it was.

Terry: How rough was that? You used to run a skid steer loader on tires and that can be rough. How does that compare to the tunnel turn before they repaved it.

Ryan: It was really rough with the race car that we were worried about having parts on the car break, like suspension components, a-frames, shocks, shock mounts, things like that. It was that rough. It’s probably the roughest I’ve ever had inside a race car. Kentucky is kind of bouncy, but at Pocono, where the tunnel was, there’s a double tunnel and when you hit the first one, it amplified for the second one.  It’s like you were up in the air, came back down and hit even harder.

Terry: Couldn’t you just go faster and jump that second one?

Ryan: [Laughs] We were trying to go as fast as we could.

Fan #1: Hi Ryan, I’m from Congressman Barletta’s office. Thank you for being here. My question is how do you like the newer engines in the car compared to the bigger motors in the cars last year?

Ryan: It is the same exact engine, they just us a tapered spacer between the intake and the throttle body. Basically, it’s just restricting the air; it’s going from a big straw to a small straw. It knocks out about 80 to 90 horsepower. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter a whole lot because of the reduced drag on the race car with a shorter spoiler. So, it all equates out.

We’re actually going about the same speed but what we’ve lost is a little throttle response; the big carburetor or big motor type feel. We may not be able to do a burn out or have a lot more power at the bottom end. It hasn’t changed racing, in my perspective but what it did was keep us in the window of keeping the cars safer. We were getting so fast at some of these race tracks, like even at Poconos and Michigan, we were going 215 going in the corner. And our cars, when you turn them around at 215, they like to fly and we don’t need that.

Fan #2: Can my buddy drive?

Ryan: [Ryan and audience laughs] Can your buddy drive? You can get in. Do you want to get in?

Little boy shakes his head. Man in background says, “Tell him it’s your birthday and you want to drive.”

Terry: Is it your birthday today? How old are you?

Fan #3: Seven.

Ryan: Well I don’t know if you’re legal to drive it, but you can get in it. Hang on – listen, he needs a new shirt. If we can get him a new shirt, we’ll get him in the car. For his seventh birthday, if you didn’t get him a shirt yet, maybe get him a new one for when he turns eight.

Terry: So we talked about the rules changing and the engines changed from ’14 to ’15, but now you’ve got more rules packages from race to race. How does that affect you? Does it affect the team more than it affects you?

Ryan: It absolutely affects the team more than it does me. The biggest change between the Indy and Michigan rules packages, there’s a lot more drag on the car. There’s a lot more down force on the car compared to the low down force package. The drag difference is different from our typical 2015 rules. After Kentucky, that same package will go to Darlington, we’ll run the low down force package. After Indy, we’ll take that same package to Michigan. So we’ve got one of each left of the drivers recommendation which is the low down force package and NASCAR’s hypothetical best case scenario which is what we call their science project for Indy and Michigan. We have one race left in Michigan for that.

In the end, we all have to drive the same type of package which makes us all equally competitive but it’s really tougher for the guys because the aerodynamics of the race car are what dominates how well it sticks, how much down force you have in the front versus rear; changes in those weights. We have ballasts that we move around – left and right, forward and backwards, and makes a difference in how the car handles. So all of those things combined makes it harder on the [crew]. Steering wheel is still in the same position.

Fan #4: How fast does your car go?

Ryan: At Michigan last year, we were doing 218 going in the corner which is really fast. Here at Pocono, I’m guess we’ll probably average 180 to 185. So, we’ll hit 205 going into turn one.

Fan #5: It’s race weekend, how hectic is your schedule and doing something like this, how does it weigh in on you?

Nothing big. We flew up a couple hours early to be here. I typically would have come up around dinner time. With the kids, we try to keep eating and sleeping schedules normal whether it’s napping or bedtime. It’s not really anything different doing an appearance like this. It’s pretty hot for the Poconos and from what I understand, it’s supposed to cool down a little bit.

Terry: How does that play in the car? How do you stay cool in the car?

Ryan: On the quarter windows of the car, those are called naca ducts. Those go to feed the race car and they go to feed me; it all depends on what I work out as a deal with my crew chief. Everything we put inside air-wise is good for cooling but bad for down force. But there’s times where you have to cool yourself off inside the race car. In Indianapolis, with the bumper extension where we had underneath the car was super, super hot for everybody so we ducted more air to myself than we typically would have just to keep from getting too hot.

I’ve actually got a burn on my left heel from Loudon about two weeks ago like a fifty cent piece cooked through my heel. That’s the first time I’ve ever had that happen. I have air conditioning which turns into ambient air to my helmet.

Inside my car, the same material that they use on air conditioned seats, I put in my uniform. So I’ll slide it into my uniform and I’ve got a port that goes into it to circulate some air around my guts to keep me cool and keep my core temperature down. And we’ll duct some air to my feet and underneath my seat just to keep some hot spots out of the car.

Check out more photos from grand opening of the Cleveland Brothers Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Branch

Learn more about what the new facility has to offer and see a video of Ryan Newman’s grand entrance as he cuts the ribbon at the grand opening.

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