By alley - Oct 3, 2014, 2:58 PM ET

IMSA: NASCAR DNA has Action Express championship-ready

Coming into the 2014 season, DPs received wholesale updates, including a big spike in downforce from revised bodywork, carbon fiber brakes, paddle-shifting systems, and other trick componentry designed to bring the Grand-Am designs in line with the ALMS P2 cars. Most DP owners ordered everything on the menu, but Nelson was one of few to take a cautious approach to the process.

From leaving his drivers to shift manually to simplifying the construction methods and processes used with AXR's Coyote chassis, Nelson's outlook on prototypes involves mastering the basics and sticking with them at all times.

"We're constantly looking at all the new ideas that come along and looking at our competitors and trying to say, 'OK, what is the risk of this new idea or this new part versus the reward of putting it on our car?'" Nelson (LEFT) told RACER. "There's a lot of sexy stuff that comes along that we'd love to have, but when we weigh the risk versus reward we say, 'Well, how much speed does that get you and how much higher is your risk of it breaking?' And you'll be behind the wall before the race is over. We like to stay with proven technologies. Fortunately, when you do that your budget gets lower, too. So our accounting folks get happier when we're not buying all the latest, greatest things."

Nelson's dedication to finding success through the simplest means also extends to AXR's race strategy calls and overall philosophy on how a race is run. Taking chances, gambling on alternate strategies and some of the other adventurous choices made by teams go apparently go against Nelson's nature.

"Certainly it does," he admitted. "Our whole thing is this: Let's start at the very foundation of why we're making this decision. If you think about it there's no magic – there's no tricks up the sleeve that work on a regular basis. Occasionally, you get surprised by something that nobody has ever done before but, typically, it's pretty much grab the ball, run up the middle, see how many yards you can get. We keep that play as our major play, and it's not all exciting and there's no long throw to the end zone every time. We just try to pound out each lap and try to make decisions on: How far will our gas go, how far will our tires go? We do that first and then we ask what's our competitor doing?

"I think a lot of mistakes that we've made in the past have been we make our decisions first on what are the other guys doing, and the second one, what do we do? We've changed our philosophy now. We made it as simple as we could to understand. We're going to put in gas, we might put on tires and we might change drivers. Those are the three things. The three phases of our pit stop, let's get that right. Let's make sure we can get our gas in well, let's make sure we can change our driver well and let's make sure we can change our tire well. We're not always the fastest, but we run that play over and over again."

Nelson and Sawyer have also drawn upon their NASCAR pit stop experience to influence AXR's DP crew, and the results have been impressive.

"The pit row part of it, the pit crew, we brought in – my background's NASCAR racing – and we've brought in a director of operations, Elton Sawyer, from a NASCAR team and we got another one, our shop foreman is a NASCAR career guy. We're all bringing that mentality to road racing. Even Iain Watt, our engineer, he spent five years in NASCAR. Those guys have got pit stops figured out. So we tried to bring that mentality to the series and said, 'OK, the first time you change a tire real fast should not be the first pit stop of the race. Let's do it back at the shop. Let's be ready when we unload.'

"We brought that NASCAR pit stop mentality to this series and it's really, really become our run up the middle. A bad pit stop for us now is the unusual, where three years ago it may have been a good stop was the unusual. So we reversed that. That is back down to the basics. If you can't cover all elements of the weekend well but you've got really great horsepower, really great aero or really great drivers, if you can't cover all of those bases with maybe just a little better than average of all of them, you're not going to get to the finish line."

Despite AXR's heavy reliance on NASCAR methodology, Nelson has a driver lineup that's as far from stock car racing as you'll find. Portugal's Joao Barbosa, Brazil's Christian Fittipaldi and France's Sebastien Bourdais have put AXR on the cusp of its first title, and as Nelson shares, the international trio are a perfect fit for the team.

"Fortunately, on our driver's lineup we ended up above average on all three of them," he said. "All three of them on the No. 5 car, Joao and Christian and when Sebastian comes for the longer races, they get along well, they sit in the same seats, they fit well together. They all have the same comments when they drive the car that it needs more of this or more of that. And they all go well. They hold it to the floor. But they also have adopted our philosophy that it's not about that one fast lap; it's how fast can you go over from the green flag to the checkered flag? How many plays up the middle do you have through the Esses? Rather than, 'I got through there really good this time but the last six times I didn't.' At any point in time we may not have the fastest practice speed or the fastest lap speed, but over the long haul, that's our focus – the checkered flag."

Asked if he enjoys using his life's work in NASCAR to apply a different approach to the world of sports car racing, Nelson demurred.

"Personally in my case, I just put my head down and work," he noted. "That's the NASCAR DNA that we have in us: When you run 38 races a year you've got to be ready to go. When I first came over here, it was, 'Oh yeah, the cars are going by [on track], guess better go practice.' Now, we are the first car in the line to go out. We had to change the culture here. What we have to do is very simple, and there's no need to complicate things unnecessarily. That's worked in NASCAR for as long as I've known it, and it can work here, too."