Lucas Oil Off Road Spotlight: Adler's secret weapon

Sprint and midget ace Cory Kruseman has helped several drivers in the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series get faster, and now he's working closely with Pro 4 pilot Greg Adler.

One of the biggest driver improvement secrets in short course off road racing stopped being a secret long ago, even if many of the drivers may not want to admit they've used it. But several of the top Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series drivers have no problem giving credit to Cory Kruseman and his Midget and Sprint Car Driving School. After several years working with Brian Deegan – and helping him to five championships as both coach and spotter – he's working with Greg Adler as he tries to make regular podium appearances with the No. 10 4 Wheel Parts Pro 4.

"I spent the last four-and-a-half years working with Brian Deegan, a 4 Wheel Parts driver," Kruseman says. "It was time for a change. Brian was stepping into a Pro 4 instead of a Pro Lite, and I already had a commitment to Greg, so I ended up coming over here full time."

But what does a dirt oval racer know about short course off road that makes drivers eager to work with him or go through his school? By Kruseman's estimation, it's about 60 percent of the Pro field. And it's not just short course off road racers looking to up their game by sliding a midget around on dirt – road racers like Patrick Dempsey and Chris Dyson have given it a go, as well as drag racers and stock car drivers galore.

"There are obviously a lot of things that we – having a career in open wheel in sprint cars and midgets mostly – do that they do," explains Kruseman, who has been Non-Winged World Champion, SCRA champion, USAC Western States champion and won the Chili Bowl twice, along with a ton of other titles. "I was fortunate to dabble; I ran some IndyCar stuff, I ran some NASCAR Craftsman Truck, so I was very fortunate to work with a lot of key people and absorb a lot of knowledge. Having a driving school, I'm able to work with those key people and still learn every day, as well as teach every day.

"If you think about a car in general, there are two types of cars – there's an aero car and a non-aero car. An aero car depends on aerodynamics and ground effects and it uses the load of the air to control what it does. A non-aero car is all the cars I just listed except the Indy car. That said, there is no difference in how the driving, how the inertias of an off road truck that jumps 200 feet int the air handles differently than a sprint car. It comes to corner entry, middle of the corner and corner exit," he continues.

OK, point taken...but sprints, midgets, NASCAR trucks and the like don't have a big mound of dirt that's going to toss them in the air in the middle of a corner. They don't have whoops leading into the turn, or a little double on corner exit, and they never have to set for a corner in the air like the LOORRS trucks do for Turn 1 at Glen Helen.

"The only way a car is going to go fast is with two conditions – if it's pointing forward, and if the tires are on the ground. So that takes everything we've learned, and any jumps, any fingers, any of that sort of stuff ... the faster we get the tires back on the ground, the faster the car accelerates. It's all understanding physics, and we're all scared of the word physics because we don't know what it means. But I can explain physics to you in 30 seconds. Will you be a physicist? No, but you'll understand how a vehicle works," Kruseman says.

Adler is happy to explain that it works: "I've done his school three or four times, and it's always humbling. It looks a lot easier, like all this stuff looks easy until you get into it. But it's good practice for throttle control and when we go back we always have a few good takeaways – and it's fun to wheel one of those sprint cars around!"

At the track, Kruseman is Adler's spotter. But more importantly he's an observer, with the help of video on the truck and from the grandstands. Those cameras in the grandstands are not always watching Adler; they may be trained on the fastest truck in the session, or the fastest truck that's not Adler. With all that video, Kruseman and his drivers get a complete picture of what's going on.

"We can listen to the throttle, we can watch the tendencies of what he's doing in the cockpit – the steering wheel, the gearshift, his body movement inside the truck – as well as watching what the truck is doing on the outside. You've got to remember when you put a helmet on, you only get to see about 60 percent of what you do without a helmet on. It's like putting blinders on a horse – they don't understand what's going on around them," says Kruseman.

Is Adler finding any value in all this? Deegan did, and had no problem crediting Kruseman with some of his success. Now Adler is looking to claim some of that success for himself as he finds himself racing Deegan in Pro 4, and he thinks it's working.

"He's got a good driver's perspective," Adler says. "As a guy in my ear from the spotter's stand, moving me around, finding the right lines, finding the places that are going to be quick on the track, knowing that he has the perspective from all those years of racing sprint cars and understanding the dirt. He's been in my ear for Pro 4 for a long time, but now we're getting more time with him to really understand the track and where the traction is, where the speed is."