Drivers
Across its seasons Braun Racing put a long list of drivers in its cars. Some ran a full year, some ran a single event, and in several seasons a single car number was shared between three or four people. That churn is not disorder — it is how an independent team funds a season.
The roster
The drivers whose names appear in the team’s cars across this site’s surviving pages, between 2002 and 2010, were:
- Chad Blount
- David Stremme
- Jamie McMurray
- Casey Mears
- Ryan Hemphill
- Shane Hmiel
- Jorge Goeters
- Ron Hornaday
- Jason Leffler
- Dave Blaney
- Brian Vickers
- Denny Hamlin
- Kyle Busch
- Burney Lamar
- David Reutimann
- Reed Sorenson
- Kasey Kahne
- Brian Scott
The car numbers the team fielded over the years were the No. 32, the No. 38 and the No. 10, alongside a small number of other entries in particular seasons.
One caveat on that list. This site kept publishing through the late-2010 change of ownership described on the team history page, so the names appearing in its final months were driving entries that had already passed to the successor organisation. The list above is therefore what the site recorded, not a statement about who was contracted to whom in any given month.
This archive lists the roster and stops there. It does not reproduce the career records, statistics or personal details that appeared on the original driver pages. Those were written about living people at a particular moment, they are checkable against the sanctioning body's own records, and restating them second-hand from a decade-old snapshot is not something an archive should do. If you want a driver's record, go to the record.
Three kinds of driver
A second-tier entry in this era was typically filled by one of three types of driver, and a team like this one used all three in the same season.
The full-season driver
Someone contracted for the year, running for championship points, building a relationship with one crew chief and one set of notes. This is what a team wants, because continuity is where lap time comes from. The driver learns the car, the crew chief learns the driver's vocabulary — and driver vocabulary is a real technical problem, since "loose" and "tight" mean slightly different things to every person who says them — and by mid-season the feedback loop is short enough to be useful.
The visiting top-level driver
Drivers from the top national series regularly ran second-tier events. For a team this was worth a great deal: an experienced driver gives calibrated feedback, which turns a race weekend into a test session with prize money. It also sold sponsorship. The trade-off is that they arrive on Friday and leave on Saturday night, so nothing accumulates.
The one-off
A young driver buying a start, a regional racer getting a look, or a substitute stepping in at short notice. Teams also field a driver simply because the schedule demands it — a national season has weekends that clash with other commitments, and the car still has to be entered.
What a team is actually assessing
Raw speed is the least interesting thing on the list, because at this level everyone has some. What separates drivers, from a team's point of view, is:
- Feedback quality. Can the driver describe what the car is doing, where on the circuit it is doing it, and at what point in the corner? A driver who can say "it's tight entering and loose from the centre off" has given the crew chief something to work with. "It's just no good" has not.
- Consistency. Twenty laps within a few tenths of each other is worth more than one fast lap and nineteen scrappy ones, because it means the data is trustworthy.
- Equipment preservation. A driver who brings the car back is cheaper than one who does not, and for an independent that arithmetic is decisive.
- Traffic craft. Most of a race is spent around other cars. Judgement about when to take a run and when to wait is where positions are actually won.
- The commercial side. Sponsors are hosted, media is done, appearances are made. Drivers who are good at this part make the next season easier to fund.
The ladder
Almost everyone on the list above arrived through a recognised progression — regional short-track racing, then open-wheel midgets and sprint cars or a national development series, then a second-tier stock car ride, and for some, a top-level seat. The second tier is the rung where that filtering happens most visibly, which is why teams at this level talk about driver development as a business line rather than a courtesy.
The engineering side of that ladder has become far more formal since. University programmes now feed the industry directly, and applied vehicle-dynamics research of the kind carried out at centres like Clemson's automotive research campus sits alongside the seat time that used to be the whole of a driver's education.