Great story at Toyotaracing.com for RGM, Race Shop On Wheels.
http://www.toyotaracing.com/motorsports/nscs/news/2009/07-30-09-01....

A NASCAR race team’s transporter is, in many ways, home away from home for the hundreds of crewmen who travel the country for 10 months out of every year, working hard and chasing glory in the Sprint Cup, Nationwide Series or Camping World Truck Series.
It’s equal parts headquarters and hotel for the crewmen, an oasis of calm for the driver and crew chief, and the place where all the important decisions are made in terms of race strategy, setups and all the thousand and one other details that go into a race weekend.

As such, it comes with just about everything you can imagine stuffed into its confines. Take Robby Gordon Motorsports’ transporter, for instance.

The Freightliner tractor pulls an Elite trailer that has been modified to the needs of the team. Freightliner is a sponsor for RGM, along with Jim Beam, Menards, MAPEI and, of course, Toyota, and the trailer is a one of a kind, says transporter driver Randy Rodriguez.

“Elite Trailers, up in Minnesota makes our trailers,” Rodriguez says. “It’s the only one in the garage area, and it’s unique because it’s all aluminum. Every other trailer in here is steel, so it’s the lightest trailer in the whole garage. It’s a nice piece. Most of them are in drag racing right now. Robby is trying to bring it into NASCAR.”

Rodriguez has an 80,000-pound limit for his tractor-trailer, and that’s a lot more bang for the buck.

“We can carry a lot more stuff, about 3,000 pounds more,” he says. “That’s 3,000 pounds of stuff that the other guys can’t, more spare parts.”

At the tall end of the trailer’s tailgate, there’s room for two of Gordon’s Toyota Camrys parked nose-to-tail above the roof of the crew compartment. That’s also the storage area for things like a spare nose, ladders for the trailer and for the crew to get up to the observation platform and other miscellaneous stuff, including the race-day Sunoco fuel cans.

Under the crew compartment, on either side of the trailer are carry boxes for water and soft drinks, spare hoses, five-gallon fuel cans used in practice and other tools that don’t have a specific home. Propane tanks for the refrigerator are also stored there.

Usually, there’s a barbecue grill somewhere in the trailer, but RGM doesn’t carry one.

“We don’t do any cooking on here,” Rodriguez says. “Robby has a motor home and his driver does all that. We don’t like that whole grilling action around the back of the hauler. We’re here to race, not cook out. Before that motor home guy got here, though, we ate a lot of slick-meat sandwiches. We do have to feed them, though.”

The crew eats twice a day over the weekend, and the transporter driver, once he parks his rig for the weekend, is off to the grocery store for supplies. “I do snacks,” Rodriguez says. “The motor home driver does the heavy stuff, like hamburgers, chicken, and so on.”

Inside the crew compartment, it’s a maze of cabinets and drawers, all with a specific purpose and all latched for easy travel. It wouldn’t do to have some of the equipment the truck carries to spill out while the truck was running down the interstate.

Each crewman has locker space for clothes and equipment, and there’s a closet for uniforms as well as the radios, headsets and pack belts they use.

At the front of the transporter, there’s a shock dynamometer bolted near the bulkhead along with the tubes, pistons and shims that go into today’s modern-day adjustable shock absorbers. The nitrogen that fills the tubes is stored in one of the belly boxes underneath the trailer.

“We have the dynos up there, both shock dyno and spring dyno,” says Rodriguez. “There’s also a work area up there for just the shock guys.”

Across from that is the spring storage bin. Each spring costs between $100 and $200, and there are a lot of them on the road from week to week.

“There’s 50 or 60 springs on there,” says Rodriguez. “That’s a lot of weight, and you have to change them out for the tracks you’re going to.”

Numerous drawers contain pens, batteries, sticky notes and the various other small-but-useful items a crew member might need over the three-day weekend, like spring rubbers, tie-downs and so on.

Rodriguez says the team also carries a spare engine or two, plus other major spares.

“We carry spare engines, and you have to have drive shafts, spare transmissions,” he says. “We don’t have a spare chassis, but we have a spare car and that needs spares too. You don’t want to be dismantling the spare car.”

At the very front of the trailer is the lounge. It contains a bench sofa along one side, work tables and TVs and closets. It is where Gordon and crew chief Kirk Almquist go to debrief after practice, and the team engineer does his calculations there as well.

It’s the place where strategy is formed, ideas are broached and discussed and sometimes discarded. It’s the place where crew members hang out in the heat – and cold – of a race weekend, and it’s where the driver usually stays before the race to get his game face on.

Once the race is over and the team is packing up, Rodriguez has to make sure all the equipment is onboard and in the right place.

“The aisle is full,” he says. “To climb up and check the cars while I’m in route, I have to climb over some equipment to get up to where the cars are. I have to check and see that none of them has come loose or gotten a flat tire or something else that would make it shift during transport. I check the cars two or three times per trip.”

In the aisle is the pit box, which folds up for easy transport, the tool box and generator carts, anything with wheels that can roll up on the tailgate.

“The tool box is really heavy,” Rodriguez says. “It weighs as much as a race car, 3,400 pounds.”

One thing Rodriguez doesn’t carry is tires and wheels. The tires are waiting on the teams when they arrive at the track, and an outside company ships the wheels from track to track each week.

The transporter is the center of the universe for the team, and it has to handle whatever might happen at the track.

“It’s a mini-race shop,” Rodriguez agrees. “It’s everything we need for the routine sort of stuff, and a bunch of things for the unexpected, too.”

But so much equipment in one hauler means this is one valuable piece of rolling real estate. All told, with the equipment, spare cars, engines and such; the RGM transporter represents an investment of between $1.5 million and $2.5 million.