WATKINS GLEN – Chris Buescher is arriving at Watkins Glen International for Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Go Bowling at The Glen riding a wave of strong momentum after scoring two wins and an 11th-place finish in the last three Cup Series events this season.
That success can be attributed to the engineering expertise of Wellsville native Aaron Kramer, who is serving in his first season as Buescher’s lead engineer with the Roush-Fenway-Keselowski Racing No. 17 Fastenal Ford.
While Buescher has gotten plenty of attention in recent weeks due to his latest success, working equally hard behind the scenes to help ensure the team’s success has been Kramer.
“Our recent success has been a long time coming,” Kramer said. “To get those couple of wins and to run good at Indy is just the culmination of a lot of years working with Chris.”
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Buescher started seventh and finished ninth in last year’s Cup Series race at The Glen.
This season, Buescher won back-to-back Cup Series races at Richmond on July 30 and at Michigan on Aug. 7. He was 11th in the road course race at Indianapolis on Sunday.
Buescher is sixth in Cup Series playoff points heading to The Glen.
Kramer, 34, who resides in Kannapolis, N.C., is busy this weekend at The Glen, hoping his RFK squad can continue its recent run of great fortunes.
“I’ve been working with Chris since 2019 in different roles on the team,” Kramer said. “I started on the Cup Series with Scott Graves (crew chief) in 2019. At the time, Ryan Newman was driving. I started doing shock engineering on the car. I was an engineer but also had the mechanical abilities.”
Kramer traces his involvement in NASCAR back to 2010, when he was a mechanic for the K-Automotive Nationwide (now Xfinity) Series team. He then performed various tasks for a variety of organizations over the next few seasons.
Kramer landed in Roush-Fenway Racing’s data and electrical department in 2016 shortly after graduating from the University of North Carolina.
By 2018, Kramer had advanced to lead engineer within RFR’s Xfinity Series program.
Soon, Kramer’s opportunity in the Cup Series came in 2019 with RFR, which became Roush-Fenway-Keselowski Racing in 2022.
“I was the second engineer for a couple of years,” Kramer said. “Travis Peterson, who is now the crew chief on the No. 34 entry that won last Sunday at Indy with Michael McDowell, he was our lead engineer.
“In 2022, I was the second engineer for Chris and this season is my first as the lead engineer for Chris.”
Kramer grew up in Wellsville but moved with his family to Kentucky following his junior year at Wellsville High School. Kramer graduated from high school in Kentucky in 2007.
He raced Go-Karts for six years during his teenage years.
“My grandfather owned a Modified in Pennsylvania before I was born,” Kramer said. “My dad watched racing but I had a friend who raced Go-Karts. So I decided that was pretty cool, so I started racing Go-Karts when I was probably 12 or 13 years old.
“I had to talk my parents into letting me do it. My dad was OK with me doing it, but my mom wasn’t super thrilled that I wanted to do it. But I talked her into it and my first feature race ever, I flipped and ended up in the hospital.
“I ended up racing Go-Karts in New York and Pennsylvania, but once we moved to Kentucky, I got out of the driver’s seat and I started working for a Sprint Car team out of Illinois and transitioned to the team crew side of the sport.”
Kramer says that due to the technology of the new Next-Gen cars in NASCAR, engineering has taken on a more important role.
“When I first moved to North Carolina years ago and got jobs in the lower stock car series, I was pretty ecstatic just to be a mechanic and getting paid just to go to the race track. It took a couple years, but I realized that I wanted more than just putting the cars together. I wanted to have more of an influence and a deeper understanding of decisions that were being made about maximizing the car’s performance.”
Kramer decided to go to college and got a degree from UNC in motorsports engineering and immediately started working with Roush after graduation.
“The outlook and landscape of our sport has changed dramatically,” Kramer said. “The mechanical and testing aspect of our sport was a lot greater than it is today. With this new car and the way practice and testing is laid out by NASCAR we are now a very engineering driven industry.
“I think a lot of people think that NASCAR stock car racing is still about those good old boys. It’s not like that at all.
“We run hundreds of thousands of simulations and spend huge amounts of time looking at aerodynamic and tire data. Mechanics at the grassroots level are still important but to make it to the pinnacle of our sport today there is no substitute for a good engineering background.”
Harvick’s last drive
Sunday’s Cup Series event will be the last at The Glen as a driver for veteran campaigner and former Watkins Glen Cup Series winner Kevin Harvick.
Harvick announced earlier this year that this will be his last season as he is retiring as a driver. He will join the Fox television booth next year as an analyst.
Harvick drives the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 Busch Light Ford Mustang. Harvick is a one-time victor in the Cup Series race at The Glen, beating his current team co-owner Tony Stewart in the final laps of the 2006 AMD at The Glen.
Harvick drove for Richard Childress Racing in 2006.
“Watkins Glen is home to one of my favorite wins because I was able to beat Tony (Stewart),” Harvick said. “That was a fun day. Tony had always been really good at Watkins Glen and had a lot of success there. The thing I remember about Tony that year is just how good he was in the braking zone going into the bus stop and he wouldn’t even practice.
“For me, racing with Tony and getting that win and being able to enjoy that and know all the time and effort that we put into the road-racing program during those years was a lot of fun.”
Despite being winless in 2023, Harvick arrives at The Glen 14th in Cup Series playoff points, 145 points above the 16-driver playoff cutoff line.
