After spending most of his professional career designing wind tunnels and automotive test facilities, Ken Woodard never thought he'd ever be spending his time at the racetrack as a NASCAR team engineer.

"I worked for Sverdrup Technology in Tullahoma (TN) for 15 years and I was planning on retiring there," said Woodard, now the team engineer for HT Motorsports and the No. 59 Toyota Tundra driven by Terry Cook in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. "Then in 2000, I saw an ad on Monster.com stating Dodge Motorsports was looking for an aerodynamic engineer. I wasn't a motorsports engineer, but after 15 years, I knew all about automotive wind tunnels and test facilities. I decided to apply and wound up getting the job. All of a sudden, my wife and I were moving to Detroit."

Fast forward seven years and Woodard has used that opportunity to carve out an impressive second career in racing -something he dreamed about way back in his high school days.

"I was always a car buff and I had a Plymouth Duster with a 340 cubic inch small block that I used to drag race," said Woodard. "Those were pretty quick cars for the day. Cars were all I thought about and I wanted to be a mechanic. I took all the automotive vocational stuff I could take in high school. I wasn't really planning on going to college, but then my dad told me he'd been saving some money for me to go. I barely got in because I hadn't done the college prep, especially the math."

Woodard's grades were good enough to get him into Tennessee Tech where he earned his undergraduate degree in engineering. Later, the Nashville native earned a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Vanderbilt University.

A four-year stint at General Electric as a design engineer followed before Woodard settled into his 'career' job at Sverdrup. Still a racer at heart, Woodard couldn't resist the temptation to apply for the engineering job with Dodge as the company advanced its NASCAR racing efforts into the NASCAR Nextel Cup ranks in 2000.

NASCAR team engineer Ken Woodard oversees his work in practice on the HT Motorsports No. 59 Toyota Tundra. (Team PR Photo)

"Our group was always responsible for designing new vehicles," stated Woodard of his new situation with Dodge. "I was always involved in the Truck Series stuff. Anytime we had a change in the body, we'd have to interface with NASCAR and implement the changes. We did all of that, along with a lot of 'blue sky' R&D stuff. If we could dream it up and convince our bosses to spend the money, we could go and do it. While the money was flowing, it was great."

In 2004, Woodard jumped at the chance to move back to the Nashville area to be a part of the Bobby Hamilton Racing factory-supported Dodge Truck Series team. The experience not only brought him closer to his dream of being part of a race team, but it opened up a whole new technical side of the sport as well.

"I had always been an aero guy and I had to learn a lot about chassis set-up and vehicle dynamics," said Woodard. "It was a challenge, but I wanted to do that. If you are going to be successful, you have to understand the mechanical part of the aero equation. I'd always felt like you always needed to understand both. It's a total package."

Woodard learned his lessons well as he, along with the rest of the BHR team, climbed to the top of the Truck Series standings in 2004 when Hamilton captured the division championship that season.

"It was cool, really awesome to be a part of that," said Woodard. "I got spoiled while I was with Dodge because we were successful the whole time I was there. When I got to BHR at the start of 2004, no one thought we were going to do the things we did. BHR was on its game and Bobby was on his game as a driver. I know Bobby had a lot of great years in Cup, but I really think he peaked as a driver in 2004. He really picked up that truck. It was almost easy because everything fell into place."

Unfortunately, Woodard's championship fortunes faded almost as quickly as they had peaked.

"We did some things that just got away from us," said Woodard of the 2005 season. "It was hard because it had been so easy. Things started to fall apart and they just got worse when Bobby got sick."

With Hamilton out of the seat in 2006, Woodard decided it was time to pack up his data acquisition gear and head back to a familiar situation - designing motorsports wind tunnels for Sverdrup.

He quickly learned you can't go back home again.

NASCAR team engineer Ken Woodard gets to apply his skills outside of an office setting. (Team PR Photo)

"I enjoyed being a design engineer at Sverdrup, but I was having a hard time getting used to being back in an office all the time," said Woodard. "I just couldn't walk out into the shop like I used to. I was just looking at a computer screen all day. My wife told me I wasn't going to be able to do it. She knew I wanted to stay a race engineer. I thought I could fit back into the 'regular world' of engineering, but it just wasn't for me anymore."

Woodard got the break he needed to return to racing this season when an old friend - Danny Rollins - called to see if he would be interested in joining the HT Motorsports Truck Series effort. Rollins, who was the crew chief on Hamilton's championship-winning team in 2004, had also left BHR settling in at HT's Martinsville, VA shop as the crew chief there midway through last season.

"It took about a month for us to work things out," said Woodard. "It looked like a good opportunity, especially with TRD and the resources they were devoting to the Truck Series. Danny can be so persuasive. He told me that with Terry Cook on board as the driver, we had an opportunity with this team to really do something fantastic. I'm always up for a challenge, especially in racing, so I agreed to sign on and here I am."

After a slow start to the season, the new combination has started to click with Cook marching his way toward the Top-10 in points. Now as a part of the Toyota camp, Woodard can see why the brand is enjoying a lot of success in NASCAR's truck division.

"When we were racing against the Toyotas, we all thought they were doing a lot of different stuff - stuff we hadn't even thought of doing - because they were just throwing money at the deal," said Woodard. "Well, now that I'm over here in the TRD camp, as far as I can tell, they are doing all the stuff we were doing and all the stuff we wanted to do. We used to sit around and say 'this is what we should be doing.' Unfortunately, management sometimes doesn't understand racing and you have to be very persuasive to get your ideas through. Sometimes, they'd turn you down. The difference is just that TRD has gone out and done those things."

Today, Woodard can be seen at the track and at the HT shop peering over his computer, sorting out the mountain of data collected by the team. According to the 49-year-old engineer, putting it all into perspective is his greatest challenge.

Ken Woodard with Crew Chief Danny Rollins and HT team manager Don Vaden go over data at Martinsville. (Team PR Photo)

"My biggest job is collecting all this data and making some sense of it," said Woodard. "We have tons of data we generate ourselves and TRD has tons of data they provide to us. It's my job to sort through all of that, to take 20 pages of data and turn it into one page that I can give to Danny (Rollins) and say 'this is what you really need to know.' If I can't get it down to that one-page summary, it's probably not going to do us any good."

As for the role of engineers in the sport and those who long for the day when the driver made all the calls from the cockpit - relying on 'seat of the pants' intellect - Woodard chuckles and says those days are pretty much history.

"Engineers have been here for a while, and you are going to see more and more of them flowing into the sport," said Woodard. "I see more of them every day. Old school racers don't necessarily like that, but the fact is you have engineers who work on all parts of the car - aero, chassis, shocks - you name it. This is such a technical sport. NASCAR isn't technical as Formula 1, but it still requires a lot of science to do this. And, we're limited by a rulebook, so we have to get extremely creative to get a tiny gain. The big stuff is done, everybody has found out how to do that stuff. The real challenge now is trying to find the little stuff, trying to fine tune this thing. That might seem boring to some, but being a part of that is pretty exciting to me."