Charlotte, N.C. — NASCAR, looking towards the future, has recently been testing several race car configurations. The tests addressed both the intermediate track cars, with testing performed a week ago at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, and speedway cars with a test run at Daytona International Speedway on Tuesday.
It should be noted that these NASCAR test sessions are purely experimental in nature and are being done on a fact-finding basis.
The intermediate track tests performed last week at LMS gave NASCAR the opportunity to run both a larger greenhouse car and a softer Goodyear tire on the current car configuration. The test involved Ganassi Racing’s Jimmy Spencer, MBV Racing’s Johnny Benson, Travis Carter’s Todd Bodine and Roush Racing’s Kurt Busch, who was primarily testing softer tires while the other three ran the larger greenhouse car.
The larger greenhouse car tests were performed with cars using bolt-on canopies that sit over the top of the existing cars. The roof room gained is on the order of three inches in height and about three inches width, in all directions.
As TFR reported last week, the first test did not produce the results NASCAR sought. Positioned in a line, the three cars running nose-to-tail lacked the center car encountered control problems due to the air blowing over the car, missing the rear bodyworks and spoiler.
Explaining the situation Bodine said, “In the group, we had three cars and the car in the middle just had no air on it at all and that’s what was bad. The big greenhouse really disturbs the air a lot.”
The second day of the intermediate track configuration test brought some stabilization, accomplished with wider spoilers and other body tweaks.
“We got the car driving really good,” said Spencer after the finished LMS test. “We widened the spoiler. You’ve got to realize it only had like a five-inch spoiler on it. There are a lot of things that are a lot different from what we’ve got now. These were five-inch spoilers. We’re used to 6-¼ [inches], Pontiac has 6-½ [inches]. We’ve only got a five-inch spoiler [on the test cars] and it’s probably about four inches wider on each side. It really made the car a lot more stable.
“[The test car] has got a lower valence in the front, just a lot of things like that. Yet on the other side of that, we don’t have the front fenders pulled out. We don’t have the nose pulled out like we have here [on the current configuration]. So we had a lot of limitations there to try to get the aero package balanced. Indications are that it works pretty good.”
James Ince, Benson’s crew chief, said that the tests were encouraging, but leaned toward crediting the softer tires the test cars were running.
“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” said Ince regarding the LMS test. “It’s definitely where we need to go. I don’t know if the biggest part of it was the aero or if it was the tires. I know aero is very important, but the tires made things wonderful.
“We’ve put ourselves in a situation with the current stuff, Goodyear got so scared of blowing right front tires, or people saying they were blowing right front tires, that they went and made these tires so hard, which was gonna save us a fortune, and all it’s done is cost us a whole lot of money and we can’t race our cars any more.”
You may recall prior to Goodyear bringing this hard tire into the game that right-front tire failures were the norm, with some teams predictably seeing their cars going into the wall on certain tracks. It was pointed out that poor, or improper chassis setups, or overly aggressive drivers pushing the tire off the car could be attributed to the tire failure.
“The encouraging part [of the NASCAR tests] to me as a crew chief is we’re about to put crew chiefs out of business here,” said Ince. “We’re headed toward engineers and we’re headed toward other people and a crew chief is just not going to be an entity.
“Any schmo can call a Winston Cup [race] right now. You come put two tires on or no tires and gas-only and it makes it pretty boring. All the stuff we used to do that was pretty creative we’re not able to do because of a combination of the tires and aero package.”
The speedway tests, which were performed at Daytona International on Tuesday, gave NASCAR a chance to tweak on the speedway aero package, yet again. Ten cars jumped the hoop and arrived at Daytona Beach, Fla., ready to roll. Representing the Ford effort were Dave Blaney, Geoff Bodine and Elliott Saddler.
The tests, which were cut short due to rain in the area, focused mainly on the rear spoilers of the cars. The tests took logical steps and shorted both size and angle of the rear spoiler. The goals were to find a combination that made the cars looser so that the drivers would have to work the throttle to make a lap on Daytona International Speedway’ 2.5-mile high-banks.
The test started with the current spoiler configuration (6-inches tall, 57-inches wide), and had the drivers running 49.40’s with their foot mashed to the floorboards. The next step of the test kicked the spoilers down to a 45-degree angle, which picked the lap times up by about .4 of a second. Driver comfort remained constant.
NASCAR then whacked 4-inches off the sides of the spoilers and left the angle at 45 degrees. The drivers were, for the most part, able to keep the accelerator matted for an entire lap. The next step got the drivers working the accelerator, some, but the spoiler could be described as tiny with 4-inches cut off each side of the rear blade, and the height shortened to 4.5-inches.
TFR’s source said that between the hard tires and the DIS lumpy surface the cars weren’t so much loose, but that they were out of control. A larger restrictor plate (increased from 15/16-inch from 7/8-inch) was put on a couple of cars, which of course worsened the handling problem.
