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BY TEAM FORD RACING CORRESPONDENT
Concord, N.C. — NASCAR and Team Ford Racing will get their first on-track look at the new Fusion in two weeks in a team effort. Wood Brothers Racing will run a prototype with former Nextel Cup champion Dale Jarrett of Robert Yates Racing testing at the Atlanta Motor Speedway on Aug. 2. The 1.5-mile track south of Atlanta is available despite almost $40 million in property damage from a recent tornado.
“As of right now [the Sunday morning of the recent New England 300 at Loudon, N. H.], we’re still planning to test the new Ford and the new Chevrolet that day,” said Robin Pemberton, a former crew chief and Ford Racing official, and now NASCAR’s vice-president for competition. “They were hit pretty hard, but they’re cleaning up and making progress.”
With small variations, it will go something like this: The Chevy and Ford haulers will arrive at AMS early in the morning. The team that tests first—that hasn’t been determined—will wait for the other team to leave the premises before unloading and testing. Once its test is done, NASCAR officials will accompany the car to the Lockheed wind tunnel in Marietta. The second car won’t be unloaded and tested until the other car is off the premises. Once its on-track test is completed, officials will accompany the second car to the wind tunnel at Marietta.
“Mainly, we want to compare the cars’ performances to each other on the track and in the wind tunnel,” Pemberton said. “We have target numbers for what downforce and drag numbers we expect in the tunnel, and what speeds we expect on the track. But there’s no reason to think either car won’t be approved. Everybody’s so tuned into what it takes for approval. The teams and engineers know the aerodynamic numbers, so the tests are to cover our bases. They’re just to verify that the cars are what we expect. It’ll be a neat and orderly process. The teams will get the go-ahead within a few weeks to start building new cars.”
Ford unveiled the Fusion—set to debut at Daytona International Speedway in February—during a July 14 announcement in downtown Charlotte, N.C. That was a show car since NASCAR had had the real car in its Research and Development Center in Concord, N. C., for several weeks. There, inspectors have measured every surface area and fitted almost two dozen templates.
The company took a somewhat-different approach with the development of this car than it had done with previous models. This time, Ford engineers—led by Ford NASCAR field manager Ben Leslie and Ford aerodynamicist Bernie Marcus—did the early development with a scale model testing program. In previous years that work had been done by race teams. The duo consulted with Ford teams and took input regarding the new Fusion, and did most of the development work while Ford teams competed week-in and week-out.
The Wood Brothers built the prototype as a spring-early summer project at their shop in Mooresville, N.C. “We began early in March because NASCAR wanted it by July 1, the deadline for submitting new cars,” said Len Wood, co-owner of the venerable No. 21 Ford team with his father, Glen, sister, Kim, and brother, Eddie. “We began with a race-ready chassis from our shop, one that originally came from Roush Racing. It was the chassis on the car we used at Las Vegas a week or so before we began converting it into the Fusion. We cut off the body and sand-blasted the chassis, and Jerry Painter (Ford's body man, under contract to Ford Racing Technology) could hang the new body.”
”After that, Bernie and Ben came in and did most of the inside work. They worked with our people and with Ford’s engineers to get it ready for submission. I think some of Jack’s people were really involved with the scale-model car that got the whole thing started. Basically, we put it together, but all the Ford teams had some degree of input. We’re really excited that it’ll be as good as we think it’ll be.”
Eddie Wood is especially pleased with the nose and grille. “I like what they did with those areas,” he said at Loudon, “I think that’ll be better for us. All in all, I think it is going to be better than what we've got. I’m really impressed, and I think the fact that it looks so much like a street car will help with sales. I’m anxious to see how it does on the track and in the showroom.”
Dan Davis, head of Ford Racing, hopes the Fusion does as well as the soon-to-be-retired Taurus, a NASCAR staple since 1998. That model has won Nextel Cups for Jarrett, Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch, and Busch Series titles for Greg Biffle. It's 100 Nextel Cup race victories have been spread among Jarrett, Busch, Kenseth, Biffle, Mark Martin, Ricky Rudd, Elliott Sadler, Jeremy Mayfield, Jeff Burton, Ricky Craven, Ryan Newman and Rusty Wallace.
”We'd like to send Taurus out with one more championship," said Davis, noting that Biffle, Busch, Martin, Sadler and Jarrett remain in contention for the final, 10-race Nextel Chase for the Championship, "but the time is right to move on to Fusion."
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