This Is Why Restrictor Plate Racing Is Better
Talladega is the greatest racetrack in the world. With all the loose talk
about "they need to change this or that racetrack," a good template
for a speedway would be Talladega – Chicagoland, Kansas, Fontana, and even
Pocono (which I love as is) would be better racetracks if rebuilt as 2.5-2.66
mile superovals (or triangle in Pocono’s case) with steep, high banking, though
not necessarily 33 degrees, something the IRL can’t race on.
And the 2002 Alabama 500 showed why restrictor plate racing is better than
any other kind of racing – even the IRL’s open-throttle racing at Fontana,
Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Chicagoland, and Kentucky doesn’t see three-abreast
racing for lap after lap, and given how much the IRL has raised the competitive
racing bar this season, that’s saying something.
All the predictions of trouble at Talladega with smaller fuel cells did not
come to pass, and this may be the biggest surprise of the season – what didn’t
happen with the smaller fuel cells. The promise that the extra stops would break
up the packs as expected failed to deliver, despite Larry McReynolds’
self-serving spin (self-serving because of his concurrent book plug) afterward.
But fuel mileage proved crucial at the finish, and that alone showed why the
smaller fuel cell rule is wrong, although mileage will certainly improve as
teams work with these cells.
Still, it is frustrating that so many cars were taken out of contention
because of fuel mileage – Mike Skinner (obviously benefiting from
Morgan-McClure’s ARCA win with Keith Segers the day before) started in
provisional land and blasted into the lead lickety split, then ran out and lost
a lap; Kevin Harvick shot into the lead but ran out and lost any chance at
winning; John Andretti, fifth in the final ten laps, had to make a splash and go
with quite a few others and thus lost his shot at the win. Take such out of the
equation and you’d have had a real fight for the win at the end.
The draft worked a lot better than expected – to the tune of more lead
changes in this year’s Alabama 500 without the roof spoiler than in the 2001
Alabama 500 with the roof spoiler; this is an upshot that is frankly
dumbfounding. Even so, the inability to make moves at the end still shows why
the roof spoiler is still necessary.
Atlanta International Raceway’s public promise of at least 30 official lead
changes in three weeks may well come to pass – given how racy Atlanta has
become, it isn’t much of a stretch to think that 30 will be the number – but
unless they exceed 40 lead changes Atlanta won’t approach Talladega for sheer
competitive depth. Atlanta had 34 lead changes in March, but Talladega had far
more cars actually fighting for the lead.
This was the second straight year that a Talladega race went caution-free.
I’m not a fan of caution-free races, because a few well-spaced yellows allow
teams and fans to get a breather and regroup for the rest of the race. It
nonetheless puts the lie to Jeff Burton’s gripe, "The real problem is that
they need to come to a conclusion that having 35 cars running in one big pack
isn’t acceptable."1
Having 35 cars in one pack is not acceptable? Looking at this race, one has
to be dumbfounded at Burton’s statement, and also at Steve Hmiel’s comment,
"What NASCAR is trying to do, we applaud, because it will break up the
packs"2
– this after explaining how teams will "work like mad to stay in the packs
so we can maintain speed in the draft."3
David Poole got the point in his headline, "NASCAR, Race Teams Working
At Cross-Purposes?" The whole mania for breaking up the packs works at
cross-purposes with competition, and team complaints about the packs are also
more than a little hypocritical. The goal is to go to the front, and rules that
impede teams’ ability to go to the front are thus wrong from the beginning.
Team lobbying for rules to break up the packs is also hypocritical, because
those same teams will spend millions of dollars to overcome such rules – if they
go to low down force for Daytona, teams will use Atlanta-type down force cars to
get back stability. And the result will be that the whole purpose is defeated.
It thus is pointless that teams are lobbying for breakage of the packs. What
the rules ought to be doing is eliminating impediments to going to the front so
teams DON’T HAVE to spend so much on their cars to be competitive. This is a big
part of why the roof spoiler worked – it eliminated impediment to passing and
thus eliminated the need to spend so much on the car to make it faster; a bigger
draft is the best equalizer in racing and greatly lessens the effort necessary
to get these cars to go to the front; with the draft teams don’t need to have a
super fast car – they just need a car that can go to the front in dirty air.
When rules allow cars to go to the front without the need for massive
expenditure of time and resources, then the racing benefits, and teams benefit.
With all the talk about how overworked teams are, why would rules that lessen
the need for them to work so hard to make their cars able to go to the lead be
considered bad? "You can have a basic car and can take the lead here,"
is the whine about how "easy" it is to race at Talladega, but if all
you need is a basic car, doesn’t that save teams a lot of trouble and labor?
And there is the continuing gripe, "If the IRL cars can race like that
at 230, why can’t NASCAR let them race over 200 at Daytona and Talladega?"
Because three times in the last five seasons sizable portions of CART and IRL
racecars vaulted the fencing and landed over 25 rows up the grandstands –
situations that would not have happened below 190 MPH. Also, CART saw one of its
greatest stars in the making (Greg Moore) killed at Fontana in 1999 when his car
vaulted head-first – literally – into a distant inside wall. It was the speeds
over 220 that made his flip so brutal, and such severity would not have happened
below 190, as witnessed by an airborne flight by an Indy Lights car at that same
track the very next year.
Also, the IRL’s cars have ground effects and make thousands of pounds of down
force, and thus are so secure to the track they have little chance of getting
off the ground – if Winston Cup cars made 2,500 or more pounds of down force it
might be a different story, but they don’t, and given that it is unsafe to let
these cars exceed 200; as it is other tracks like Texas and Michigan are in need
of restrictor plates.
One more fact in comparing to the IRL’s open-throttle competition – it is
sometimes asked why the IRL does not have "the big one." There are two
reasons why – the first lies in the IRL’s no-blocking rule, which doesn’t impede
driver daring at all. There was some scuttlebutt before Talladega that NASCAR
would closely monitor blocking moves by drivers during the race; whether or not
NASCAR did monitor for blocking, one has to be struck at how drivers for once
held their lines better and generally didn’t chop each other off.
The second reason is the IRL presently do not have more then a dozen
competitive teams – ten to twelve cars fight for the win and the rest fall back
or fall out; it is a situation that will improve as the series evolves. NASCAR
has 40 competitive teams (which came about via natural evolution plus improved
sponsorship packages and factory involvement) and when impediments to passing
are eliminated, we see those teams battle for the win.
There is already griping about how Tony Stewart "couldn’t" pass
Dale Junior at the end. Two qualities stand out here – one, and this was
mentioned above, as strong as the draft was, without the roof spoiler it wasn’t
strong enough to allow passing without help. Two, even if they still had the
roof spoiler Tony had made up his mind to NOT pass Junior; he was more concerned
with protecting his point lead with Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin’s bizarre
pace-lap crash, Johnson’s subsequent engine failure (punctuating a perfect
failure rate for Randy Dorton’s plate motors in this race) and Martin’s day
spent a lap down.
It shows yet again the folly of the Latford point system’s present
construction. Junior fought for the lead all day, won the race, led the most
laps (it shows how much others have caught the DEI juggernaut when you consider
that Junior led 56 laps, nowhere near the 133 led in April) won a cool million
and gave a down-on-her-luck woman another cool million – and gained next to
nothing in points.
Fords as usual griped before the race that they aren’t competitive on the
plate tracks; what resulted was reminiscent of Speedweeks, when Fords were
molasses slow in practices and then raced to the front even more quickly than
the Chevrolets. I’d say they don’t have that much to gripe about there.
Dale Junior’s win marked a unique historical moment – he tied Buddy Baker as
the only drivers to win three straight at Talladega. Ironically, Junior’s third
straight win came in similar circumstances as Baker’s – Baker became the first
driver to win a 500-mile race in less than three hours in a race with only three
short yellows; Junior won without a yellow.
Junior’s concussion after Fontana and Sterling Marlin’s neck brace led to a
lot of griping about how NASCAR is "still behind" in driver safety,
about how NASCAR needs a traveling medical staff, about how NASCAR needs to let
drivers throw out their worst finishes in the season, and so forth.
The drivers and press toadies who wrote and said a lot of this material sound
like scared little kids. We regularly read about comparisons with CART and IRL’s
traveling medical staff, as if Junior would have told the truth to them about
his concussion, and as if they would have found Marlin’s cracked vertebrae any
more effectively than the track doctor at Kansas – remember that Marlin’s own
team physician had a hard time finding Marlin’s deal.
There is talk of parking injured drivers for a race or more, and again CART
and IRL’s policies are cited. Now there are certainly situations where an
injured driver SHOULD be parked, but what we frequently see is drivers who could
race without difficulty get parked, making the open wheel system not a safety
system as much as a system for harassing people.
Then there is this nonsense about "an 80% rule" on points –
basically counting only 28 or 30 of 36 races and letting drivers throw out their
worst finishes so they don’t have to start every race. This is worse than a
joke; it is an insult. Drivers should have to start ALL the races to win the
title; ALL the races should count toward the title. Letting drivers skip races
and still win the championship is an insult to competition. This is what makes
the rookie point system so stupid – points toward ALL the races should count,
not just the best 25 or so finishes.
Driver convenience should be secondary to competition, because these guys are
supposed to be tough enough to handle the stresses of this kind of racing. And
ultimately toughness is the issue. They called Dale Earnhardt "One Tough
Customer." If they loved Dale Earnhardt so much, why not make his legacy a
toughening of drivers and competition instead of the wussification that has
become his real legacy? Richard Petty raced with a broken neck, cracked ribs, a
severely ulcerous stomach, and shoulder injury; Davey Allison won North
Wilkesboro after getting hurt at Bristol, won Talladega after crashing at
Martinsville, and finished fourth at Charlotte after slamming the wall in The
Winston; Earnhardt himself finished sixth at Watkins Glen after getting nailed
in the roof at Talladega. Instead of acting like scared little kids, drivers
should be man enough to take it and keep on going.
Editor’s Note: Recent editorial difficulties prevented previous posting of
this column in timely matter. Such difficulties have been resolved, and
for the sake of completeness we are posting this article as it is – the date of
it’s original submission is highlighted to better remind the reader of the
particular context of time in which it was intended to be published. We
hope you understand, and we thank you for your patience.