Pre-Michigan – Bring Back The Draft
"NASCAR officials want to strike the buzzword ‘aero-dependent’ from
garage vocabulary. Later this summer, their intentions are to decrease the size
of cars’ spoilers significantly and end what has become an aerodynamic war among
manufacturers."
So writes Lee
Spencer. She also notes that in the Kansas test of a larger greenhouse
earlier this year, cars also ran smaller spoilers, and it was found that
Goodyear would have to develop greater grip to compensate for the loss of rear down force.
And just how is this going to improve the racing? In theory "the racing
should become more mechanically dependent, meaning there will be greater
emphasis on engines and shocks and less on body style."
But just where will improved ability to suck up on and pass cars come from?
It won’t come from a package that thus revolves more around shocks and springs
than on aero. It never has. Shocks and springs help handling but not ability to
draft.
Rusty
Wallace barks that "we have too much downforce, the tires won’t wear,
and everyone’s speed stays consistent. Because of that, we’ve got a bad aero push
and you can’t pass anyone."
Rusty is wrong, again. The cars do not have too much downforce. The problem
remains how they are making downforce – without any drag penalty. The cars of
today have the aero form of raindrops. Nowhere is air punched open other than on
the rear spoiler; instead it flows over the car and is channeled to keep the car
sticking.
That the tires stay consistent is a good thing. The problem here is that they
still won’t allow drivers to lean hard on them through the corners. We saw the
difference in New Hampshire’s doubleheader in May – the Grand National cars,
running low-stagger radials, could not lean on their tires; the North cars,
running higher-stagger bias-plies, leaned hard on their tires and were racing
through the corners lap after lap.
Amid all the proposals for change, nowhere is there any effort toward
increasing drag. The proposed larger greenhouse has not shown any serious
increase in drag in testing – remember how Sterling Marlin’s car ran faster at
Talladega with a larger greenhouse than with the roof spoiler? – and serves
little more purpose than to let drivers climb out of their cars faster.
The Modifieds make far more downforce than fendered cars – perhaps the most
downforce of any non-ground-effects racecars in the sport – but they also pay a
serious penalty in drag – shown in the superior strength of the draft at NHIS
and other tracks with long straights. And the Modifieds pay no aero push
penalty. This is a big (likely the key) part of why they put on so much better
racing at NHIS than the track’s fendered classes do.
Dale Jarrett claims, "I don’t know how we go back now. I don’t know
where we go from here, honestly." Dale, you go back by going back to the
roof spoiler package of 2001, and adding spoilers to the body (i.e. the forward
doorposts) to punch open the air, spoilers that add permanent drag, drag no
amount of engineering trickery can ever rake out.
At Pocono higher drag would have meant a serious increase in passing – at
Michigan it would be the same story. So bring back the draft.
Little noticed of recent has been the slide of Bill Davis Racing. Ward
Burton’s Daytona 500 win has not translated to a productive season – he has not
had a top ten since Atlanta – and his day at Pocono was a short and unhappy one.
Hut Stricklin’s Pocono day wasn’t much better, though of recent Stricklin has
been a more consistent finisher than Burton.
Davis did cross a significant Rubicon – Caterpillar re-signed with the #22
for five more years, hardly surprising given how good the Davis team has been to
them in the four seasons the #22 has carried CAT colors.
The recent tragedy at Irwindale Speedway was inevitable. All the hype over
head restraints tended to give the impression that such tragedies as occurred
through 2000 and 2001 would have been prevented by the use of head restraints.
Now we’ve seen this to be just hype.
The safety overkill lobby’s credibility thus took a blow – it was, after all,
something of a cherished conceit that "(insert driver’s name here) would
have lived if he’d worn a head restraint."
And NASCAR’s postponement of installation of the SAFER barrier will no doubt
get some criticism from that same lobby – it already elicited a typically
wrongheaded slam by Gary London in National Speed Sport News – but so far press
coverage has noted the differences in the turns at different tracks compared to
IMS, where the SAFER barrier is already in place.
It leads to this cynical question – why are all the most popular proposed
safety changes (head restraints, soft walls, the Humpy Bumper, etc) the ones
that involve new equipment, which will earn someone a profit, while the one
change that will actually do serious good – drastically slowing the cars down
everywhere – is not even considered an option? Because it won’t make money for
someone?
The above is not meant as a slam on the sincerity of those pushing the most
popular safety changes mentioned – it is to point out that greater effort needs
to be expended on changes OTHER than those that involve new and expensive
equipment. The "nonprofit" ideas for safety improvement have never
gotten more than a cursory look, yet they usually do more actual good and ought
to be the ones that get first look. We saw that in the pit road debacle – where
mandating helmets have done less good than dropping the pit-road-closure rule
that is the real culprit – and we’ve seen it with the debacle of roof flaps –
does anyone seriously think they do any good after years of continuing aerial
crashes?
An interesting trend was lost amid everything else during the Pocono weekend
– big-league racing saw a surge of first-time winners. Brendan Gaughan, Jeff
Ward, and Jack Sprague all bagged breakthrough wins in their classes. Damon
Lusk’s ARCA win at Pocono was his career second, but it sure felt like a first.
And even Dale Jarrett’s win was a "first" – for the season, and given
that nearly a year had passed, it may have felt like a first career win.