The year 2000 will see the introduction of two new bodystyles to NASCAR competition. Chevrolet has undertaken a major overhaul of the Monte Carlo body, creating what is quasi-officially known as the MC Intimidator. As for Ford, its overhaul of the Taurus racecar is less radical, more of a minor facelift. Pontiac, meanwhile, remains unchanged while Dodge will debut its new bodystyle in 2001.<\/p>\n
The interesting aspect of the new bodystyles is that seems to be entering a cycle that has revolved around NASCAR aerodynamics for some three decades. To fully appreciate it, one must go back and review the aerodynamic changes that have permeated NASCAR over the decades.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until the second half of the 1960s that aerodynamics started to become a pronounced aspect of NASCAR racing. Certainly teams didn’t ignore aero in preparing their cars, but the emphasis was always on horsepower – aerodynamics was a distant second in team thinking.<\/p>\n
In 1966, however, a subtle change took place. Dodge introduced a new Charger bodystyle at the Daytona 500. The new Dodge Charger 500 was completely different from the other cars entered for Speedweeks ’66. Where other cars were basically boxes with a roof bolted on, the Charger 500 had a narrow nose, and the roofline and trunk were one continuous graceful slope. The new car didn’t win at first, in large part because the radical fastback shape made the back of the car lift off the ground at speed. By the Firecracker 400 in July, however, another subtle change was added – a small strip was added across the edge of the trunk to push air down onto the back of the car at speed. This spoiler made the Charger more stable, and Sam McQuagg promptly drove one from the Ray Nichels garage to win the race.<\/p>\n
It is somewhat surprising Dodge didn’t cash in on as much success with the bodystyle as one might think, though David Pearson’s Cotton Owens Dodge team won the 1966 title. It wasn’t until 1968 that aerodynamics suddenly took the forefront of stock car engineering. Humiliated by Richard Petty’s unaerodynamic Plymouth Belvedere in 1967, Ford came out with radically redesigned cars. The Mercury Montego and Ford Torino copied Dodge’s Charger 500 profile and also added narrower windows to reduce drag. Combined with far greater spending by Ford, the result was a banner year for the Blue Oval organization.<\/p>\n
Dodge made a stockier version of the Charger for the ’68-’69 seasons, featuring a flatter trunk, narrower windows, and somewhat smaller roofline. This model Charger won both 1968 events at Charlotte Motor Speedway and also saw prominent attention in the Steve McQueen police classic
\nBullitt. When Richard Petty demanded to switch to Dodge because of the car’s better aerodynamics, Chrysler refused, preferring to try and win on the cheap and designating Petty their Plymouth representative. Petty thus went to Ford for 1969.<\/p>\n
In September 1969 Dodge upped the aerodynamic ante even more. This time they fitted a shark-shaped nosecone on the Charger and added a large wing to the trunk area and called it the Dodge Daytona. The Daytona won in its first outing, the boycott-marred Talladega 500. Its first "true" test was in the National 500 at Charlotte, and the car dominated though Donnie Allison pulled out a win in Banjo Matthews’ Ford. Bobby Isaac gave the Daytona its second win by taking the Texas 500.<\/p>\n
Richard Petty wanted to go back to Chrysler and run the Daytona. Chrysler still wanted him in Plymouths, so they created a Plymouth version of the Daytona in the 1970
\nSuperbird. Chrysler also provided Petty Enterprises a larger budget than they’d provided previously. This allowed Petty to run two cars, and teammate Pete Hamilton responded with a surprising victory in the Daytona 500. Pete then followed up by sweeping both events at Talladega. A fourth win at Michigan was foiled in a stirring late battle with Cale
\nYarborough; Cale got the win even though scoring indicated he was a lap down to Hamilton. In any event, Petty Enterprises still had a banner year as Richard survived a spin with Cale at Rockingham to take his first win in the
\nSuperbird, and added wins at Riverside, Trenton, Atlanta, and Dover with the Superbird that season. With additional wins by Charlie
\nGlotzbach, Bobby Allison, and Buddy Baker with the D<\/p>\n
The wing cars were so strong that NASCAR handicapped them by mandating they could only run 305 CID engines for 1971 – the last start for a wing car was Dick Brooks in Mario Rossi’s Daytona in the car’s namesake 500. Chrysler teams also had to cope with the loss of the factory, following Ford’s lead in quitting NASCAR. Petty Enterprises still had Chrysler backing, but only for 1971. Buddy Baker replaced Hamilton, and aerodynamics were now as much a concern as horsepower in the garage. Virtually every entrant car in the ’71 Daytona 500 featured a long nose, sloped roofline and rear glass, and a small spoiler on the trunk, not quite as slick as the wing cars but still a vast change from the metal boxes of the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n
The 1970s were an interregnum in terms of aerodynamics, as basic body shapes didn’t change much through the decade. By today’s standards, the cars were bigger and bulkier, but aerodynamically they were quite sound. The most balanced bodystyle of the decade was the 1971-74 Dodge Charger, featuring a long nose and well-rounded roof and trunk. In terms of straightaway slickness the 1975-7 Chevrolet Laguna S-3, featuring a drooping grille, was the hot tip until it was banned by NASCAR for 1978. With this the car seen as the hot tip was the 1977 Olds Cutlass, featuring a twin-nostril nose that drooped downward even more than the Laguna’s snout. Receiving surprisingly little attention was the ’77 Buick
\nLesabre, identical to the Laguna S-3 but featuring flatter headlights and a tri-grille configuration as opposed to the Chevy’s twin-grille nose. The Buick had the same potential as the Laguna and the Cutlass but only saw victory<\/p>\n
Ford\/Mercury aerodynamics of the time deteriorated over the course of the decade. The 1971 Mercury Cyclone won twenty races 1972-3, nineteen with the Wood Brothers and once with James
\nHylton.. By 1974 the ’73 Mercury Cougar was Glen and Leonard Wood’s racer of choice, and David Pearson gave them ten wins 1974-5 with it. By 1976 the Mercury Cougar and Montego had become ever boxier. Pearson nonetheless had his finest season in ’76 with ten wins, none wilder than the Daytona 500. By 1977, however, he was lamenting, "I (can’t) even keep up with the
\nChevys, much less try and outrun Petty."<\/p>\n
On the Ford side Bud Moore campaigned the ’72-3 Ford
\nTorino, noticably bigger than the Mercury and sporting a bulkier grille. By 1975 the Torino’s grille had become more aerodynamic and the car proved a winner with Buddy Baker; he bagged four 1975 wins in the Torino and became the first driver to win a 500-mile race in under three hours in the ’76 Winston 500. By 1978, however, Moore was forced to run the ’78 Thunderbird, a monstrosity that delivered Bobby Allison to ten wins 1978-9. Allison and Moore clashed over the car in 1980 despite four wins that year; Allison asserted that the Ford and Mercury were only competitive at Atlanta, Charlotte, Dover, and Michigan. "We still need a Chevy at the other tracks," he said.<\/p>\n
The 1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, as Allison noted, had become the car of choice by that time. One reason for this was that downforce was becoming an issue, albiet quietly. Richard Benyo noted in 1976 that Cale Yarborough’s Junior Johnson team campaigned a Monte Carlo at Pocono instead of the slicker Chevelle or Laguna, because the bulkier Monte Carlo allowed extra lateral bite in the turns at the price of greater drag on the lengthy
\nstraightaways. On short tracks and intermediate superspeedways like Charlotte and Michigan, Monte Carlos
\npredomianted, as opposed to the far slicker Cutlass that predominated at Daytona and Talladega. In pre-season testing of the Cutlass entering ’78, teams universally criticized the car’s instability. By March of that year NASCAR had answered with larger spoilers that made the car
\ndriveable, and the Olds ultimately won nearly 20 races 1978-80.<\/p>\n
Aerodynamics became THE hot issue with the 1981 changeover from 115-inch wheelbases to 110-inchers. Virtually every available car featured a rear glass deployed almost vertically above the trunk, and pre-competition testing saw Greg Sacks tumble violently by himself at Daytona. Teams universally disliked the lack of stability with the new cars – "Detroit is going broke building these things, and I don’t have much faith in them," said Darrell Waltrip.<\/p>\n
The only available car with any stability was the ’81 Pontiac
\nLemans, and it is a telling comment on general team thinking that it was Bobby Allison’s son Davey who suggested that his dad’s Harry Ranier team test one. The Ranier team was stunned by how good the slope-backed Lemans ran in testing, and the sport was stunned when Ranier Racing proved to be the only entrant with a
\nLemans. Some teams claimed NASCAR had told them the car was not eligible, but Bill Gazaway and Dick Beaty of NASCAR noted that it had been listed as eligible through 1980. "The others got outfoxed, and you’ll have a heckuva time getting them to admit it," Gazaway said.<\/p>\n
Allison won the Daytona 500 pole and showed far greater stability than the notchback cars of his rivals. Tumbles by John Anderson and Connie Saylor caused NASCAR to increase spoiler size several times during Speedweeks. The 500, though, proved to be somewhat tranquil. Bobby Allison played it cool during the first 300 miles; this helped Neil Bonnett’s Wood Brothers Ford keep up with Allison and saw the lead change hands some 40 times in 300 miles. But after Neil fell out and Allison nearly spun as Buddy Baker boxed him in lapped traffic, Bobby put the hammer down and pulled away from the field. His victory bid was spoiled when Richard Petty gambled on his final stop and emerged with a ten second lead. Surprisingly, Allison didn’t gain any ground until Petty slackened his pace in the final two laps, and after taking the checkered Petty said, "That fastback Pontiac didn’t handle no better than us."<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, it was clear the car was far better than the notchback machines run by everyone else. Not wanting a field of 38 Pontiac
\nLemans, NASCAR mandated the car run with a smaller spoiler than those used on other brands beginning at the Atlanta 500. Allison,
\nRanier, and Waddell Wilson got into a lengthy prerace dispute with NASCAR over spoiler sizes – a Ranier crewman even hung a sign on the Lemans that said, "Help! NASCAR is trying to kill me!" – but NASCAR prevailed and the car campaigned at Atlanta with the smaller spoiler. Allison ran a Buick at Darlington, ran the Lemans at Martinsville, then parked the Pontiac for the Buick that predominated the field. Allison sourly noted the obvious – NASCAR said it didn’t want a one-brand field, yet they got it anyway.<\/p>\n
But the Lemans was too good a bodystyle to let go. Ranier ran the car, with the smaller spoiler, in 1982 with Benny Parsons, but the team failed to win. Parsons was let go halfway through and by the final quarter of the season Buddy Baker was driving a "conventional" Pontiac Grand Prix instead of the
\nLemans.<\/p>\n
Though the Lemans was not recording wins, its bodystyle was being incorporated into a new entry in NASCAR’s car wars. In the 1983 Daytona 500, Ford debuted a car built with NASCAR in mind – the 1983 Thunderbird. The car incorporated much of the shape of the Pontiac Lemans but was much rounder and noticably smaller – so small in fact that Ford needed NASCAR permission to add six inches to the car’s wheelbase to meet the 110-inch wheelbase spec; the car was also allowed to run an inch lower than the GM makes and the older Ford. In the ’83 Daytona 500, fastback cars old and new finished one-three – Cale
\nYarborough, having flipped his primary Chevrolet in qualifying, drove a year-old Lemans to the win over Bill Elliott’s year-old square-shape T-bird. Finishing third was Buddy Baker in the new round T-bird of the Wood Brothers, beating out Chevrolet’s entry in the renewal of NASCAR factory wars, Joe Ruttman’s Ron Benfield ’83 Monte Carlo.<\/p>\n
1983 and ’84 were teething periods for the Ford, as Chevrolet’s new Monte Carlo – basically an old notchback with a flush nose – dominated. But in 1985 the Harry Melling Ford of Bill Elliott came out, using yet another new wrinkle to the sport they had finally perfected – computer engineering. Elliott’s T-birds exploded forth and didn’t just dominate superspeedways, but crushed the opposition thoroughly. A NASCAR rule change raising the T-bird to the same height of the other brands took some of the dominance out of Elliott, but it didn’t change anything overall, as Elliott romped to 11 superspeedway wins – only a complete collapse during the September short track stage cost Elliott the title.<\/p>\n
The sport not only reentered factory wars, but the exoticar wars it had last seen in the late 1960s were on again. GM began design work on a whole new bodystyle for all of its brands. It would take years for the new bodies to be ready, so as a stopgap Buick and Oldsmobile fielded fastback, ’82 Lemans-esque bodystyles for 1986, while Chevrolet and Pontiac added sloped rear glasses to their basic bodies and Pontiac added a flush nose; the car was dubbed the Grand Prix 2+2. Combined with greater use of computer engineering, General Motors stormed through and the Elliott express was derailed for the moment. Ford and Elliott fought back with the 1987 Thunderbird, featuring a longer, sharper nose and higher rear deck.<\/p>\n
With the growing aeroization of stock cars, speeds continued to escalate – in 1984 Cale
\nYarborough, in a notchback Chevrolet, won the pole at Daytona and Talladega at some 202 MPH; by 1987 Elliott was winning poles at 210-plus. With the growing speeds came more and more airborne crashes, a malady since the initial conversion to 110-inch
\nwheelbases. The inevitable happened in May 1987 when Bobby Allison ripped out 100 feet of Talladega fencing. Now 200 MPH was consigned to the junkyard of NASCAR history via horsepower restrictions for the biggest tracks.<\/p>\n
1988 finally saw General Motors debut its new cars, the GM10 body. Gone were the exotic bubble-glass Pontiacs of 1986-7 and the ’82 Lemans-esque boxes Buick and Oldsmobile had fielded. In their place were well-rounded machines that could challenge the track-seasoned Fords and Monte Carlos. Chevrolet’s GM10 body was delayed when NASCAR disallowed the Chevy Lumina until May of 1989. When it finally arrived, it began winning almost immediately. Ford’s 1989 answer to the GM10 body was the MN-12 Thunderbird. It marked a departure of sorts for Ford; where the GM10s sported the short round style of Ford’s mid-80s T-birds, the MN-12 opted for the long lean style of the Monte Carlo and Grand Prix 2+2.<\/p>\n
The departure proved to be troublesome for Ford, for the big problem GM had had with its long lean bodies had been lack of stability in the back. The Ford rear deck sloped downward somewhat where those on the GM10s tended to be level. This teething plus pre-Daytona 500 injury to Bill Elliott helped make for a 1989 season that had fewer Ford wins than 1988. Ford broke out again in 1990 and actually tied Chevrolet in NASCAR’s manufacturer point parade, losing the title because Chevy had more wins. The MN-12’s lack of downforce caused Ford teams to began "raking" their cars’ bodies – altering the nose, roofline, and trunk to create the kind of downforce the somewhat bulkier GM10s made. Raking was as old as racing – it had helped the notchback GM machines of the early ’80s get through races, and Bobby Allison noted that Richard Petty’s 1984 Pontiacs were so raked that they "looked like a dirt car." A<\/p>\n
Losing the 1992 title sent GM to work. Chevrolet began designing a replacement for the
\nLumina, which had not sold well in dealerships in any event. The prototype was built and began testing in May 1993. Hendrick Motorsports and to a somewhat lesser extent RCR Enterprises tested the prototype extensively; Richard Childress used Neil Bonnett to do his testing, and after Bonnett died he would call the new car Neil’s last contribution to racing. Buddy Baker did testing of the new car for Hendrick, and NASCAR closely monitored the extensive excercising of this new Chevrolet.<\/p>\n
The new car was dubbed the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, the first of GM’s new W-body machines. In a sense the car was revolutionary in NASCAR aerodynamics – it was the first car built with
\ndownforce, not low drag, in mind; even Chrysler’s wing cars of 1969-70 had low drag rather than downforce in mind. The car harkened back to both the 1987 Ford Thunderbird and also bore traces of the bubble-glass 1986-88 Monte Carlo SS.<\/p>\n
When the Monte Carlo debuted in 1995 it caused a huge uproar. The production model’s rear deck was much rounder than those on the MN-12 Ford or the GM10 Pontiac, and as such it was some four to five inches shorter than the 57-inch spoiler mandated by NASCAR. The popular story that circulated was that NASCAR told Chevy teams to widen the rear deck so the spoiler would fit; the more plausible story is that NASCAR had Chevy teams flatten the round rear deck, and this caused the area’s "widening" and thus allowed the spoiler to fit. Regardless, a precedent of sorts was set, and when the Monte Carlo started slaughtering racefields week after week, Ford teams howled that Chevy had lied to NASCAR to get aero concessions. NASCAR responded with an unprecedented move – following the crash-torn Rebel 400 at Darlington it impounded the highest finishing (and least damaged) of each marque for windtunnel testing at Lockheed’s Georgia win<\/p>\n
Pontiac had its own W-body on the way for 1996. But unlike Chevy, Pontiac struggled mightily just to get a prototype to test. Blueprints were given to SABCO racing in October 1994 for construction of a prototype. SABCO, however, sat on the blueprints for some seven months, until Pontiac gave them to Bahari Racing. Not until August 1995 was a prototype W-body Pontiac ready for testing. With the months lost, Pontiac teams were too far behind to be fully competitive out of the box. The lost time also contributed to a snafu in placement of the nosepiece, and when the car raced, teams found it pushed in traffic. Another NASCAR windtunnel test showed the car lacked front
\ndownforce, and a nosepiece Pontiac had tried to get approved for the start of 1996 was approved beginning in mid-June of that year.<\/p>\n
As a result, Pontiac struggled throughout 1996, but by September the Grand Prix began to finish consistently high, and in November Bobby Hamilton gave the car a win at Phoenix. A pivotal change then occurred, as GM switched Joe Gibbs’ Interstate Batteries team from Chevrolet to Pontiac for 1997.<\/p>\n
Ford, meanwhile, was still campaigning the MN-12 Thunderbird. A flusher nose was added in 1996, and NASCAR allowed the roofline to be lowered by under an inch. Ford thus regained the form of 1994, and with 11 wins in a 17 race span by mid-September Ford appeared ready to upset Chevy in the manufacturer race. Chevy rallied with five wins in the final seven races to win the title, but Ford was reenergized and Chevy exhausted. Ford roared through 1997 with 18 victories and the manufacturer title, but Ford’s decision to end production of Thunderbirds left its teams in something of a quandry for 1998. The only available body was the Taurus, a car never intended for any kind of competition, lacking any kind of natural downforce other than an excellent roofline greenhouse, and which would not be ready for any track testing until October. NASCAR allowed Ford to use a
\nChevrolet-esque rear deck on the competition Taurus and also al<\/p>\n
As a result, the Taurus roared through, often placing ten cars within the top dozen or fifteen spots of a finishing order. NASCAR narrowed the Taurus’ spoiler early in the season, but Ford wound up with 15 wins, and only a complete annihilation by Jeff Gordon allowed Chevrolet to win the manufacturer title. For 1999 NASCAR gave up on the unraceable 5 & 5 specs, and the quality of racing improved somewhat. For Ford, the success continued to come and the company’s fourth manufacturer title of the decade thus came.<\/p>\n
The spoiler of the season was Pontiac. Its W-body Grand Prix was something of a throwback. The rear deck of the Pontiac was humped upward around the taillights, reminscent of the fins featured on many brands four decades earlier. The nose also dropped downward more, due in part to the change in nosepieces halfway through 1996. Compared to the Chevy and Ford, the Pontiac was a return to the exoticars of the latter 1980s. With the addition of Tony Stewart to Joe Gibbs’ team, the merger of Petty Enterprises with Kyle Petty’s satellite PE2 outfit, and a change of crew chiefs at Bill Davis Racing, Pontiac stormed to nine wins and a pile of top tens.<\/p>\n
With the 2000 season, Chevrolet will roll out the new Monte Carlo Intimidator. The car was scheduled to be raced beginning at the 1999 Coca-Cola 600, but NASCAR surprisingly refused to approve the car for competition. The MC Intimidator continues the exoticar cycle begun in the late 1960s and renewed in the latter 1980s. The Intimidator Chevrolet borrows heavily from its Pontiac brethren – the rear deck is even more "cambered" than that of the Pontiac, the roofline greenhouse is flusher like the Grand Prix’s, and the nose is rounder and slopes downward more than on the mid-90s
\nMontes. In pre-competition testing teams have complained the car lacks sufficient front
\ndownforce, but remember that such chicanery took place during pre-comp testing of the older Monte and of the Taurus – remember the Robert Yates-Jack Roush feud of January 1998? The Monte Carlo Intimidator will be a successful racecar.<\/p>\n
The final player of the aero wars is Dodge, reentering NASCAR with Ray Evernham and,
\napparantly, Petty Enterprises for the 2001 season. The Dodge Intrepid appears to be the body of choice; certainly the car fits every aerodynamic need teams will have. The Intrepid’s nose is long and round, and its quad-grille configuration leaves the top of the nose flush, good for
\ndownforce. The downside to the nose is that the grille is open, not flush with the outer skin; such a configuration has tended to make cars push in traffic. The greenhouse is noticably larger than on the GM and Ford
\nmarques, but Dodge’s roofline is also rounder and would seem to have no problem with creating
\ndownforce; the car might actually be slicker than the other brands even though it only now is being entered to race. There’s a bit of exoticar look to the Intrepid, though not as radical as with GM’s NASCAR entries.<\/p>\n
Two curious footnotes to NASCAR’s aero wars are worth mentioning – in 1993 Cale Yarborough’s team built a Mercury
\nCouger, a car whose rear glass drops straight down from the roof, and tested it at Daytona, reportedly at the behest of Ford. In an interview with Eli Gold at the time, Cale explained that the idea was to use the vacuum on the car’s rear deck to loosen it up and decrease drag, thus overcoming the near-seven inch spoiler mandated. The test, though, proved a bust, and the Mercury project was stopped.<\/p>\n
Showing greater promise was John Andretti’s 1996 Charlotte test of a Lincoln Continental. Sporting a huge humped rear deck, the "Hot Rod" Lincoln proved better than the Ford Thunderbird in downforce and potentially better than GM’s race-engineered W-bodies. Unfortunately Ford stepped in and vetoed any use of the Lincoln.<\/p>\n
Said boxing great Ray
\nArcel, "It was always thus." So it is with NASCAR aerodynamic wars. It will be interesting to see how it transpires in this new cycle of exoticar wars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The year 2000 will see the introduction of two new bodystyles to NASCAR competition. Chevrolet has undertaken a major overhaul of the Monte Carlo body, creating what is quasi-officially known as the MC Intimidator. As for Ford, its overhaul of the Taurus racecar is less radical, more of a minor facelift. Pontiac, meanwhile, remains […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-original-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racindeals.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}