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'Car Of Tomorrow' Not Living Up To Hype

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By TONY FABRIZIO

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 8, 2008

LONG POND, Pa. - Designed from scratch and tested, modified and tweaked during a period of several years, NASCAR's "car of tomorrow" was supposed to be the best race car ever built.

From a competition standpoint, it has not measured up.
Fifteen months after the car's rollout, engineers and crew chiefs are struggling to make the winged car rotate through the corners, and drivers are frustrated with its balky handling and the fact it's hard to pass.

And NASCAR's hierarchy is staunchly defending it.

"With all due respect to every driver in our garage, today's Sprint Cup car is much more difficult to drive than the Nextel Cup cars we used to know, and that's part of the design," Sprint Cup director John Darby said.

The new car races for the first time today at Pocono Raceway, and some drivers are expecting a long afternoon.

Pocono is a big track with three tight turns and little banking in two of them, and it didn't produce much passing for the lead with the old car. With the new car, the leader could run away.

"A boring race - that's a big concern," points leader Kyle Busch said about what he expects. "You just get within a few car lengths of the guy in front of you and you get stuck and you just can't go anywhere."

The new car has delivered entertaining races at the two superspeedways - Daytona and Talladega - and at Charlotte with last month's Coca-Cola 600. Elsewhere, it has mostly been disappointing.

The March race at Atlanta had little side-by-side racing, in part because Goodyear's tire compound was too hard, and the April race at Texas was so uncompetitive the track's general manager practically apologized to fans.

After last week's race at Dover produced only one true green flag pass for the lead, second- and third-place finishers Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle complained they were held up for several laps by a slower car (Travis Kvapil's) they would have gotten by more easily with the old car.

"You can't get close enough to put the bumper on him because the car is so aero-tight," Biffle said. "It's so big it punches such a big hole in the air that you just can't get to the guy's bumper, or I'd have jacked his tires off the ground and sent him into the fence backward."

Edwards, who has won three times this year, is the only top driver who has raved about the new car's attributes beyond its safety enhancements. But even Edwards says that making the cars practically equal has reduced passing.

"It's hard to work somebody over and get an advantage because if you are better than them, you might only be two-hundredths of a second a lap better," he said.

Rules governing the new car are so tight almost no modifications to the chassis or body are allowed. Engineers and fabricators can't twist the frame or shape the fenders to create extra downforce and sideways as they did with the old car.

But to the surprise of no one, the race teams still found a way to manipulate aerodynamics and help the car turn.

Through a modification to the rear housing, engineers put the car in "yaw", meaning it travels down the straightaway crooked but enters the corners at an advantageous angle. A "yawed out" car is said to "crab" down the straightaway.

NASCAR practically outlawed the process last month, tightly limiting the amount of yaw in a car.

With that trick taken away, teams are back to battling the condition known as aero-push - basically meaning a trailing car doesn't want to turn because of insufficient front downforce.

Two-time defending Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson says the enhanced aero-push drivers are fighting with the new car is due to its larger size, so there's no easy fix.

"It works great on the superspeedways, but it's terrible everywhere else," he said. "That huge hole it's punching in the air doesn't allow anyone behind that car to have any downforce. I don't know how we make this car smaller because everything about it is to make it bigger for a reason."

Engineers and drivers have recommended lowering the car's high center of gravity and allowing more suspension travel, which would increase downforce. Kurt Busch, who is struggling through a difficult season, suggests raising the splitter - the lip below the front bumper - to the measurement used in the Craftsman Truck Series.

Darby says "that's the world we left" and indicates no changes are coming anytime soon. He says the car's parameters were decided upon after years of research and development.

"It's very easy for some of our resident experts to walk around and tell the world what would make the car run faster, but we don't really have an interest in making the car run faster," he said. "What makes a good race car is balance, and the car is balanced just fine."

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