Article From Insider Racing News on COT (POS)
By Larry Van Zandt
Oct. 15 2008
As I have said in the past, I think the COT is a disaster. The COT is essentially NASCAR management telling the team owners (and car builders working for those teams), telling them how to do their job in building the cars. From a safety standpoint, I couldn't agree more, however, I am not entirely buying the 'safety' argument that keeps being relayed, ad-nauseum, by those in charge.
Why?
Part of the COT's new design might have been enhanced safety for the drivers, and I like what has been done to increase the crush zones of the door areas on both sides of the car. After seeing Travis Kvapil trying to color outside of the lines with a hard hit into the SAFER barrier last night, during the Bank Of America 500 Points Down In The Stock Market, at Lowe's Motor Speedway, I am seriously impressed with the kind of hit these cars can take, and still allow drivers to at least stumble away, like watching a tipsy librarian trying to walk home after Prom night.
Of course, it doesn't do anything to reduce the immediate stress level increase a driver gets after the realization that he is about to follow Spock's advice, and become 'one' with the wall, although some teams are working on eliminating the stress of seeing the wall coming towards you at an unfriendly rate of speed; just look at the #45 Petty Racing Dodge, for example.
They are so concerned about drivers not encountering any stress during impending doom, that they have installed an experimental automatic hood-opening device that pops the hood up in case the car goes towards the wall at speeds over 100 mph, in order to block the driver's view of the accident, ensuring that the driver will remain calm instead of stressing out over something as silly as 'hitting the wall'.
We got to see it in action at Charlotte last night, although it appears there was a malfunction, as the #45 Sprint (or whoever is sponsoring that car this week) Dodge was sent out onto the race track with the hood up and back onto the windshield...and it didn't appear that it was in any danger of hitting the wall at the time. Or, it may be entirely possible that Petty Racing thought that the #45 was having too easy of a race to run, and were in too much danger of finishing in the top 43, so they thought that they needed to do something to prevent a higher finish in the final results.
As it is, the pesky driver, Chad McCumbree, finished in 35th place anyway, never mind that his crew chief, during later pit stops, also pulled other pranks to slow the driver down, such as putting itching powder down in his uniform, sending old ladies with walkers out in front of the car while Chad was trying to exit the pits, putting baseball cards in the wheel spokes, repeatedly telling him over the radio that a large bee flew into the car, and when none of that worked, during the last pit stop of the race, they went for it and casually sneaked a rabid badger into the car with him from the passenger side window, as they changed the tires on the driver's side.
After all of that, he still had to contend with a last lap drive for his life, with the spear-throwing, arrow-shooting, and dart-blowing Hovitos from the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' were following him around the track in the back of a NASCAR Craftsman race truck driven by some French guy, the angry Hovitos trying to shoot out his tires with flaming arrows, darts, and spears, after the crew chief, seeing none of his plans working to slow Chad down, made a frantic phone call to Steven Spielberg with 5 laps to go...
Whoops....back to the COT disaster....
The reason why I don't buy the entire 'safety' argument of the COT? NASCAR has stepped on its own foot in sooo many different directions with this car...and I shall count the ways:
1. Deliberately building a car that is such an aerodynamic disaster, that it can only run in tight packs of 43 cars on certain high-speed tracks? The last time I checked, that wasn't the safest way to run a race, with forty-three 3500-pound cars all traveling at 190 mph, only inches apart. Gee, one would think that they were trying to cause more accidents.
Think of it this way: If you assembled 43 drunken grandmothers in wheelchairs, tied them all together with lengths of rope in order for them to stay bunched together (in the interest of 'parity'), placed them all on a 15-mile-long downhill road with a 30-percent grade, and then pushed them to get going, how many wheelchairs are going to be wiped out if one crashes? I don't know, but I do know that the resulting chaos would definitely generate more ratings...but if I made the wheelchairs safer, then what? If you are increasing the chance of accidents during the race, then how in the world is this a safer race car for the driver?
2. These cars were deliberately built to keep them closer together on tracks. If one worries more about the 'show' than enhancing the racing, the COT is exactly the car you are looking for.
3. If enhancing 'parity' was a strong concern in the design of the COT, in making sure everyone got the same car, how is it that the same few teams are still dominating every event? Because no matter how much you try to ensure that nobody dominates, or gets too far ahead, somebody is going to work harder AND smarter than the other guys.
If NASCAR insists on its paranoid quest for 'parity' they might as well just adopt the IROC series way of running things, and just toss the drivers out into 43 cars all built by the same shop. Oh, wait, IROC didn't work out too well, did it? Well, they might improve on the IROC model, by adding flaming rings to jump their cars through, or making machine gun pits where drivers have to duck live machine gun fire whizzing through the windows, all while doing 190 mph on the backstretch of Daytona....yep, that would make IROC interesting again....at least until the conspiracy theorists begin to circulate rumors that the Roush drivers all have to duck lower in the cars than everyone else...
4. Parity again raises its ugly head....if I hear the term 'clean air' ever again, I am going to toss my cookies at the TV screen. This is yet another failure of the COT, the fact that if someone gets into the lead...it's almost impossible to pass the guy. These cars have soooo little downforce, that the moment someone gets behind another car, what little downforce assistance they were getting in the corners disappears completely, the cars slide up the track...and then whoever is in the lead continues to stay in the lead, at least until a pit stop. So much for the 'parity' argument, again. COT = fail.
5. I am getting a bit off-topic with this one, but it includes NASCAR, and it's the subject of tires.
In NHRA Drag Racing, if you follow that series at all and have noticed the tire failures of the last few years, officially, there wasn't a rear tire problem with NHRA Top Fuel dragsters. Unoffically, if you listened to some of the drivers who dared to speak, the cars were simply too fast for the tires, and too much downforce was allowed to be generated by the huge rear wings they use, with some of the numbers generated showing somwhere north of 7500 pounds of rear downforce at the end of the 1/4 mile, squarely onto the rear tires.
This was being generated on tires that were only designed to go 300 mph, yet these cars were going 330+, with the hideous amount of downforce. The problem here? If you listened to the drivers, they were overloading the tires, and the tires simply couldn't handle the loads, therefore they were blowing out. A blowout isn't a fun thing at 190 mph, and it's certainly not a walk in the park to have one at 330 mph. However, after the death of driver Scott Kalitta, NHRA has finally slowed the cars down, by reducing the top-fuel class track length to 1000 feet, instead of 1320 feet.
It appears to have worked, as engine explosions have almost entirely ceased, and tire explosions have stopped for the most part. I apologize for mentioning the other race series, but there is an interesting parallel between the NHRA and NASCAR, on the subject of tires.
After watching almost a full season with the COT, and the tire disasters that have popped up, race after race, I am convinced that either Michelin or Firestone need to give NASCAR a call, or Goodyear needs to bow out in protest, for the following reason; Either Goodyear is dropping the ball, by producing crappy, inconsistent tires, or the COT, being the aero disaster that it is, is simply too much car for the tire being mandated by NASCAR.
I think both parties are a bit guilty here, as the tire inconsistency problems have plagued NASCAR as far back as I can remember, well before the COT was even a gleam in the eye of NASCAR. If you have a car that nothing is changed on during a pit stop, and the car goes from being the envy of the field to becoming a backmarker in less than 20 seconds, with this happening race, after race, after race....there is definitely a problem here.
Where does the COT come in?
With the reduced downforce, and horsepower 'creep' (engine horsepower slightly increases year to year, as we are now well over 800 HP on the non-restrictor-plate tracks), these 3500-pound behemoths can no longer generate the same corner speeds as the pre-COT cars, and any attempt to do so causes the cars to slide up the track, and shred the tire tread with the track surface cheese grater.
I am convinced that this is what happened at the Brickyard 400 this year, as tires were not lasting longer than 10 or so laps, before being ground down to the cords, blowing out, and sending the cars into the wall. This lack of downforce makes the teams go to drastic measures with negative camber or excessive air pressure, and we get blowout after blowout. Concerning Dale Jr's blowout last night at Lowe's Motor Speedway?
From my experience with race cars in general, a small puncture wound, like the track reporter so graciously showed the audience ("Goodyear says THIS caused the flat!") with the destroyed tire from the #88 Amp Energy Drink Chevrolet, does not cause a giant 'bang' and blow half of the fender off, when the tire begins to lose air from that small of a hole. It simply loses air, in a somewhat controlled manner, and goes flat rather quickly, but not in an explosive manner. So, my dear Watson, is it the tires, or the car? Or was it the one-armed man?
Find out in next week's action-packed episode of 'As the Sunoco Burns'....
Well, enough with the COT rants. I just hope the drivers develop a spine someday, and refuse to drive until NASCAR yanks this heap off of the track, and replaces it with something resembling a Mustang, Camaro, or Challenger.Whatever car is used, give it downforce, a 4-liter V8, along with a 500-pound diet, and let a car dominate for a change. Socialism belongs in Politics 101, not NASCAR.
