DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Despite NASCAR president Mike Helton's concern about Brad Keselowski's airborne car Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, don't look for a solution to flying stock cars in the short term, if ever.
While preventing cars from getting airborne is a worthy goal, the violence and unpredictability of NASCAR racing probably makes it unreachable, Cup Series director John Darby said Tuesday.
And Darby reiterated that the coming return of spoilers on the back of Cup cars was largely an aesthetic change, not a functional one.
"The one thing that's very, very hard for us to deal with is there's a huge difference between a car being lifted off the ground by air and being knocked up into the air by another car," Darby said. "So the biggest roof flaps in the world or the biggest parachute in the world may not bring a car back to the race track once it's catapulted up off the race track from the forces of another car.
"We can test and we can make additions and we can do everything we can to help keep the cars on the ground -- a car that spins and turns and wants to come up, but the aero devices won't let it. What's hard to do is to displace the energy of a second car being involved and physically pushing the car up into the air."
