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By Chris Jenkins, USA TODAY
Imagine a Detroit engineer in a brainstorming meeting offering up the following suggestions for a new sports car:
NASCAR's "car of the future" is expected to be a safer vehicle because it will be taller and wider, leaving more room for safety equipment.
NASCAR
Can we make it boxier? Hopefully, that will mess up the handling. And by all means, keep it low-tech.
In the world of passenger-car design, that would earn somebody an instant demotion to the department of fuzzy-dice development. But to engineers designing NASCAR's Nextel Cup "car of the future," it is becoming apparent that the streamlined designs, unflappable handling and gee-whiz gadgets that make a sporty car appealing to consumers aren't ideal for race cars.
All those things make a race car go faster, but faster racing isn't necessarily better racing.
Through a redesigned race car, NASCAR officials hope to address three looming issues in the sport: safety, competition and cost control.
The car will be safer, partly because it's taller, wider design will have more room for safety equipment. The boxier car also will be less aerodynamic, slowing it slightly in turns and hopefully making it easier for drivers to pass each other. And officials will use the car to intensify efforts to limit expensive technological advancements, to shrink the growing disparity between big- and small-budget teams that threatens their recent efforts to encourage NFL-style parity.
"With the emphasis being on safety and then competition and then cost control, I think by the time we sort out all the fine details, we see no reason we should not obtain our goals," says NASCAR managing director of competition Gary Nelson, who is leading the redesign effort.
NASCAR could begin phasing in the car next year.
The idea of employing engineers to plan future car designs represents a shift in philosophy. For most of NASCAR's 50-plus years, officials' involvement in car design was limited to approving or rejecting modifications proposed by teams or automakers, policing cheating and trying to equalize the competition among different car brands.
That changed after the death of racing icon Dale Earnhardt in February 2001. Under intense media scrutiny of its outdated safety measures, NASCAR hired engineers and consultants and built a high-tech research and development center outside Charlotte. Nelson, once an expert in skirting NASCAR's rulebook as a team crew chief, runs the center.
Safety changes came quickly. Thanks to mandatory head and neck restraint collars, improved seat belts and impact-absorbing walls at many racetracks, NASCAR's top series has had relatively few serious injuries and no deaths since Earnhardt's accident.
The millions NASCAR is spending on engineers, computer-aided drafting and wind-tunnel tests won't instantly solve problems that have been building for 20 years. The redesigned cars should help, but will the level of improvement justify the short-term expense and effort teams would have to expend to throw away old cars and build new ones?
"It's going to be a long-term proposition," driver-team CEO Kyle Petty says. "They're going to have to sit down with teams ... and say, this is 2005, this is 2006, this is what (it will) be in 2008. It's a major step for them, and a major step for us, because we've never planned that far ahead."
Solving competition problems
In NASCAR's formative years, race cars came off the showroom floor. Today's cars have almost nothing in common with street cars; since the mid-1960s, they have been hand-built to NASCAR specifications.
Until recently, NASCAR based cars' external dimensions on the street cars they were supposed to resemble. If a brand's body design seemed to cut through the air better than another's, officials would try to equalize competition by adjusting design rules.
But during the last few seasons, officials have further encouraged parity by rewriting the rules to make the Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge body designs almost identical. Thus, more drivers are capable of winning a race, and rarely does a race leader build a lead of more than a few seconds.
NASCAR's body design rules are strict, but there are so-called "gray areas" so top teams spend millions on wind-tunnel research to figure out how the subtle reshaping of fenders and other body panels can help their cars stick to the track.
Hence, NASCAR cars are slicker, handle better and are more equal — and often can't pass each other. If two cars are nearly equal and the lead car is in calm air and the other is in turbulent air, the trailing car won't handle as well and won't be able to pass.
Boxier cars wouldn't handle quite as well, but their handling wouldn't change as dramatically when caught in turbulent air. That might make it easier for a trailing car to pass a leading car. Thus the racing tends to be more competitive in NASCAR's minor league Craftsman Truck Series, where competitors race bricklike replicas of pickups.
"If we can design into our car less of a swing from clean air to turbulent air, the car isn't affected that much," Nelson says. Such a car means "that maybe the fifth-place guy is able to move up much better and the first-place guy might not be able to get away."
Officials already took a small step toward making cars less aerodynamic, reducing the height of rear spoiler wings, so the cars won't stick to the track as well. Driver Jeff Burton says he favors changes but asks, "What has it really changed? I don't know that it's made that big of a difference."
A more effective solution to NASCAR's passing problems might be found in racetrack design. The problem is worst at high-speed tracks with relatively gradual banking in the turns such as Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Pocono Raceway (in Long Pond, Pa.), Chicagoland Speedway and Kansas Speedway in Kansas City.
At those tracks, the fastest line around the track — the "groove" — is always on the inside, making it difficult to pass on the outside. "You're not going to have great races everywhere all the time — you're just not," team owner Ray Evernham says. "Some of the racetracks just don't allow spectacular races."
Last year officials at Homestead-Miami Speedway spent about $10 million to rebuild the track's turns. Banking on the redesigned track becomes progressively steeper from the bottom of each turn to the top. Cars go faster on steeper banking so the reconfigured Homestead entices drivers to try passing on the outside. Last year cars were able to run side-by-side and pass each other more easily at Homestead.
"It was awesome compared to what they had," Fox Sports' Darrell Waltrip says. "It was great racing. I can think of two or three tracks that could stand to have the same thing."
Nelson sees potential: "We only have one race of experience at Homestead, but that one race was pretty neat."
Solving cost problems
Another potential way for officials to make NASCAR more entertaining: make it easier for smaller-budget teams to contend for the season title.
NASCAR has always designed rules to keep expensive technology out of the sport, but that doesn't stop big-budget teams from spending millions of dollars researching improvements to their cars.
Although Nelson doesn't want to prevent teams from coming up with technological innovations, the redesigned car will make it harder to do so. That, he hopes, will give smaller-budget teams a fighting chance.
The last driver to win a championship on a modest budget was the late Alan Kulwicki, who owned his own single-car team. Most subsequent attempts by drivers to run their teams on humble budgets have failed.
Today six teams field a combined 22 cars, more than half the starting field.
Teams operate independently from NASCAR so officials can't impose a salary cap on drivers or crewmembers. But NASCAR can expand its efforts to limit expensive technology and control the mechanical costs of racing. Nelson's goal: "You can gold-plate your doorknobs if you like. It's not going to make you faster."
The series has hired former driver Brett Bodine, who struggled as an owner-driver in recent years, to help determine what measures could help smaller teams.
"The goal is to have an Alan Kulwicki-style champion one day. ... It's OK to be wealthy. That's fine. But we're trying to limit the ways the dollars can buy speed," Nelson says. "So now the guy that's less well-funded but has a lot of talent and a lot of heart and a lot of the things that America is about can make it."
Petty is skeptical, saying racers spend whatever they have: "Racing and cost-saving is an oxymoron."
Next year officials could place limits on the types of gears teams can use in an attempt to limit engine revolutions per minute. This would prevent larger teams from spending money to develop higher-revving engines that produce more horsepower. It's more important to have competitive racing than faster racing.
Perhaps the most controversial idea NASCAR is considering: forcing teams to buy the center section of their chassis — the car's basic underbody frame — from an outside firm at a fixed price. Teams would build their own engines, suspension systems and body panels.
Chad Knaus, Jimmie Johnson's crew chief, doesn't want NASCAR to go into the car-building business. He says crewmembers work long hours and seven-day weeks because they're motivated to build a better car than that of rival teams. "They're going to continue to try to make the cars the same, and that's fine," Knaus says. "But I think ... race teams still need to have some freedom to do what they want. I mean, that's kind of what this whole deal was founded on."
Nelson has been working for NASCAR since 1991, but he probably would express the same concern as Knaus if he were still a crew chief. He once delighted in confounding NASCAR officials with technical innovations; rivals called him a cheater.
"My thought process was always to take the rule book and read it closely and find advantages between the lines," he says, laughing. "NASCAR spent a lot of time rewriting rules to stop what I'd come up with."
Nelson says teams shouldn't worry that NASCAR is trying to stifle creativity. Even if they did, he says, it wouldn't work: "The creative folks are always going to invent stuff that doesn't exist today."
By Chris Jenkins, USA TODAY
Imagine a Detroit engineer in a brainstorming meeting offering up the following suggestions for a new sports car:
NASCAR's "car of the future" is expected to be a safer vehicle because it will be taller and wider, leaving more room for safety equipment.
NASCAR
Can we make it boxier? Hopefully, that will mess up the handling. And by all means, keep it low-tech.
In the world of passenger-car design, that would earn somebody an instant demotion to the department of fuzzy-dice development. But to engineers designing NASCAR's Nextel Cup "car of the future," it is becoming apparent that the streamlined designs, unflappable handling and gee-whiz gadgets that make a sporty car appealing to consumers aren't ideal for race cars.
All those things make a race car go faster, but faster racing isn't necessarily better racing.
Through a redesigned race car, NASCAR officials hope to address three looming issues in the sport: safety, competition and cost control.
The car will be safer, partly because it's taller, wider design will have more room for safety equipment. The boxier car also will be less aerodynamic, slowing it slightly in turns and hopefully making it easier for drivers to pass each other. And officials will use the car to intensify efforts to limit expensive technological advancements, to shrink the growing disparity between big- and small-budget teams that threatens their recent efforts to encourage NFL-style parity.
"With the emphasis being on safety and then competition and then cost control, I think by the time we sort out all the fine details, we see no reason we should not obtain our goals," says NASCAR managing director of competition Gary Nelson, who is leading the redesign effort.
NASCAR could begin phasing in the car next year.
The idea of employing engineers to plan future car designs represents a shift in philosophy. For most of NASCAR's 50-plus years, officials' involvement in car design was limited to approving or rejecting modifications proposed by teams or automakers, policing cheating and trying to equalize the competition among different car brands.
That changed after the death of racing icon Dale Earnhardt in February 2001. Under intense media scrutiny of its outdated safety measures, NASCAR hired engineers and consultants and built a high-tech research and development center outside Charlotte. Nelson, once an expert in skirting NASCAR's rulebook as a team crew chief, runs the center.
Safety changes came quickly. Thanks to mandatory head and neck restraint collars, improved seat belts and impact-absorbing walls at many racetracks, NASCAR's top series has had relatively few serious injuries and no deaths since Earnhardt's accident.
The millions NASCAR is spending on engineers, computer-aided drafting and wind-tunnel tests won't instantly solve problems that have been building for 20 years. The redesigned cars should help, but will the level of improvement justify the short-term expense and effort teams would have to expend to throw away old cars and build new ones?
"It's going to be a long-term proposition," driver-team CEO Kyle Petty says. "They're going to have to sit down with teams ... and say, this is 2005, this is 2006, this is what (it will) be in 2008. It's a major step for them, and a major step for us, because we've never planned that far ahead."
Solving competition problems
In NASCAR's formative years, race cars came off the showroom floor. Today's cars have almost nothing in common with street cars; since the mid-1960s, they have been hand-built to NASCAR specifications.
Until recently, NASCAR based cars' external dimensions on the street cars they were supposed to resemble. If a brand's body design seemed to cut through the air better than another's, officials would try to equalize competition by adjusting design rules.
But during the last few seasons, officials have further encouraged parity by rewriting the rules to make the Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge body designs almost identical. Thus, more drivers are capable of winning a race, and rarely does a race leader build a lead of more than a few seconds.
NASCAR's body design rules are strict, but there are so-called "gray areas" so top teams spend millions on wind-tunnel research to figure out how the subtle reshaping of fenders and other body panels can help their cars stick to the track.
Hence, NASCAR cars are slicker, handle better and are more equal — and often can't pass each other. If two cars are nearly equal and the lead car is in calm air and the other is in turbulent air, the trailing car won't handle as well and won't be able to pass.
Boxier cars wouldn't handle quite as well, but their handling wouldn't change as dramatically when caught in turbulent air. That might make it easier for a trailing car to pass a leading car. Thus the racing tends to be more competitive in NASCAR's minor league Craftsman Truck Series, where competitors race bricklike replicas of pickups.
"If we can design into our car less of a swing from clean air to turbulent air, the car isn't affected that much," Nelson says. Such a car means "that maybe the fifth-place guy is able to move up much better and the first-place guy might not be able to get away."
Officials already took a small step toward making cars less aerodynamic, reducing the height of rear spoiler wings, so the cars won't stick to the track as well. Driver Jeff Burton says he favors changes but asks, "What has it really changed? I don't know that it's made that big of a difference."
A more effective solution to NASCAR's passing problems might be found in racetrack design. The problem is worst at high-speed tracks with relatively gradual banking in the turns such as Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Pocono Raceway (in Long Pond, Pa.), Chicagoland Speedway and Kansas Speedway in Kansas City.
At those tracks, the fastest line around the track — the "groove" — is always on the inside, making it difficult to pass on the outside. "You're not going to have great races everywhere all the time — you're just not," team owner Ray Evernham says. "Some of the racetracks just don't allow spectacular races."
Last year officials at Homestead-Miami Speedway spent about $10 million to rebuild the track's turns. Banking on the redesigned track becomes progressively steeper from the bottom of each turn to the top. Cars go faster on steeper banking so the reconfigured Homestead entices drivers to try passing on the outside. Last year cars were able to run side-by-side and pass each other more easily at Homestead.
"It was awesome compared to what they had," Fox Sports' Darrell Waltrip says. "It was great racing. I can think of two or three tracks that could stand to have the same thing."
Nelson sees potential: "We only have one race of experience at Homestead, but that one race was pretty neat."
Solving cost problems
Another potential way for officials to make NASCAR more entertaining: make it easier for smaller-budget teams to contend for the season title.
NASCAR has always designed rules to keep expensive technology out of the sport, but that doesn't stop big-budget teams from spending millions of dollars researching improvements to their cars.
Although Nelson doesn't want to prevent teams from coming up with technological innovations, the redesigned car will make it harder to do so. That, he hopes, will give smaller-budget teams a fighting chance.
The last driver to win a championship on a modest budget was the late Alan Kulwicki, who owned his own single-car team. Most subsequent attempts by drivers to run their teams on humble budgets have failed.
Today six teams field a combined 22 cars, more than half the starting field.
Teams operate independently from NASCAR so officials can't impose a salary cap on drivers or crewmembers. But NASCAR can expand its efforts to limit expensive technology and control the mechanical costs of racing. Nelson's goal: "You can gold-plate your doorknobs if you like. It's not going to make you faster."
The series has hired former driver Brett Bodine, who struggled as an owner-driver in recent years, to help determine what measures could help smaller teams.
"The goal is to have an Alan Kulwicki-style champion one day. ... It's OK to be wealthy. That's fine. But we're trying to limit the ways the dollars can buy speed," Nelson says. "So now the guy that's less well-funded but has a lot of talent and a lot of heart and a lot of the things that America is about can make it."
Petty is skeptical, saying racers spend whatever they have: "Racing and cost-saving is an oxymoron."
Next year officials could place limits on the types of gears teams can use in an attempt to limit engine revolutions per minute. This would prevent larger teams from spending money to develop higher-revving engines that produce more horsepower. It's more important to have competitive racing than faster racing.
Perhaps the most controversial idea NASCAR is considering: forcing teams to buy the center section of their chassis — the car's basic underbody frame — from an outside firm at a fixed price. Teams would build their own engines, suspension systems and body panels.
Chad Knaus, Jimmie Johnson's crew chief, doesn't want NASCAR to go into the car-building business. He says crewmembers work long hours and seven-day weeks because they're motivated to build a better car than that of rival teams. "They're going to continue to try to make the cars the same, and that's fine," Knaus says. "But I think ... race teams still need to have some freedom to do what they want. I mean, that's kind of what this whole deal was founded on."
Nelson has been working for NASCAR since 1991, but he probably would express the same concern as Knaus if he were still a crew chief. He once delighted in confounding NASCAR officials with technical innovations; rivals called him a cheater.
"My thought process was always to take the rule book and read it closely and find advantages between the lines," he says, laughing. "NASCAR spent a lot of time rewriting rules to stop what I'd come up with."
Nelson says teams shouldn't worry that NASCAR is trying to stifle creativity. Even if they did, he says, it wouldn't work: "The creative folks are always going to invent stuff that doesn't exist today."
