Tony Stewart: NASCAR's aero problem is partly why I retired

Chase-Elliott-2017-paint-scheme-NAPA-AUTO-PARTS-24-rendering.jpg


2017
 
dpkimmel2001 said:
.... How are the cars supposed to be slowed down? Restrictor plates? Lower horsepower? ..... The cars are perfectly capable of the drivers running foot to the floor around most of the venues ...
Click to expand...
Then slow the cars down by leaving the hardware alone and changing the venues so the drivers CAN'T run around wide open. Knock the damn banking down or otherwise alter the track so drivers have to step on the brakes or eat the wall.

Why are the teams always expected to change to 'improve' the racing? Let the tracks eat those costs for a while. They don't all have to change at once, but each time they repave, scrape some banking away, alter the ends so they don't match, use the infield or area behind the track, etc.
 
formula racer said:
Look at the sides . Combined with skew they're just as twisted.
Click to expand...
To my eye. the left side of the 2017 car isn't as extreme as the sister. Both right sides are pretty flat.

The biggest difference appears to be up front. The new cars are much more symetrical side to side.
 
Those 2006/2007 cars posted above were quite possibly the ugliest race car bodies in NASCAR history IMO. They started getting ridiculous around 2003 or so, and really hit rock bottom by '07. The COT wasn't much of an improvement in the looks department, but at least it was a little more symmetrical and the nose wasn't so crazy elongated
 
Acs said:
I mean sh!t, I wasn't even 10 when this race was run, but it took me all of 4 minutes to look up a random 90's coke 600 and then watch 20 minutes of better racing than I'll see all this 2017 season. Hell tune in at 19 mins in to this race and you'll see what everyone else means:

.
Click to expand...


I went to the 19 minute mark of that video. And watched for several minutes (until the caution for the two-car incident). Which was about laps 22 through 35.

Initially, Ward Burton had a healthy lead. By the time I stopped watching, Mark Martin had caught him, briefly passed him, then backed off a bit. They were way ahead of the third-place car (Gordon), which was way ahead of the rest of the field.

Until Martin caught up to Burton and there was some racing at the front of the field, TV was focusing on some big names back in the twenties. But I saw little passing at all in the several minutes I watched. Other than lead lap cars passing noticeably slower lapped cars.

Perhaps I'm blind, but I cannot see how the racing during those several minutes was so vastly superior to what we have now. :idunno:

Oh, there was one obvious significant difference: the stands were packed to capacity...
 
Candace66 said:
Perhaps I'm blind, but I cannot see how the racing during those several minutes was so vastly superior to what we have now. :idunno:
Click to expand...
There’s nothing wrong with either your vision or your perception of what you saw.
 
KTMLew01 said:
What IS a "stock car"? Picture of 2018 "Stock Cars" for the three manufactures, please.
Click to expand...

They were going frame off to a preferred chassis, before the JFK assassination or close to it. JFK was going to put a stop to the sheit. He knew it was going to eventually lead to the twisted sister perversions.
John John was going to stop the COT too. More importantly he would have prevented the unjust atrocious invention of Aero, created specifically to end Tonys career.

Well they killed JFK, and John John to stop them, and now Tony is only man left standing, well at least the only man left limping .
At least they only have needed to use Aero, a broke leg, and the Wards on him so far...
 
Greg said:
They were going frame off to a preferred chassis, before the JFK assassination or close to it. JFK was going to put a stop to the sheit. He knew it was going to eventually lead to the twisted sister perversions.
John John was going to stop the COT too. More importantly he would have prevented the unjust atrocious invention of Aero, created specifically to end Tonys career.

Well they killed JFK, and John John to stop them, and now Tony is only man left standing, well at least the only man left limping .
At least they only have needed to use Aero, a broke leg, and the Wards on him so far...
Click to expand...

Any coincidence that Brian France's sister married a Kennedy?

Typical France incompetence lead to her marrying an unrelated Kennedy but she tried.
 
The Nature Boy said:
Any coincidence that Brian France's sister married a Kennedy?

Typical France incompetence lead to her marrying an unrelated Kennedy but she tried.
Click to expand...
Itten there airplane crash they don't care to talk about much
 
Greg said:
They were going frame off to a preferred chassis, before the JFK assassination or close to it. JFK was going to put a stop to the sheit. He knew it was going to eventually lead to the twisted sister perversions.
John John was going to stop the COT too. More importantly he would have prevented the unjust atrocious invention of Aero, created specifically to end Tonys career.

Well they killed JFK, and John John to stop them, and now Tony is only man left standing, well at least the only man left limping .
At least they only have needed to use Aero, a broke leg, and the Wards on him so far...
Click to expand...
Can I assume this was supposed to be funny?
 
FLRacingFan said:
Fundamental redesign of the car. It sounds more likely than not that the Gen-7 will not have a splitter...if Steve O'Donnell is to be believed.
Click to expand...

Engineers take fundamental redesigns, redesign, and solve problems inherent to the fundamental redesigns.
 
FLRacingFan said:
Ontario, Texas World, Michigan, Charlotte, Atlanta, etc. Daytona and Talladega before there were plates. Just not in the same manner as what we currently perceive to be "drafting" because it's mostly defined now to be what we see at Daytona and Talladega currently.
Click to expand...
Exactly. Drafting becomes crucial on any fast race track when you have relatively low horsepower and relatively high drag. Example: Moto3 is dominated by drafting on almost every track, but Moto2 and MotoGP are not. All three classes have about the same drag, but Moto2 and MotoGP have more power so slipstreaming is less unimportant. Another example: Trucks. With high drag and high downforce and low power, the trucks draft at all of the intermediate tracks. Third example: IndyCar on every oval. Low power relative to the high downforce and drag... slipstream for the win... go one lap too early and risk becoming a sitting duck to the guy behind you.
 
LewTheShoe said:
Exactly. Drafting becomes crucial on any fast race track when you have relatively low horsepower and relatively high drag. Example: Moto3 is dominated by drafting on almost every track, but Moto2 and MotoGP are not. All three classes have about the same drag, but Moto2 and MotoGP have more power so slipstreaming is less unimportant. Another example: Trucks. With high drag and high downforce and low power, the trucks draft at all of the intermediate tracks. Third example: IndyCar on every oval. Low power relative to the high downforce and drag... slipstream for the win... go one lap too early and risk becoming a sitting duck to the guy behind you.
Click to expand...

One thing I'll add is that more drag =/= more downforce necessarily. The NASCAR's of the 90's had a lot more drag and punched a bigger hole than today and yet had a fraction of the downforce of today's cars (before the first Brickyard ABC estimated the stock cars made about 400 lbs of downforce compared to 1500 lbs for Indycars at the time, ironically now cup cars make as much downforce as the 94 indycars). That's what you could have before coil bound setups and body panel manipulation took over.
 
FLRacingFan said:
Ontario, Texas World, Michigan, Charlotte, Atlanta, etc. Daytona and Talladega before there were plates. Just not in the same manner as what we currently perceive to be "drafting" because it's mostly defined now to be what we see at Daytona and Talladega currently.
Click to expand...

I believe it is called single file racing today. They have been drafting at Daytona and Talladega since the opening of those tracks. Those were the only tracks they could run wide open thru the highly banked corners. The rest of the above it is/was impossible to draft thru the corners.. you loose the front end and get passed on the bottom. At the plate tracks with or without the plate a "drafting partner(s)" are usually needed. Same then as now. The slower Tony went, the more he bitched about the tires, the track, or whomever was close to him.
 
StandOnIt said:
I believe it is called single file racing today. They have been drafting at Daytona and Talladega since the opening of those tracks. Those were the only tracks they could run wide open thru the highly banked corners. The rest of the above it is/was impossible to draft thru the corners.. you loose the front end and get passed on the bottom. At the plate tracks with or without the plate a "drafting partner(s)" are usually needed. Same then as now. The slower Tony went, the more he bitched about the tires, the track, or whomever was close to him.
Click to expand...

No, losing the front end (aka "Aero Push") is a relatively recent phenomenon at intermediate tracks. In the past when cars had 1/4th of the downforce of today, yeah, you still lost front downforce from trailing a car through the corner, but mechanical grip was far more important and could make up for that. Big difference between losing 200lbs of front downforce vs losing 800lbs.
 
Acs said:
No, losing the front end (aka "Aero Push") is a relatively recent phenomenon at intermediate tracks. In the past when cars had 1/4th of the downforce of today, yeah, you still lost front downforce from trailing a car through the corner, but mechanical grip was far more important and could make up for that. Big difference between losing 200lbs of front downforce vs losing 800lbs.
Click to expand...

I didn't buy your D/Force figures completly. Aero push was as big or bigger problem in the 90's as it is now culminating with the "twisted Sisters" cars that were the most aero dependent cars I think that were on the tracks in the 90's. Less so now IMO, they have been working on that with every car change.
 
Last edited:
FLRacingFan said:
Fundamental redesign of the car. It sounds more likely than not that the Gen-7 will not have a splitter...if Steve O'Donnell is to be believed.
Click to expand...
What is the significance to the racing of having or not having a splitter, excluding the issue of what happens in an accident? It is a serious question.

I understand the splitter affects front downforce and total downforce, but many other things also affect these. Gen 7 without a splitter will still have a certain amount of target downforce, which can be achieved by fender design, or dive planes, or radiator pans, or other means. When people say, "The splitter is the source of aero dependency because the car is stuck to the ground," they are misinterpreting the truth. Total downforce is what sticks the car, and total downforce can be achieved many ways. Also, total downforce today, with splitter and side skirts, is still lower than it has been for many years, at least 20 years.

Complaints from the Nascar garage about the splitter focus on what happens when a car slides through the grass. I get that. And I get the splitter's role in preventing flight in a high speed spin. But as for affecting how the cars race on the track? I don't get that. (I think Steve O's comment is an admission that popular misconceptions about the splitter are insurmountable.)
 
The splitter is a mere nub of what it once was. Fans demand a Nascar running in the infield tooling thru the grass at a buck 50 survive unscathed. :rolleyes: Unless it isn't their driver..then it is ok.
 
Acs said:
No, losing the front end (aka "Aero Push") is a relatively recent phenomenon at intermediate tracks. In the past when cars had 1/4th of the downforce of today, yeah, you still lost front downforce from trailing a car through the corner, but mechanical grip was far more important and could make up for that. Big difference between losing 200lbs of front downforce vs losing 800lbs.
Click to expand...
Yeah, like SOI, I'm not buying this at all. The term "aero push" is relatively recent, but the phenomenon of it isn't. In the 1990's, the manufacturers were spending tons of time in wind tunnels with their stock cars. Aerodynamics of race cars was an emerging science that evolved rapidly from the aerospace industry... in F1 first, in every other category soon after.

One thing is for sure... we cannot un-learn what we now know about aerodynamics.
 
One thing we know for sure is that John Q Public and his wife Jane don't give a rats ass about aero or aero push or down forcer. What John and Jane want to see is something they find worthwhile and they don't care how it is achieved just that it is.
 
Somebody red Reddit and apparently this 1990-91 Ford Thunderbird generated 400 lbs of downforce.

51ae12f35728409ac1a29b791f49845a.jpg


The hood is generating that much ...
 
dpkimmel2001 said:
Granted, I did not stay @ the Holiday Inn Express last night as there was no vacancy but I'm still at a loss how slowing the cars down is going to make better racing. How are the cars supposed to be slowed down? Restrictor plates? Lower horsepower?

Say they run a smaller engine, horsepower wise..... The cars are perfectly capable of the drivers running foot to the floor around most of the venues at a far reduced speed. If everyone is running foot to the floor, how does this benefit anything? I just don't get it.
Click to expand...

Get the cars off the ground, less down force and and more aero drag.
 
wi_racefan said:
Get the cars off the ground, less down force and and more aero drag.
Click to expand...

think that will make any difference if the top 4 are a tenth of a second apart? Cars would look different, but it is't going to magically make them able to pass anywhere.
 
StandOnIt said:
think that will make any difference if the top 4 are a tenth of a second apart? Cars would look different, but it is't going to magically make them able to pass anywhere.
Click to expand...

A faster car out front will always pull away. Problem is now a faster car struggles to pass anyone in dirty air. It would give them a better chance of passing someone once they caught them. More off throttle time would create a lot more passing opportunities
 
He's lost a bunch of weight, might be the new very pretty Latin girlfriend..healthy meals right?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom