DAYTONA
BEACH, Fla. – Performance was at the forefront of more than a few
minds Thursday as the NASCAR Car of Tomorrow tested for the first time at
one of the sport’s most historic venues – Daytona International Speedway.
(All photos courtesy of NASCAR)
NASCAR Vice President for Research and Development Gary Nelson and his
group began the latest round of on-track data acquisition for the Car of
Tomorrow using the prototype produced by the NASCAR Research and
Development Center and driven by Brett Bodine, NASCAR Director of Cost
Research.
Previous on-track sessions set performance baselines. Now, the quest to
fine-tune those baselines begins at Daytona. The Car of Tomorrow, which is
two inches taller and four inches wider than current NASCAR race cars,
represents the sport’s next major step in safety and competition
enhancements, and cost-reduction improvements.
NASCAR is in the final stages of the five-year Car of Tomorrow project,
and Thursday’s test marked another step toward the finished product.
“The
last part of the Car of Tomorrow is, ‘How does it run in traffic,’ ”
Nelson said. “The only way you can do that is in traffic. You can't do
that in the laboratory. You can't do that in the wind tunnel. And so we're
working our way into that to close up the specification to where we have a
very nice package that works on the race track and in traffic, and the
leader and the overtaking cars are able to have the right amount of
balance as they're running in clean or dirty air.”
The tests that preceded Thursday’s – last October at Talladega
Superspeedway, then at Atlanta Motor Speedway – featured the NASCAR
prototype along with teams’ prototypes. Although Thursday’s Daytona test
was open to teams, the NASCAR car worked in solitude, with Bodine’s laps
building a framework of information to be used in the next test, next
week.
On Jan. 19, teams that have built Car of Tomorrow prototypes are scheduled
to test with NASCAR at Daytona. Everyone will use the baselines developed
in Thursday’s test to see how the cars react in traffic and drafting
situations.
“It’s
new, it’s different,” Bodine said. “It’s the future.”
Part of the future being tested Thursday included a wing rather than the
usual spoiler attached to the car’s rear deck lid. NASCAR tested the wing
briefly last October in Atlanta, but didn’t complete it because of a
team’s engine problem. Most of Bodine’s runs today were done with the wing
rather than the spoiler, and both he and Nelson say the possibility of
using a spoiler adds to the pieces teams can use to tune their cars.
"Today we’ve been able to tune it with bolt-on pieces, not cut fenders off
and not cut quarter panels off, to change the balance of the car,” Bodine
said. “And that’s one of our goals. We want a car that’s very tuneable,
very adjustable, so maybe the car can be very adaptable to several race
tracks instead of being track-specific.”
Nelson said the idea of using a wing came from the Grand American Road
Racing Association, where wings are common components in several different
classes of sports car racing.
“There's
actually several theories that are working when we start experimenting
with the wing,” Nelson said. “The wake that is left behind the car at
speed is what affects the following cars. And so as we explore ways to
have better competition on the track, we want to understand that wake. And
a wing produces a completely different wake than a spoiler does.”
“The wing is very adjustable,” Bodine said. “You can change the angle and
the shape of the wing. We’re still in development. The wing on the car is
strictly a prototype piece. By no means is that something that could be
final, but certainly the concept is starting to prove itself worthy of
continued investigation.”
Part of that continued investigation will take place next Thursday, when
Bodine – a former NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series competitor – is scheduled to
test in traffic with other cars.
“We're
establishing a baseline with the spoiler and the speed that it produces,”
Nelson said. “Our plan is to have a car follow us next week with the
spoiler, switch to the wing and have that same car follow us so we run the
same speed with the spoiler, the same speed with the wing and get the
feedback from the driver that's following on how that effects the
turbulence.”
Along with spoiler and wing configurations, the Car of Tomorrow also
features a much more box-like front bumper that catches air rather than
deflecting it. It’s one of several components that Nelson and Bodine say
will help team owners with cost reduction; those components can be
adjusted on the car, rather than having to be replaced. The goal is to
produce a car that can perform at high levels at many different race
tracks instead of just a few.
“That
is all going away for this car,” Nelson said. “The purpose of that is on
the car owner side for the expense. If you have one size fits all, when
you talk about the body of the car and the frame of the car, then how do
you make that car run well at all the tracks? You bolt on aerodynamic
devices, the spoiler, the wing or the splitter.
“You can't sit here in early stages of that kind of development and say
what the end result is going to look like. All you can say is that the end
result will be what turns out best in testing.”
The author can be contacted
at
nascar@autoracing1.com
Go to our
forums
to discuss this article
