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Bitter Rivals: Toyota, GM exchange shots
AP File Photo
Toyota driver Kyle Busch (right) had six wins on the Nationwide tour this season, heading into last night’s race.
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Published: August 3, 2008
Horsepower, horsepower, who's got the horsepower?
Lee White, the Toyota racing boss, said his teams are getting a raw deal from NASCAR with a horsepower-cutting engine rules change issued 10 days ago. He castigated NASCAR for making the change and he ripped Chevrolet for pushing for the new rule.
GM's Pat Suhy said that White "doth protest too much," and Suhy said that Toyota, even after the change, still has more horsepower than its competition.
And, Suhy said, he suspects that Toyota fudged on a Chicago dyno test, downplaying just how big a horsepower edge Toyota has.
Suhy, Chevrolet's group manager for NASCAR, said that facts are facts, and Toyota has, indeed, had more horsepower to work with the past year and a half in NASCAR's Nationwide series. And Suhy said even with the new rule, Toyota still has about a five horsepower edge over Chevrolet on that tour. He said he will be eager to see what happens next week when the NASCAR tour hits Michigan International Speedway.
NASCAR has long dodged the question of why it keeps letting the manufacturers improve engine designs and create more horsepower, when the sport -- and its fans -- might be better served with engines with less horsepower.
"Do people want to see drivers going into the turn at Indy at 210 mph or 180 mph?" Suhy asked.
NASCAR and Detroit did study new, smaller, lower-horsepower engines a few years ago, but after extensive discussion, the project was shelved.
"When we were all discussing ‘the engine of the future' a few years ago, we were looking at 600 horsepower engines, with fewer cubic inches," Suhy said.
"They wound up putting it on the shelf, saying, ‘We have it if we ever need it.'"
Engine builder Robert Yates started pushing NASCAR for smaller, less powerful engines back in 1994, but NASCAR has ignored the issue.
Suhy said that GM is now offering a different tack: "We have been developing an E-85 NASCAR Cup racing engine, which we plan to share with NASCAR. We've been racing that in our Corvette this year.
"There is an issue of materials-compatibility, rubber seals and aluminum parts in the carburetor (because ethanol is somewhat corrosive). But we make E-85 engines of every variety for the street, so our guys know how to make it work.
"There would be issues to study, like we did when we went to unleaded fuel -- looking at valve seats and lower-end bearings.
"But we think we can put a package together that would be as durable as the current NASCAR engine."
And Suhy said that an E-85 changeover could be implemented very quickly in NASCAR, if the go-ahead is given: "We're confident it's something we could do in fairly short order. Maybe not in four to six weeks, but probably 12 weeks, or half-a-year turnaround time."
That might be an excellent PR move for the sport.
But the current issue is the Toyota engine, which, in its Nationwide configuration, is flat out kicking butt.
The line has been that, because Toyota has more horsepower, its teams can put more downforce in the Toyota stockers to help them go into the corners better.
Toyota's horsepower tends to come at higher RPM, at the end of the straights, while NASCAR Chevrolet teams have traditionally pushed hard to get engine power at low RPM for more punch up off the corners. In fact last year Toyota men were criticized, lampooned even, for going the wrong way on their RPM curve-engine design, when Toyota teams appeared so far off the pace.
But this year Toyota's smarts are evident -- the winged car this season has maybe only half the downforce of last year's big-track stockers, so any little extra bit of downforce into the corners is a big boost.
He who laughs last….
Fudging data?
"When you have more horsepower, you can make those tradeoffs," Suhy said. "If you can go through the turns better because you've got more horsepower, then you can afford to give up speed on the straightaways. That gives you an edge over the guys who have to flare their fenders in (to cut straightaway drag) just to keep up on the straights, because they can't go into the turns as fast.
"Fundamentally, we knew we were behind with our SB2 engine against their stuff; that we would be down on horsepower. Not that we were behind, but that the rules that made us run the SB2 kept us behind.
"And we suffered the same last year, too -- but the difference this year is now Toyota has some great teams and drivers."
That is Joe Gibbs' bunch: Kyle Busch, Tony Stewart, Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano, and crew chief Dave Rogers.
And going into yesterday's race, Toyota teams had won 15 of the Nationwide tour's 22 races.
"So we've been lobbying NASCAR for the better part of a year to let us run our R07 engine in Nationwide, so that architecturally we would be on the same playing ground as Toyota," Suhy said.
After increasing complaints about Toyota's rampaging through all three NASCAR series this year, and after Toyota drivers swept four of the top five spots at Chicago three weeks ago, NASCAR took Chicago engines after that race back to Charlotte for dyno tests. And a few days later NASCAR changed the Nationwide rules to cut Toyota engines by about 15 horsepower.
White said that the data from those tests aren't nearly as conclusive as the rule might indicate.
Suhy, however, said that Toyota may have been fudging in the tests, in a sense.
"Looking at those dyno tests -- and look at the ‘average' horsepower (under the RPM increase over time curve), rather that peaks, because you race ‘average,' not peak -- the best was David Reutimann's (he finished fifth in the 300), the second best was (winner) Kyle Busch," Suhy said.
"And when Kyle did his victory burnout, well, we know that burnouts are a good way to kill horsepower. So the number he ran (on the dyno), well, he was probably really better than Reutimann.
"But based on the tests themselves, Chevrolet was third-best. We were 20 horsepower off the Toyotas across the power band."
White said, because of this rules change, NASCAR should now mandate that Chevrolet run its R07 on the Nationwide series.
Suhy said "That's fine with us."
So the next move in this minidrama is up to NASCAR.
■ Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com
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