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NASCAR Notebook: Chassis-dyno tests are deemed inconclusive
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Published: August 23, 2008
■ So who's got the strongest engines in NASCAR?
It might be hard to make a case against Ford's Carl Edwards, considering he's won two of the past three NASCAR Cup tour starts and finished second at Daytona and Indianapolis in the past few weeks.
And then Jack Roush's No. 1 set himself up as the man to beat in tonight's Sharpie 500 by winning the pole for the 8 p.m. start. A victory would be his sixth of the year, and only Toyota's Kyle Busch, with eight, has more.
However last weekend's NASCAR chassis-dyno tests -- the first of the season -- and this week's NASCAR engine-dyno tests of those same motors have been somewhat inconclusive, although Roush continues to say that Toyota has a significant technical edge in engine design.
□ Kurt Busch's Penske-Dodge showed the most horsepower at the rear wheels in Sunday's Cup testing at Michigan, by a fairly good margin, particularly against Jimmie Johnson's Hendrick-Chevy -- maybe 20 to 21 horsepower.
□ But then Jeff Burton's Childress-Chevy apparently won the pure engine tests two days later at NASCAR's Concord shop.
The Michigan engine testing was the first major chassis-dyno test of the season.
Kurt Busch's car weighed in with 839 horsepower at the rear wheels, best of Sunday.
Now the rule of thumb is that numbers from a chassis-dyno run are about seven percent lower than actual engine horsepower (because the chassis dyno measures output after the horsepower runs through the entire drivetrain). That would mean Busch's true engine horsepower would be nearly 900 horsepower.
Roush said 900 might be overstating the case, but he adds that he knows of engines that have topped 875 horsepower.
(For a sport that could put on a very decent and competitive show with about 600 horsepower, that raises a question -- again -- of why doesn't NASCAR, particularly in these days of $4 a gallon gas, just cut cubic inches and give these teams less horsepower, rather than continue to fuel a meaningless but expensive horsepower race.)
Other key Sunday chassis dyno results (unofficial since NASCAR doesn't publicly release the figures, despite a push by several top crew chiefs for NASCAR to release the numbers):
□ Jeff Burton (11th at Michigan), 830 horsepower.
□ Mark Martin (sixth), 827 horsepower.
□ Kyle Busch (race runner-up) 825 horsepower.
□ Carl Edwards (race winner) 819 horsepower.
□ Jimmie Johnson (17th), 819 horsepower.
□ Brian Vickers (seventh), 818 horsepower.
That's a range of 21 horsepower.
■ What's up at Rick Hendrick's shop? That's been a hot question all season and even hotter now, with Jeff Gordon still looking for his first win.
Doug Duchardt, Hendrick's race track boss, said he hadn't seen all the Michigan numbers yet so he didn't want to talk about engine comparisons. But he didn't seem convinced that Johnson's engine came in at the bottom of the list in NASCAR testing. "It's not the peak horsepower number that really matter, it's the power range," Duchardt said.
■ Just what did the Gibbs guys actually do at Michigan to earn NASCAR's wrath?
They slipped a kitchen refrigerator magnet under the throttle pedal, after the race and just before NASCAR's dyno test. The object was to keep the throttle from going all the way to the floor.
According to those watching, the deception was discovered when a Gibbs crewman dived into the car ostensibly to retrieve a notebook.
An official noticed the magnet, but was initially unaware of its purpose.
According to some rivals keeping tabs on the whole issue, the reported cover story might have worked if it had been better rehearsed: the story was that, since Gibbs uses a throttle cable rather than the standard throttle rod system, the Gibbs crews would put a magnet under the pedal in order to keep a driver from overstretching the cable and that if the driver felt he needed more throttle response, he could then simply kick the magnet out of the way. However when a NASCAR official asked one of Gibbs' drivers about the magnet, the driver was clueless.
Needless to say, Gibbs men and Toyota executives are not in the mood for any jokes about high-tech kitchen magnets.
Some rivals, however, have been quick to praise -- quietly, of course -- the Gibbs' innovation.
■ Bruton Smith has just finished installing more soft-walls at his Las Vegas Motor Speedway, in response to Jeff Gordon's savage crash.
Now Bobby Labonte, after his nasty crash at Watkins Glen two weeks ago, says it's time for that track to install safer soft-walls in that section of the New York road course.
And Jeff Burton agrees: "We have access to soft-wall technology … but soft-wall technology only works if we put it up. Every other race track, I believe, except for maybe Sonoma, has soft-walls … and it's time for Watkins Glen to follow suit. The technology doesn't help us if it's not up."
In the incident Michael McDowell clipped David Gilliland coming out of the final right-hand corner onto the frontstraight, knocking Gilliland into the outside wall, protected in part by a tire barrier. Gilliland's car bounced off that tire barrier back onto the track, triggering a huge melee.
"If that part of the outside wall had been a soft-wall," Labonte said, "that car probably wouldn't have bounced back so much.
"So it's time for that track to install a soft-wall right there."
"There was a huge rebound effect," Burton said. "Now I don't like to speculate … but there was a huge rebound effect. And we have access to safer technology, and we should implement it."
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