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Analysis: Wing & A Prayer - NASCAR is apparently ready to put its very unpopular car on the Nationwide Series
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Published: September 5, 2008
RICHMOND, Va.
It appears that NASCAR officials heard team owner Rick Hendrick and driver Jimmie Johnson loud and clear when they grumbled about the new winged car, which has been such a headache for teams all season at big tracks.
The reaction? NASCAR scheduled a test of a Nationwide tour version of the car for Monday and Tuesday at Richmond International Raceway.
In your face? It seems that way at first blush, given that NASCAR decided a few weeks ago to postpone taking the car to the Nationwide series in 2009 because of cost issues.
But maybe the differences in the two versions -- the Nationwide tour is dominated by Cup teams -- will be enough that teams can find ideas from the newer new car to incorporate into the older new car.
Or maybe it's just more NASCAR marketing … since there really isn't much drama left in the race to make the Chase for the Championship, with only one spot still up for grabs in the playoffs that will start next week.
Jeff Gordon, still winless this season, and Denny Hamlin might be the men to watch today in qualifying for Saturday night's Chevy Rock & Roll 400 -- a 300-mile race around this flat but high-speed three-quarter-mile track. Hamlin, and this is his hometown, was on the pole in May. And Gordon typically runs well here … although he hasn't really run well many times at all this season.
Tony Stewart is also winless, and so are Matt Kenseth and Kevin Harvick. All three should challenge for this win though.
The big story line? Before the new testing announcement late yesterday, there really wasn't one.
However now the focus might be back on the controversial and still ill-handling "car of tomorrow" that NASCAR designed and that drivers and crew chiefs, even now, still generally dislike.
Is the car just a boondoggle? Well, it is safer, but nothing else about it draws any raves, and certainly not the action on the track.
However it's hard to make a race at Richmond boring, so Saturday's should be a good one.
Still, next week's test raises questions. NASCAR says that all four manufacturers can each bring two cars.
But there has been no word on drivers. The Nationwide tour is dominated by Cup teams as well as Cup drivers. Clint Bowyer leads the Nationwide tour, and if he makes the Chase, he'll be in New York next week for NASCAR's annual promotional tour of the playoffs. So will fellow Nationwide/Cup stars Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, Stewart, David Ragan, Hamlin, Harvick, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Burton. That leaves big questions about how good a test this might actually be, if the top stars are at the Hard Rock in New York City rather than here.
NASCAR's Robin Pemberton said: "The goal of this test is for the manufacturers and participating teams to start laying a foundation for the transfer phase from the current car to the new car in the Nationwide series."
That means that the final version of the Nationwide car has yet to be determined, raising yet another question about why anyone should pay much attention to the Monday-Tuesday test.
And it's still unclear when the Nationwide series drivers might actually start racing the new cars. The original timetable was for a debut next summer at Michigan, but that appears to have been scratched.
"We're still in the process of approving the cars," Pemberton said. "This wasn't a quick process on the NASCAR Sprint Cup side, and it won't be with these cars."
The model changeover on the Cup side has been accompanied by yowls and complaints. Even the vaunted Hendrick Motorsports operation has struggled -- Gordon is winless, and teammate Earnhardt won his only Cup race by stretching fuel mileage at Michigan in June. Johnson, though he has three Cup tour wins, was quite critical of the car in victory lane at Auto Club Speedway on Sunday night.
But NASCAR officials have steadfastly refused to make any changes either to the Cup car or to the very stringent rules -- even though the Cup tour has been dominated by only two drivers all year, Toyota's Kyle Busch and Ford's Edwards.
This test next week is the closest NASCAR has come to even looking at possible changes to make the car more race-worthy.
The car is clearly safer. But the Cup car has only rarely produced decent racing and very little side-by-side action. Some crew chiefs complain that the car has actually made the on-track racing worse because it accentuates the undesirable handling characteristics of the old car.
And the key to winning with the car has been curious -- call it the "crab" chassis design, where the car actually waddles sideways down the straights. That trick is no longer a real trick, but only Busch and Edwards have been able to adapt their driving style to the awkward chassis setup. Johnson has adapted on occasion, but Gordon has been unable to get comfortable, and he isn't alone.
On top of all that, teams have been testing more this season than ever, trying to figure out how to make the car work. And that has been expensive and time consuming.
The car was, in part, designed to make racing cheaper, but it hasn't done that. Combined with the struggling U.S. economy, it has been a recipe for disaster, with some Cup teams folding at an alarming rate and no end in sight.
So NASCAR officials are between a rock and a hard place, They refuse to concede that there are any major problems with the car despite the abundant evidence, such as Johnson's runaway in California, where he led for 228 of the 250 laps.
Clean air is so critical to getting the car to turn in the corners that passing is all but nonexistent.
And crew chiefs complain that even in four-hour races such as last weekend's, they simply can't seem to make any adjustments that make the car better as the race goes on.
So what you see at the start is pretty much what you can expect to see the rest of the race.
And, if that weren't enough, Goodyear has at times been in a bind coming up with tires for the Cup cars. Atlanta and Indianapolis were the sites of the biggest problems. At Atlanta, the tires were so hard that cars were simply undrivable. At Indianapolis, tires were so ill designed that they lasted only eight laps or so before wearing down to the cords.
But all the protestations of team owners, crew chiefs and drivers have gone nowhere so far.
What NASCAR might do with the results of next week's test is unclear. Another similar test of the proposed new Nationwide car is set for Concord's Lowe's Motor Speedway in mid-October.
■ Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.
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