Catchfence

The 2008 Chase was set at Richmond’s rain-delayed Capital City 400, and following that Sunday, NASCAR’s Nationwide Series Car Of Tomorrow underwent testing. The new COT is a ponycar design but with a spoiler instead of wing; it still, though, has the same gapped airdam and top-heavy roofline of the big-league COT. With the “debut” test session we once again got talk from NASCAR’s Robin Pemberton about the supposed “benefits” of the COT and how teams can use one car on a variety of tracks – with curiously little evidence that they in fact are – and so forth.

Pemberton may try to cite the surprising run of David Reutimann at Richmond as example of the success of the COT – that any Michael Waltrip car could have led as much as Reutimann did is shocking enough, but to equate it in some way with the COT is pushing it badly.

Of course Richmond was competing with the full opening slate of the NFL’s 2008 season and race talk largely got drowned out between Tom Brady’s ACL, Matt Cassel’s unknowns, Vince Young’s knees, Peyton Manning’s latest meltdown, and ESPN’s Brett Favre obsession during the Packers-Vikings game. But also getting lost in the shuffle was a dramatic auto race on a NASCAR track that illustrated just how myopic NASCAR’s rules packages have become – and also illustrated that two of NASCAR’S big-name owners may be out of their league.

The Indy Racing League wrapped up its 2008 season at Chicagoland, and the Chicago Indy 300 turned into something that made it easy to forget all of NASCAR’s ho-hum short track races. Scott Dixon, driving for Chip Ganassi, won the season title, but had a huge fight with Penske Racing’s Helio Castroneves and Ryan Briscoe. The race was fairly mild for some 100 laps, but the intensity began to pick up in the second hundred as cars strained to get a run in the second groove, and past Lap 159 it finally became a battle – a huge battle, in fact. Dixon and the Penske cars fought nose to nose for the lead for some 25 straight laps, other cars trying to go three wide above them. The cars were stuck to the racetrack, they could suck up to one another in the draft, and with that they fought for the win.

The race itself came down to a late yellow, and the final six laps were a sprint. Dixon and Castroneves went nose-to-nose again on Lap 199 and dragged it out to the checker – and a finish so close that Dixon was initially declared winner until a scoring recheck showed Castroneves had won. Dixon went to victory lane but then was told he hadn’t won, but had nonetheless won the championship.

A shoutout in this wild finish should also go to Darren Manning, who drives A.J. Foyt’s car and rallied to finish a strong seventh at Chicagoland. As he is one of racing’s ultimate warriors of the 20th century, seeing A.J. get results in Indycars is a big reason to watch that form of racing.

That this race was a battle between Penske and Ganassi was to be expected in Indycars as the two have waged war in the old CART series and now IRL for decades; that their IRL programs are thriving while their NASCAR programs are in disarray also says something about their ability to handle NASCAR’s end of the racing table.

The IRL race also illustrated just how myopic NASCAR’s approach to rules packages truly is. The COT was designed to not have much downforce, to be difficult to drive. It has lived up to this promise but the premise behind this package is grossly flawed and IRL showed why. Making cars difficult to drive is not the same as making better racing. The myth that NASCAR history is of good racing by unstable cars slung around racetracks curiously dies hard, for NASCAR’s most competitive racing has NEVER been with unstable racecars; indeed the COT is just the latest of several examples from the 1990s that cutting downforce does not make better racing.

In the IRL in contrast there is no problem with stability as the cars make thousands of pounds of downforce, and the draft kicks in with these cars to allow passing; IRL’s history since the breakaway sanctioning body’s formation in 1996 has been a history of excellent racing on tracks derided as “cookie cutter” by many stock car fans, illustrated by heart-stopping battles up front at Texas, Chicagoland, Kentucky, and Kansas, and some outstanding battles at Fontana and Michigan.

Before IRL’s arrival at those latter two speedways, CART figured out a way to improve their racing – in part as an answer to a thrilling IRL 300-miler at Texas in 1998 – by bolting a rail on the rear wing of its cars for extra drag; this “Hanford device” proved more effective than anyone could have imagined; the draft became so effective that CART broke 50 official lead changes in 500-milers at Michigan in 1998, 2000, and 2001, and at Fontana in 2000 and 2001.

And all of this has been with HIGH downforce cars, with tires that keep the cars stuck to the racetrack, and with bolt-on aero-drag. Nowhere did the racecars get their downforce cut or their fundamental design altered based on a myth about what downforce does to racing, a myth that equates cutting downforce with cutting aeropush, a myth that clearly drove the design of the COT even though no example of racing improvement via reduction of downforce can be cited by anyone – least of all John Darby of NASCAR, who helped pave the way to the COT by cutting the “old” car’s downforce and making multiple sway bar rule changes in the 2004-6 period, the end result of which was worsening of aeropush problems and reduction in ability to pass.

This is what drives so many fans, and some participants, up the wall with the sanctioning body – the same mistakes are repeated and alternatives based on real-world experience seem never to cross anyone’s mind. And now the Nationwide Series will get this “new” car even though the old COT has still shown no ability to improve anything in the sport.

The ten-race Chase will determine the champion and will also illustrate the weaknesses of the COT – and of NASCAR’s rules myopia.