Catchfence

Now that the novelty of two-abreast restarts has faded, the reality that the sport is woefully dry on competitive depth has come to the fore yet again. The 2009 season has certainly seen spots of competitive fire, and the Yankee 400′s upset win by Brian Vickers gives the sport a new winning team in the Dietrich Mateschitz group as well as a comeback win by Vickers, winless since the chaotic 2006 Die Hard 500 at Talladega. The win also opened a lot of eyes after the competitive bane that is fuel mileage took over at Michigan International Speedway.

That Michigan’s August 400-miler was decided on fuel mileage was yet another case of influences other than hard racing getting in the way of competition. And amid the weekend another brouhaha developed as Dale Earnhardt Jr. criticized the uncompetitive nature of the Car Of Tomorrow and Mike Helton of NASCAR saw fit to disparage Junior’s comments as the vented frustration of a driver enduring a season with little to nothing in the way of accomplishment.

Helton’s rhetoric was laughable. He talked about how urgency could create havoc or expense, yet as is usually the case with such issues no examples from the real world were cited. Helton also claimed that the racing was as good as he’s seen it before, which leads to the question of what his definition of competitive racing is.

Two of the primary myths that go with the COT design – that is has saved money for teams and is safer. Neither is the case. There is no evidence of any reduction – theoretical or actual – in team spending with this new car. The “20 different cars for 20 different tracks” argument against the old car was long advanced by John Darby and others yet was and is grossly misleading, as teams still build “20 different cars,” with numerous models tailored for specific types of tracks and others serving as backups for inevitable attrition – just as they did with the old car.

The safety argument with the COT ignores the wholesale changes made to the seats inside the cars and to the retaining walls at all the ovals – to the point that one can say that the COT’s improvement in safety is a far lower percentage of the equation than the changes made to seats, helmets, the tracks, etc.

The salient myth about the COT, though, cuts to the issue raised by Junior. The reality is Junior merely restated what has been obvious from the very first test of the COT in December 2005. The COT was designed to make the cars less aero-dependent – yet it was ignorance of aerodynamic reality that has made the COT such a bad racecar. The design cut downforce significantly, most graphically on the nose with the COT’s ugly gapped airdam. The roofline, raised to make the car top-heavy, has raised havoc with its stability, and the use of a rear wing, apparantly to change how dirty air was being displaced, has had the effect of increasing aeropush instead of helping make the drafting effect of dirty air better.

The reality is NASCAR has gone about improving the racing the wrong way. Racing is never improved until the cars are able to safely run open throttle; when dirty air is the ally of passing and not the impediment; when handling never gets in the way of passing. The way to improve the racing, car-wise, is to make the cars able to safely run open throttle – figuratively at least – at speeds the tracks can handle, which also adds a improvement of safety aspect to the issue. The cars need to make the drafting effect of dirty air stronger, which means a bigger hole in the air than is presently punched open. Handling needs to be “neutralized” as far as interfering with passing goes.

In short the cars need far more grip, less horsepower, and a bigger draft. Given how the sport’s history has gone, figuring out ways to get there should not be the equivalent of finding the Holy Grail.

But with a sanctioning body long refusing to act in the face of manifest problems, the issue becomes more vexing. The present leadership generation of NASCAR has never shown a credible grasp of what makes racing better and what does not. The COT is just one aspect of this stubborn ignorance – the farce that is the Chase format is the most graphic example; NASCAR’s periodic fights over “exclusivity” with regard to some sponsors has been among the uglier expressions of this ignorance. The blunt truth is that Brian France, John Darby, and the whole bunch has not come up with any good idea for the racing beyond two-abreast restarts, and they all but had to be dragged kicking and screaming into that.

This isn’t to say that drivers who criticize NASCAR are by definition correct, for much of the mythology that has surrounded what is wrong with the racing and how to fix it has stemmed from driver input – Rusty Wallace in particular was infuriating in his 2003 lobbying to cut downforce and go to soft tires in response to Penske teammate Ryan Newman’s victory binge that year. Yet the package the 5 & 5 Rule Redux replaced was a package of very high downforce and hard tires, and in 2001-2 it produced 26 winning drivers among 14 different teams – a diversity of winners the sport hadn’t seen since the Tire War years.

That package had far more going for it than the COT has ever had. It could have been tweaked to work better. Instead NASCAR gave us the COT and a lot of stubborn ignorance about racing – stubborn ignorance that is doing nothing for the sport.