Catchfence

The annual media tour for NASCAR’s Winston Cup teams has begun and with it have come the inevitable queries about what the season will bring. Seventeen items in particular stand out and they are presented below with possible answers -

CAN ANYONE DEFEAT HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP? – Until we actually see otherwise, the answer remains No. Certainly Joe Gibbs Racing and Roush-Fenway are strong enough to do it, but right now they are basically the only ones.

WILL STEWART-HAAS RACING WIN THE CHAMPIONSHIP? – No. Being a satellite team of Hendrick Motorsports, their equipment is at the mercy of the supplier, and Hendrick has no history of letting customer cars defeat his primary guys on any consistent basis – it cost Bob Whitcomb his raceteam in the early 1990s, it ultimately cost Darrell Waltrip his team, and Joe Gibbs saw the handwriting on the wall early enough to get out while the getting was good. It even wound up ruining Morton-Bowers Racing, who won twice in the early 2000 decade and nothing else. Chevrolet made SHR by basically buying out Gene Haas to put Tony Stewart back in a Chevy; one would hope Chevy is smart enough to let SHR develop its own engine shop to build its own engines.

WILL DALE JUNIOR REBOUND? – No. What people seem to be coming to grips with now is that Dale Junior simply is not as talented or driven as he was advertised. People remember his spectacular Talladega success but have forgotten that it came because of underside aerodynamic work by DEI after Louis Duncan joined the team; once teams figured out what DEI was doing the advantage disappeared. Junior’s fiascos with multiple crew chiefs is now well-known, to where it has become impossible to see any scenario where he clicks with anyone and rebounds to success.

WILL FORD WIN MORE NOW THAT IT IT FIELDING MORE TEAMS? – Yes. The follow-up, though, is tougher – how much more will Ford win? Roush has basically taken over the Yates and Petty-Gillett teams, and what he did to the Yates team was criminal – Roush basically milked it for what he could and left a shiny corpse. His team benefitted from the alliance it had with Yates and it bled Yates dry. Petty-Gillett made the move to Ford because they had been shortchanged by Dodge throughout the past decade; they should win now but Roush’s history of alliances isn’t encouraging.

WILL RICHARD CHILDRESS RACING REBOUND IN 2010? – No. Chevy has basically left RCR out to dry. RCR was quietly allowed to drop down the Chevy totem pole to where RCR brought in engine people from Ilmor Engineering to boost his engine shop – if Chevy was serious about RCR they’d have supplied the effort to boost his engine shop themselves. RCR had a weak season in 2009 and it has not spurred Chevy to start spending money to boost this team back up the ladder.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO DODGE? – Dodge appears to have one foot out the NASCAR door now. It has reduced to one team (Penske) with no evidence of effort to bring in more teams and depth. The program was mismanaged as soon as Stuttgart took over from Lou Patane in 2001 and this is evidence of continuing mismanagement.

HOW ABOUT TOYOTA? – Curiously, Toyota doesn’t appear to be working to boost its competitive depth. It has the success of Joe Gibbs Racing, plus Michael Waltrip and Dietrich Mateschitz bagged their first win apiece in 2009, but Toyota does not look to be boosting the muscle of its other teams alongside JGR, nor did it make an effort to get teams defecting from other brands such as Petty-Gillett. Right now Toyota looks too satisfied with what it has.

WILL THE CAR OF TOMORROW RACE BETTER WITH A SPOILER INSTEAD OF WING? – Yes, but as above the follow-up is tougher – how much better will the racing be? Early testing showed no balance issues and the term bantied about was “looser,” but I’m not yet sold that a spoiler only four inches high (even though it appears to be substantially wider than the old-car spoiler) can deliver. The real test will come in a draft, for the salient failing of the COT has been worsened aeropush and we’ve yet to see a change that made dirty air the ally of passing instead of passing’s impediment. The design has raced well on the plate tracks but needed some serious work by the teams to make the design stable, and to date the plate tracks have been the only venues where the COT has been successful; everywhere else the car is a flat failure – short tracks, intermediates, there isn’t a track outside of the plate tracks where the COT has been successful.

WILL NASCAR DROP BUMP-DRAFTING AND YELLOW-LINE RULES FOR THE PLATE TRACKS? – Yes. No-bump rules are now officially gone while the yellow-line remains in place “for the time being,” according to Robin Pemberton. It remains impossible, though, to feel the yellow-line rule has any future. Both rules have been failures and the graphic nature of their failure is too embarassing for the sanctioning body to justify their continuation.

HOW WILL DRIVERS REACT TO RESTRICTOR PLATE RACING IN 2010? – This is a rebuttal to ATHLON SPORTS in their 2010 NASCAR Preview magazine, where the question is asked if drivers will now fight harder to bring an end to plate racing after what happened in 2009. ATHLON SPORTS seems to take seriously that drivers could form a drivers union on this issue, and they also take seriously the myth that the 2009 Autumn 500 constituted some kind of wildcat drivers strike against NASCAR and against restrictor plate racing. After two straight melees at Watkins Glen (2008 and 2009), multicar melees at several venues (notably Pocono) during the 2009 season, and Joey Logano’s Dover tumble, the notion of drivers now uniting against plate racing loses all punch.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH START-AND-PARK TEAMS? – By all accounts it will get worse. The absorption of more teams and sponsorships into “alliances” with established multicar factories can do nothing except worsen the economic landscape for other teams. Start-and-parkers are doing what they have to do to survive; the economic structure of the sport won’t let them do anything else.

SO WHERE CAN THE SPORT GET ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF REVENUE? – NASCAR is going to have to accept a new tire war, for starters. Firestone and Hoosier can provide more teams with revenue and engineering help and also help make new winners in the sport – it happened both times Hoosier was in, back in 1988 and in 1994. Goodyear’s monopoly has failed in safety and reliability and has shut off revenue streams the sport now needs more than ever.

Bringing in more manufacturers – or getting existing ones to boost their efforts – is another area. I’m surprised Honda hasn’t yet gotten in to battle Toyota.

But ultimately there are only so many streams one can find; cutting spending across the board remains a necessity, and this will inevitably mean NASCAR has to alter the independent contractor model and start dictating to teams how much money they can spend – spending caps are a proven success in all sports in which they exist. It also means NASCAR is going to have to start forcing contraction of multicar teams.

TO BRING IN MORE MANUFACTURERS, WILL NASCAR ADOPT FUEL INJECTION? – No. The talk has been out there, but the reality is fuel injection is not better than carburation in any way – it is not less expensive, it is not simpler, nor is it easier to police. It is impossible to find any racing series using fuel injection that sees any kind of benefit from it.

We again go to ATHLON SPORTS to rebut a myth they push in their season preview – they argue that racing brought about technological improvements to cars in the 1960s, ‘70, and ’80s, except the reality by 1986, as noted at the time by the likes of Brock Yates, was that racing had become worthless as a test bed because costs and ridiculous performance levels had led to the banning of a host of technological items, notably Wankel engines.

Fuel injection is not needed and sticking with carburation has not stopped Toyota from racing NASCAR and seeing marketing benefit from it. If Honda comes in, carburation won’t stop them. People need to face that old school works.

WHAT IS TO BE MADE OF THE CHANGES IN RACE DISTANCES AT PHOENIX AND FONTANA? – This one is a puzzle. Phoenix raised its April race to 375 miles while Fontana’s October race was cut to 400 miles. Fontana gets bashed for being boring, yet cutting the distance won’t make the racing better – the myth that shorter races are better always seems to pop up even with the complete lack of evidence of any improvement in competitive depth or ferocity anywhere from shorter distances. The longer distance at Phoenix will likely make for more passing; I’m doubting that strategy will come more into play because yellows will fly that wipe out strategy.

Fontana should have stayed at 500 miles, a superior test of machinery and racer over shorter distances.

WILL MORE OPEN WHEEL DRIVERS COME TO NASCAR? – Of course they will, because they are the drivers who can work with all the engineers the COT requires. It will take a massive sport-wide change to ever see the day when short trackers can come from a place like Stafford Speedway, go down South, and reach any kind of competitive level in major NASCAR touring series.

WILL DANICA ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN NASCAR? – No. She is a fraud.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH KENTUCKY AND KANSAS AND NASCAR DATES? – Atlanta has failed to live up to having two dates, so Kentucky will be handed over one of those races, while Martinsville has outlived its worth as a Winston Cup track and will be dropped to make room for Kansas’ second date. The short track partisans will howl but it needs to happen.

And so it goes as Speedweeks 2010 approaches.