 | RACING PERSPECTIVESLooking Back at NASCAR's
First Car of Tomorrow
by Michael Daly-Staff Writer
02/12/2008
A new species of racecar is set to debut at Daytona. It is a species unlike what has been run before, and this new machine's subtlties and characteristics make it a particularly tricky puzzle for raceteams to figure out. It is the car of NASCAR's future.....and here for the 1981 Grand National season the Daytona 500 will see racecars completely different from what was run even last year.
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Yes, NASCAR has changed the very species, as opposed to bodystyles, of stock cars it has raced before. The 1981 Winston Cup Grand National season marked a long-delayed debut of cars with smaller wheelbases than what had been run in previous years. Seeing that manufacurers were phasing out 115-inch wheelbase cars eligible for NASCAR competition, NASCAR had aimed at debuting "smaller" cars for 1978, but as 1977 went along that became impractical, so 115-inchers remains for the '78 season.
NASCAR got a foretaste of its 1981 racecar changeover when for 1978 teams switched to the 1977 Olds Cutlass, and after preseason testing drivers reported the Olds was unstable, a result of the car's narrower trunk area and open rear quarter windows. The 1978 Dodge Magnum was also set to debut at Daytona and the few drivers sticking with Mopar at the time said almost the same thing - "The Magnum is undriveable at 190," Richard Petty said.
Speedweeks 1978 turned out to be a harbinger of Speedweeks 1981, as the undesirable handling qualities of the new cars began popping up during on-track action, although not at first, as the 125s went off with little incident and were hotly contested affairs as the lead changed hands four times on the opening lap of Race #1 and over 20 times in the combined 100 laps of action.
It was the 500 that saw things break open. After Richard Petty dominated the first 59 laps he blew a tire and Darrell Waltrip and David Pearson got caught in the ensuing wreck. Soon after the restart Benny Parsons blew a tire in the trioval and behind it all A.J. Foyt got dropkicked by Lennie Pond and tumbled through the trioval.
By mid-March NASCAR allowed GM teams to run larger spoilers for stability by mandating a set spoiler size based on square inches - meaning the wider Ford and Dodge products had three-inch-high spoilers while the narrower GM models could increase theirs to almost four inches while all measured 190 square inches.
The rest of the 1978 season and the subsequent '79 and '80 seasons saw little in the way of instability with the racecars, and the racing remained ferocious. But by the end of 1980 the switchover to 110-inchers was approaching.
Preseason testing of the new cars began at Daytona in December 1980 and immediately a major concern arrived. Greg Sacks tested a Richard Childress Pontiac and literally flew off Four into the earth wall shielding the garage area from the track; the Pontiac all but disintegrated, the remains tumbling to pit road and Sacks' helmet coming off and rolling onto the track; Sacks himself was lucky to escape with no worse than a broken collarbone.
Throughout preseason testing all the drivers said the same thing - the new cars, with their squared-off notchback rooflines, were grossly unstable. "I was nervous as hell during those tests," Dale Earnhardt said.
Speedweeks 1981 proved the concerns justifed as Darrell Waltrip won the Busch Clash and all but admitted being nervous as hell himself afterward. In the 125s John Anderson and Connie Saylor came off Turn Two, shot into the air, and tumbled - which left all the other drivers repeating variations of "I can't believe it, these cars weigh 3,700 pounds" to describe the horror with which they watched replays of the two wrecks.
Entering Speedweeks the cars all had spoilers measuring 216 square inches. After the Clash NASCAR increased the size to 250, then increased it to 276 after the Anderson-Saylor melees. It seemed to help as the 500 went off with just four yellows; the stability of the cars remained on the minds of drivers, however, as they displayed a bit of tentative quality in how they raced. Though the 500 went without incident, the rain-delayed Sportsman 300 won by David Pearson wasn't so fortunate as Bob Ballantine tumbled brutally off Four.
The rest of 1981 went with no repeat of the disasters that had hit Speedweeks; the racing in fact was strikingly competitive as four races exceeded 40 lead changes and several others broke 35; nine different drivers won races and five races saw the lead change hands on the final lap - three of them in a four-race span in mid-summer as Cale Yarborough shot down Harry Gant at Daytona, Darrell Waltrip swept past Richard Petty at Pocono, and rookie Ron Bouchard blew off Waltrip and Terry Labonte at Talladega.
But the disasters of 1981 reappeared with a vengeance in 1983 as Cale Yarborough flipped in qualifying, Rusty Wallace flipped in his Twin, Bruce Jacobi was launched 40 feet high, plunged into the ground, and would die after four years in a coma, and Rodney Howard flipped brutally to pit road in the Sportsman 300. These disasters reappeared at Talladega several months later as Waltrip and Phil Parsons hammered the wall in One and Parsons tumbled high in the air amid a melee of ten cars underneath him.
Indeed, the 1980s decade was an era of brutal melees and a very rough gestation period for NASCAR's original cars of tomorrow. It wasn't until a combination of major horsepower restrictions, spoiler increases, and manufacturer switchover back to the long nose/sloped roofline shape reminiscent of the late 1970s - and inspired by the one car of the early 1980s that actually was stable to race, the 1981-3 Pontiac Lemans - that some true stability was achieved with the racecars.
It's a history lesson worth keeping in mind as NASCAR's new cars of tomorrow proceed through 2008.
Questions? Comments? Contact Michael at stp43fan@hotmail.com
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