October 22, 2008
By Larry Van Zandt
With last week's announcement that NASCAR would not be making any rule changes for the 2009 Sprint Cup season (none that would benefit the drivers or teams, anyway, but we all know that the rule book is written with parity-changing ink), NASCAR is blatantly ignoring the handwriting on the wall. Even worse? The handwriting in question is 8000 Font size, bordered by green neon lighting, so it's really hard to miss, shining like the mother of all beacons in the dark. What are they missing?
The current formula ain't working.
How so, you might ask.....let's have a rundown, shall we?
1. Look at attendance. Track attendance is down, and so is TV viewership. I can understand that fans want to save money by not going to the races, but last time I checked, you don't have to spend too much on gas and lodging to watch the races in your home, correct? With that in mind, how does one explain how TV ratings are dropping? Gee, with all of the people staying home from the track, you would think that those people who can't see the race in person would watch it from home?
2. The 'Chase' format was supposed to generate 'close' racing for the last ten races, as a sort of 'playoff' format. Small problem with that; most of the guys who are in the 'playoffs' are mired way back in the field, with no chance in Arkansas of winning, yet they are touted from week to week as a 'chase contender!'. Gee, nothing different, is there?
We had close season-ending finishes under the old format, didn't we? The 'Chase for the Ratings' did exactly zero for NASCAR other than point out that the race season is 8-10 races too long to begin with. You want ratings? Put some short tracks back on the bleeping schedule, and take some of the mile and a half double dates away. Soulless mile-and-a-half tracks represent the 'McDonaldsfication' of NASCAR racing in general, and the generic feeling they represent. Give me Bristol, or give me Death!
Okay, maybe death was too strong a term...but seriously, for some reason or another, the mile-and-a-half tracks are quite possibly the most boring form of track ever created...geeze, I watched some of the Malaysian Grand Prix MotoGP event after the Martinsville race....I was on the edge of my seat for a good hour there (with Valentino Rossi chalking up win #9...I'm not a fan, but I like Yamaha products, which is what he was riding), and I have absolutely no clue as to who any of those people are out there on the track. All I know is that this track looked every bit as challenging as Martinsville, but not for the same reasons; The bike riders were fighting a tough track, NASCAR drivers at Martinsville were fighting a poorly-designed car....which I shall address next.
3. The car itself. Yes, I am spending quite a bit of time beating up on the COSHAT (Car Of Some Hideous Alternate Tomorrow), but yesterday's atrocity of a race is dumping more water into the hold of the ship that represents NASCAR....and the bilge pump has seized. It was sooo bad at points, with the blowouts sending cars into the wall (or almost), I actually found myself supporting Kurt Busch's plea to park the car, wishing to tell his spotter to go pound sand, if only for a protest move against the racing organization that made this wonderful 'car' possible. I also didn't really appreciate Brad Daugherty in the ESPN Snooze Booth telling him to essentially quit his whining and drive, as Dear Old Brad isn't the guy down there driving a car that wasn't designed to turn. Yes, I know Brad owns a team or two, but he isn't the driver down there on the track, risking everything in a car that was engineered more to political blueprints than racing design, to make sure the cars stay in a pack on the 'money' tracks, and engineer enough crush zone so that they survive the hits generated by the car sailing into the wall, with a large portion of the cause for wrecks.....being the car itself.
3A. Stop Right There! The braking problems and blowouts....and I am surprised that nobody notices what the problem is. Problem #1? The wheels themselves. NASCAR mandates a 15" diameter wheel on the bulk of their sanctioned classes, if not all of them. The problem here, at the Sprint Cup level? Remember how I spoke of 'horsepower creep', with engines slowing climbing to over 800 hp in power output? Couple that with a car that's hideously overweight, has no downforce to help it in corners, with small grille vent openings, and also runs that small of a wheel, you get a massive heat problem that's incredibly easy to fix. How to fix it? First, I need to describe what the actual problem is.
These cars obviously run a disc-brake system on all four corners. The problem with disc brakes? You are limited to a certain diameter of brake rotor inside the wheel. Right now, I think they are squeezing a 12" rotor inside of the mandated 15" wheel, at least on the front, anyway. The problem with that? In having such a tiny, outdated wheel, brake cooling becomes a MAJOR problem, because you can only force so much air into the rotors, and that's only air being pushed into the suspension side of the brake rotor.
Air coming from the outside, through the wheel? Almost non-existent, due to the small cooling holes they are stuck with on the flange part of the 15" wheel. You can't make them any bigger, because to do so will degrade the integrity of the wheel, or if you made the flange part larger, with the 'bell' being larger in diameter, you couldn't install tires on the wheels, as this bell section (narrow part of the rim) is needed to get the tire beads over the rim edge. So on short tracks, you had cooling problems to begin with due to the small wheels (a holdover from the....1950's?), but with the COSHAT and the increased load on the brakes (you have to slow down more to make the corner with the new car), this is a problem that isn't going to go away.
In an effort to squeeze as much rotor as possible into as small a space as available, in order to get the car to stop as well as it could, they used up all the available space with the rotor, as the larger the rotor, the more stopping leverage it provides. The rotor is now too close to the wheel itself (maybe half an inch to a full inch?), and there's no way to get rid of the heat down there, because there is no place for the heat to go, other than into the wheel bead area...causing the bead-related blowouts we saw in abundance at Martinsville.
Yes, I know they run heat-reflective tape....but that only works so well against 1000+ degree temps the brakes generate.
Okay, how to fix it? Run an 18-inch wheel, doing away with the ancient 15-inch wheel and hideous response-killing sidewall flex of the huge sidewall-height tires they run currently, and mandate either a 13" or 14" maximum rotor diameter at the same time, to guarantee this doesn't happen again. Voila, many problems solved at once. You now have room around the brakes for proper cooling, you move to a tire that's more responsive on the car (hey, you also use less material to make the tires!), and you won't have tires being blown out because of excess heat at the bead. You can still kill the brakes if you use them up early, but it won't send you into the wall, or someone else when it happens, due to tire failure. In addition to all that? The wheel/tire assembly is now easier to handle for the pit crew, as you have some extra wheel to grab while mounting/dismounting during pit stops. Hey, I can dream, right?
3B. That was an excellent regulatory plan to leave the front slicer/splitter at the current height, by the way. Anyone else notice how intelligent this idea was, seeing car after car pull into the pits with blown right front tires, with the car grinding the too-low splitters into the race surface? After Kurt Busch's 199th or 200th blowout, that poor splitter was ground down into almost nothing on the right side of the car...with almost all of the other cars going into the pits suffering from the same malady. If you won't alter the splitter height, the 18" wheel idea would solve this problem, also, as there is less sidewall height to maintain vs. the 15" wheel...
Race Notes
1. Juan Pablo Montoya was reported to be using the brakes rather heavily during the race.....gee, maybe he's used to cars that actually turn?
2. The recipient of the "I'm trying really hard not to show just how disgusted I am right now with NASCAR" award goes to Dale Earnhardt, Jr. When asked if staying green for the remaining laps would have helped him win, his reply was something to the effect of (paraphrasing) "NASCAR wouldn't allow 112 laps of green flag racing towards the end, anyway...they would throw some cautions to bunch the field back up...."...yay, artificial racing.
3. Kyle Busch busted for causing a yellow, and being placed two laps down....well, at least some good news came from Martinsville, huh?
4. I can't wait to see ratings for this race....it got so tedious to watch at times, I was tempted to go start a World of Warcraft account to give me something productive to do during the cautions and blowout coverage.
NASCAR Jokes
The trouble with leading during the race? You don't know if the other cars are following you or chasing you.
Did you hear about the crew chief who was reading a book about anti-gravity? He couldn't put it down.
Someday, we will look back on all of this, and run into the pace car.
How many NASCAR officials does it take to change a light bulb?
"Sorry, but there won't be any bulb changes for the 2009 season".
See you next week....
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