January 12, 2009
By Matthew Pizzolato
Matthew Pizzolato
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NASCAR officials are set to ruin the racing in the Nationwide Series at the start of the 2010 season when they introduce a new car. But as the old saying goes, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
The Nationwide Series produced some of the best racing on the track last year with the championship battle coming down to the final laps of the last race in a series that doesn’t have a Chase for the Championship to bunch up the top drivers toward the end of the season.
The debut of the new car for the Nationwide Series has already been postponed once and should be put on the shelf permanently. The entire thought process behind the new cars in both the Cup and Nationwide Series is to ultimately save the owners money because the new cars are suppose to be more cost efficient.
However, the whole process of changing technology from one type of car to another is expensive and pretty much negates the whole idea of saving money. And although the cars are supposed to provide more safety for the drivers, they are more difficult to drive.
The new Nationwide cars are designed differently from the Cup cars, so hopefully they won’t be the tire-shredding tanks currently used in NASCAR’s top series. The new car will feature spring suspension instead of the bump stops used in the current Cup car, and it will have a more traditional spoiler instead of the rear wing.
Regardless of the complaints from drivers and fans alike, plans for the new car is still going forward. Nationwide Series director Joe Balash seemed adamant that although the current economic conditions might require pushing back the debut of the new car even further, NASCAR officials must assume it will be launched in 2010.
"All of our development work is still going forward," Balash said in a Reid Spencer article on nascar.com. "We have an engineering process and a timeline that we're still working on. We have to be prepared to launch the new car, as we have expected, for 2010.”
Another reason NASCAR implemented the new cars in the Cup Series was to make the cars more equal and increase competition on the track. There was nothing wrong with the competition on the track in the first place and if anything, competition has suffered. Why? Because the only teams that have a handle on the new car are the teams with the most money, IE: Hendrick, Roush, and Gibbs. It will be several years before the smaller teams catch up, if they ever do.
Perhaps the most surprising thing recently regarding the new cars is that Jeff Gordon has recently endorsed the Car of Tomorrow after degrading it when it first debuted.
"I really credit NASCAR right now, because right now we have a series that can operate without the manufacturers," Gordon was quoted as saying in a Jeff Owens article for foxsports.com. "We don't want to, but they could. This sport could survive without 'em."
Gordon’s comment makes a lot of sense because in actuality, NASCAR is already surviving without the auto manufactures because the only thing that differentiates between makes and models on the track are the decals on the car. The automakers are no more that glorified sponsors.
Major changes need to be made to the current Cup car and the Nationwide Series should just be left alone, but that is not likely to happen, not in this world of corporate greed that is NASCAR.
If you would like to learn more about Matthew, please check out his web site at matthew-pizzolato.com.
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