NASCAR, teams seek balance with new spoiler

As most of you know, we race at 22 different tracks over the NASCAR Sprint Cup season. At 20 of those 22 tracks, NASCAR isn’t as worried about the speeds of the car as it is at the other two – Daytona and Talladega.

The reason for that is at the other 20 tracks, the driver typically gets out of the throttle to get down into the corner. So naturally your speed goes down. I was in Talladega this week for the spoiler test. Now next week at Charlotte Motor Speedway is another spoiler test. Also next week, the wing is officially replaced with the spoiler at Martinsville.

The big concern at the other 20 tracks is balance and how well the car drives. Now obviously teams will be working on the balance of the car with the return of the spoiler and how that compares to the balance with the wing.

Now at Daytona and Talladega it is somewhat different. At Talladega, for instance, everyone’s car handles well. The track is very smooth and very wide. The place has a lot of grip. So at that track, nobody’s car drives badly, but it is all about speed.

There were 24 teams at Talladega, representing several organizations. It was so encouraging to see how all the teams worked together and worked closely with NASCAR to get to where they needed to be on the speed of these race cars. NASCAR started big with both the restrictor plate and the rear spoiler.

At the start of practice with the single-car runs, the speeds were right where they wanted them -- right in the high 180s. However, where NASCAR got into a dilemma is when drivers got into drafting practice. Remember that these cars are big and bulky -- that means they poke a very big hole in the air.

So when the cars started lining up and drafting, not only did officials realize they were way too fast, but they also realized the closing rate was darn quick. I think it was Mark Martin who said he didn’t even have enough brakes to use because he was catching cars so quickly. So that, combined with being way, way too fast, required changes to be made.

First they reduced the hole size in the restrictor plate. They went to a 1-inch plate. Now to get you a point of reference, that is only a 1/64th-inch larger opening than what we just ran in February in the Daytona 500. But even though that took away about 25-30 horsepower, the problem was the cars really didn’t slow down all that much in the draft.

That really didn’t help much, so the next thing NASCAR did was drop the plate size down another 1/32nd of an inch. Well, that helped and got them headed in the right direction, but overall the cars were still too fast. In addition to that, the approach rate was still too quick. So that’s when officials started trimming the spoiler. All the trimming they did on the spoiler definitely helped.

So even though there is still some head-scratching about exactly what combination they want to take down to Talladega in a little over a month, I really believe they have a good direction. I think you will see the restrictor plate they ended up with, if not even possibly a 1/64th smaller. I also think the rear spoiler will be pretty close to what we had when the test ended. The only other possible change might be a lower gear which will bring the RPMs back up, but actually slow them down at the restrictor-plate tracks.

The bottom line is everything is moving in the right direction. Next week the spoiler will return. That will be at Martinsville. Then after the Easter break, we will have Phoenix, Texas and then the biggie, Talladega. Again there is a test in Charlotte next week for the new spoiler and that will go a long way in helping the teams get a grasp on the handling of the cars for all the tracks other than the two superspeedways.