NASCAR speeds toward ‘Tomorrow’
Kurt Busch likens his initial impression of NASCAR’s radically retooled racecar, known as the “Car of Tomorrow,” to meeting someone new. The first thing he noticed was its looks. His heart hardly took flight. Instead of the sleek, sloping racecar he drove to NASCAR’s 2004 championship, Busch found himself confronted with a taller, wider shoebox on wheels with a retro-looking wing sprouting from its rear end.
Busch hasn’t necessarily warmed up to the car’s appearance since. Nor have his peers. Two-time champion Tony Stewart derides it as “a flying brick.” But on the eve of its competitive debut at Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway, drivers hope that something akin to its “inner beauty” emerges.
“This car doesn’t aesthetically appeal to most people’s eyes,” Busch said. “Yet we have to give it a chance and let it race and see it out on the racetracks and see what it can do from the inside out.”
Like it or not, the Car of Tomorrow has arrived, scheduled to compete in 16 of the 32 remaining Nextel Cup races this season and be fully phased in no later than 2009. Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol will give the first indication whether it will put the “racing” back in stock-car racing, as NASCAR officials claim, or prove a high-stakes, high-dollar bust.
“Sure there’s unknowns,” concedes John Darby, NASCAR’s Nextel Cup series director. “When you go to a dealership and you buy a new car, you drive it home. You don’t know how it’s even going to get you there. Part of the excitement of having that new car is taking that maiden voyage.”
NASCAR’s in-house engineers, based at the sport’s research and development center in Concord, N.C., took the unprecedented step of designing a race car from the ground up with three objectives in mind: to keep drivers safer during crashes; to reduce costs for race teams by creating an all-purpose car that could be adapted to every track on the circuit; and to make the races more entertaining by making it easier to pass.
The safety imperative was the prime driver behind the initiative, which was prompted largely by a string of fatal wrecks in 2000 and 2001 that saw four drivers killed in less than 10 months, including seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt.
“We were being tapped on the shoulder,” said Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s competition director.
Nearly seven years later, the result has gone a long way toward making drivers feel more secure behind the wheel. NASCAR’s revamped car moves the driver’s seat 4 inches to the right, farther from impact in a driver’s-side collision.
Its cost-effectiveness is a matter of debate. In fact, the Car of Tomorrow is having the reverse effect this season, with teams forced to build two different types of racecars: the traditional stock cars (to run in 20 races) and the new models (to run in 16). The result has many team owners rooting for it to be phased in more quickly than planned so they can quit investing in an obsolete car.
But even when the transition is complete, it’s doubtful that the huge, multicar teams with 400-plus mechanics on the payroll, such as Hendrick Motorsports and Roush Fenway Racing, will truly spend less.