By The Commish

In the last two decades, a new phrase and concept have entered the lives of most of us living in this technological age: beta testing. We have all accepted, more or less, that companies will introduce new products with the assumption that there will still be “bugs” to correct, and that dutiful users will report those bugs so that the designers and manufacturers can fix them. For computers, for DVD players, even for refrigerators, this has become the norm. But when the beta testing is being done inside a race car at nearly 170 mph, one has to wonder about the wisdom of the process.

For that's what is being done with NASCAR's "Car of Tomorrow," aka the Flying Brick. PR-happy NASCAR is already trumpeting that the car is a success because of its performance so far at Bristol and Martinsville. If casual fans only looked at the finishes of these races, which featured close, aggressive racing, it would appear that the sanctioning body is right: the car is improving competition and entertainment. But is it improving the racing? That's another question.

First of all, the two slowest tracks on the circuit are perfect for beta testing but not necessarily for predicting future success with the COT. The average speed at Bristol was just under 82 mph, and the average speed at Martinsville was barely 70 mph. "We're wasting our time even trying to comment on the Car of Tomorrow at Martinsville and Bristol," Jeff Gordon said after the Martinsville race. "You can't tell anything really about this car right now until we go to [larger] race tracks." With their slow speeds and special handling characteristics, Bristol and Martinsville aren't really typical Cup racetracks. What works here may not work at longer, higher-speed tracks. Phoenix, where the car will appear next, averages about 132 mph, and Darlington, which will be the real touchstone for the new car, averages nearly 170 mph. Will double the speed mean double the trouble?

To the initiated, some of the initial indications of how the COT will race at higher speeds are disturbing. The teams will figure out some of the safety issues quickly, such as installing the door foam in such a way that it doesn't melt from the heat of the exhaust pipes and making those exhaust pipes out of stronger steel so they don't crack and release carbon monoxide into the driver’s compartment. Realistically, those are easy fixes for engineers. The racing indications are not.

One of the issues seen at both Bristol and Martinsville was how shaky the rear end of the car can be, almost without provocation. In the two races at least half a dozen cars inexplicably broke loose entering the corner and slid up into the outside wall. Fortunately, on the low-speed tracks, almost all of the following drivers were able to avoid the sliding cars, leaving these one-car wrecks. But what if that happens at Talladega this fall, when the pack is running tightly bunched? If one car in the middle lane twitches loose, the 'Big One' could take out most of the field. No one seems to be able to explain why the COT has this handling characteristic and why it won’t “cut” into the corners, requiring such loose setups-— but it's a problem to be very much aware of as the COT goes to longer, faster tracks.

Part of that problem is probably due to some of the design decisions made by NASCAR. In the past, crew chiefs have helped cars turn by adjusting where they put the moveable lead cylinders in the frame to adjust the nose weight. In the COT, those frame rails are sealed and the crews can't move the lead at all, so that kind of adjustability is taken out of the equation. The higher front end clearances mean that the teams can't pin the front ends of the cars down to the track by coil-binding the springs. Eventually the engineering talent in the garage will find a solution to pinning the nose, but until then, expect to see more mysterious spin-outs and to see more multi-car wrecks resulting from them. At higher speeds, these cars can't turn quickly enough to avoid all the problems.

Another issue is the dreaded aero push. Yes, folks, the same problem that the splitter and the wing were supposed to fix by punching such big holes in the air is back. Gordon noted at Martinsville that "it was a little bit harder to pass. I couldn't drive in as deep, but those are all the things you expect with this car. I was still able to pass certain guys, but just wasn't able to pass the leader." That's a diagnosis that has to put fear into the competition committee's hearts: when the series moves to the higher downforce tracks like Phoenix and Darlington, will there be passes for the lead? Certainly the bump-and-run for a lead pass is out, as the Gordon-Johnson duel demonstrated. With the bumper matching on the new car, the only way to loosen up the leader's car by contact is to bodyslam it into the wall. Gordon, the master of the subtle nudge, was clearly frustrated at how the COT took this nuance out of racing for the lead.

A number of other subsidiary issues have happened often enough to make one wonder. All three of the leading Chevrolet teams have had issues with the new, truck-mounted fuel pump system mandated by the COT (Kyle Busch at Atlanta, the JGR teams at Bristol, Kevin Harvick at Martinsville). Waterman pumps are an industry standard and the problems with crimping that have apparently caused the pump cables to fail so far under long runs and with high vibrations will undoubtedly be fixed, but couple that problem with all the problems expected when the new Chevy engine comes on line this year (once teams have enough spare parts to install them) and power plant issues become a real concern. NASCAR has forbidden teams to use under-screens in the COT, so lumps of rubber building up under the car and then falling off under tires, as happened to Gordon at Martinsville, are also a concern. Darlington already shreds tires to bits. What will happen to the cars when all those shreds end up in the wheel wells and on the undercarriage?

Finally, there's the issue of what the COT development is doing to teams. About half the garage sent their backup COTs home to the shop after Happy Hour at Martinsville because they needed to convert them for the test at Richmond the following week. With teams scrambling to build more COTs while maintaining the fleet of conventional downforce cars, teams are working more overtime and stretching themselves thinner. What will this do to teams once they hit the stretch run? Will there be any energy left? In a sport that already takes a terrible toll on marriages and families, what will the human cost of the COT development be? Again, it's far too soon to tell.

Most of these problems, of course, can only be discovered and diagnosed on the racetrack—which is why the beta testing of racing is a necessary evil. But it's also a potentially dangerous, even fatal one, as it is tested on increasingly faster tracks with drivers under more and more pressure to produce results and make the Chase. Since everybody seems to be assigning the Car of Tomorrow (COT) a grade after its first two appearances, I may as well get on the bandwagon. Drum roll, please.... I give the COT an incomplete.

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