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Nascar and Racing

Favorite Adjustment for Drivers? Clean Air

Posted Oct 12, 2008 7:54AM By Geoffrey Miller (RSS feed)

Filed Under: Jeff Gordon, Lowes Motor Speedway, Chase for the Sprint Cup

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FanHouse's Geoffrey Miller is at the track in Concord, N.C. for Saturday night's Bank of America 500 in full fan mode. He's hoping to avoid Kevin Harvick's motor coach driver from his location in the Ford Grandstand, Section I.

Jeff Burton, Jimmie Johnson and every other leader in Saturday night's Bank of America 500 proved one thing: NASCAR's biggest trump card to winning a race is still the clean air a driver gets, and the timing of that can pretty much guarantee a particular race's winner.

Of course, this isn't to rag on Jeff Burton or claim he secured an unjust victory because he certainly pulled out all of the stops with a great but risky call in the pits and holding off Jimmie Johnson for the lead as the laps wound down.

Instead, I'm just hoping that NASCAR is realizing how bitterly important the nose design on the Car of Tomorrow is, and how much it truly affects both the lead car and the trailing car.

For evidence, one only has to look so far as the laps led column from Saturday night's 334-lap race at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Five drivers -- Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Jeff Burton, Brian Vickers and Jimmie Johnson -- led at least 42 laps in the event, with most of them coming on successive runs.

In particular, one example for how bad the new car designs handles in traffic was Greg Biffle's late race performance.

For much of the event, the No. 16 was in the Top-5 and at times had the fastest car on the race track. On the final stop, Biffle restarted fifth as the first car with four fresh tires, while Burton had taken gas only and the others had taken two.

Most felt, including Biffle who said over the radio that he "liked his chances", that at least some fresh tires -- two or four -- would overtake Burton over the final 33 circuits. Instead, the only challenge Burton got was from Johnson, who came out second after the last pit stop.

Another example? Jeff Gordon.

Gordon slapped the outside wall early in the race and had to pit out of sequence early in the event. He eventually got his lap back and came back up through the field. A pair of timely cautions helped Gordon -- who had been riding around 10th for many laps without making headway -- take the lead and suddenly become the fastest car on track thanks to clean air.

After another round of pit stops put Gordon in the lower Top-10, and he commented over the radio that his car was completely different from what it was just before the stop, and that being in traffic and without the clean air caused his car to be extremely tight. He talked about it after the race:
HOW IMPORTANT WAS CLEAN AIR? "I'm so frustrated with that. It's unbelievable how good my car drove out in front. It was on rails. And it was like having the best car, and then like having the worst car, when I was five or six cars back. [...]

"If I could have got out front, I would have won the race. I mean, anybody who gets out front is going to win the race. It's ridiculous."
And if you don't believe those examples, just look at the huge leads that each leader was able to build on green flag runs Saturday night until they caught lapped traffic. No, it wasn't because each team truly hit the setup at that point, but rather it was because of the undisturbed air on the nose of the leader's car.

It's a millon dollar question in figuring out how to make the cars run better behind each other, but for the millions of dollars NASCAR handles every week, I'd say having race cars that can race with each other in close competition is highly important.

My first suggestion? Give up having the lapped-down cars start to the inside of the leaders on restarts, and instead, allow the leaders to bunch up in at least a single-file line, or ideally, a double-file line for restarts.

It won't solve the dirty air problem, but it will reduce the number of cars the leaders have to deal with, and will actually promote more close racing between the race's contenders, not its pretenders.

Tags: BankofAmerica500, BrianVickers, ChasefortheSprintCup, JeffBurton, JeffGordon, JimmieJohnson, LiveFromLowes, SprintCup, TonyStewart

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