HOME > INSIDE NASCAR

March 1 , 2007

Car of Tomorrow: Will It Be Safer and More Competitive
By Dennis Michelsen

NASCAR has made a lot of promises about the Car of Tomorrow, almost as bad as the last used car salesman I met out on the lot! Just as the slick sales guy will try to convince you that the car you are about to buy is totally free of any problems, the NASCAR PR machine has everyone convinced that the COT will be even better than sliced bread! You can now add the arrival of the COT on the NASCAR scene to those other inevitable things in life…death and taxes. But will the COT be safer and lead to more competitive racing?

Safety First
Older race fans will remember that horrific accident years ago when Richard Petty's head literally bounced off the wall after a wreck. That led to the addition of the window net but as good as those things are they are little match for a flailing head in a horrific accident. Yes the seats have gotten much better over the years and the headrests help too, but anything that adds space between the driver and the wall is a good thing. Also when a car gets t-boned by another car the potential damage to the driver getting hit on his driver door borders on life threatening. But my concern with the Car of Tomorrow is the front splitter. Pieces of the splitter will be hard to find after wrecks. The chance that a driver will hit that debris and blow a tire out at high speed is very high. Also at the Rolex 24 we saw how much of a sodbuster that front splitter is on road racing cars. My fear is for that front splitter to dig in as a car flies down off the banking and hits the grass. Stopping or changing directions fast is how drivers get seriously hurt.

Even the Playing Field…Not Likely
Money buys speed in racing…that is the one unbroken rule in any form of Motorsports. So this notion that the Car of Tomorrow will even the playing field between the haves and the have-nots is a joke. In testing at Bristol we saw some of the smaller teams up high on the speed charts. But when the cars return for the race the mega teams will pick up a few tenths while the little guys will post comparable speeds. This is due to the first commandment of Motorsports that money buys speed! Also while wind tunnel testing might not be as crucial with the new body styles, there will be other ways for the teams to spend a lot of cash to find speed. Look for a whole new shock and spring combo that will be discovered by the big money teams that can afford to have youngsters in their driver development program testing every week!

The Car of Tomorrow is coming and all we can do as race fans is either embrace it or stop going to the races. It is that simple! Hopefully the learning curve in the safety area will not be so rough that drivers get hurt. You can simulate and do test crashes to measure g-forces and movement, but nothing matches the laboratory of five hundred mile races with forty-three cars. Students of chaos theory could right their thesis about a NASCAR weekend! NASCAR is doing the right thing trying to make the cars and tracks safer. They should be applauded for the efforts to keep their stars safe. Let's hope that not many lessons are learned the hard way with the Car of Tomorrow program.