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player ready...If ever there were a slam-dunk argument in favor of a common body style for all makes in Winston Cup racing, it is this latest Band-Aid rules change giving the complaining Chevrolet teams more front-end downforce–with which they already admit they don’t know what to do.
The change is another drop in an ongoing water torture. More maddening at this point is that NASCAR won’t set a timeline for the inevitable–the common body style–to end all the bickering. NASCAR better set a deadline soon. Otherwise, newfound mainstream popularity could come to a screeching halt.
When you hear voices as diverse as Ford driver Dale Jarrett and Chevrolet team owner Rick Hendrick pleading for a common body style, that’s a clear mandate. NASCAR chief operating officer Mike Helton and marketing vice president Brian France are for it and pressing forward with it.
So who’s against it?
Detroit, which created this mess in the first place.
Detroit has used NASCAR for too long. Manufacturers reap enormous benefits in showroom sales for paltry investments in Winston Cup racing. Ford, for example, spends about four times as much on a mediocre Formula One team ($100 million annually) as it does on all its Winston Cup teams combined.
Then the manufacturers shamelessly mislead the American public into believing that Cup cars are kin to the Fords and Chevys you see on the streets.
Now the manufacturers have one-upped each other in aerodynamic designs, spoiling the competition in NASCAR. Yet they have the audacity to wag the dog again by opposing the common body style on the grounds that it might destroy “brand identity.”
Leave it to wise, old Richard Petty to put it perfectly: “If you painted all these [current] race cars gray, then you wouldn’t be able to tell what [makes] they are from the grandstands.”
Said Dan Davis, Ford special vehicle operations director, “If we turn this into a series where the cars are all identical and you put different stickers on them, then our interest level is pretty low.”
Low enough to go away?
“Well, if the fans don’t identify with our brand, there’s no reason to be here,” Davis said.
He should have thought of that before he sent NASCAR a de facto Batmobile “Taurus” in 1998, detonating all this chaos.
Now to combat Ford’s pseudo-Taurus, Chevrolet engineers have created a truly screwed-up race car in the 2000 pseudo-Monte Carlo. To cover their blunder, they now have asked for–and received–a bailout from NASCAR.
No sooner had NASCAR issued a technical bulletin this week, allowing the misbegotten Monte Carlo’s front air dam to be moved forward two inches, then Chevrolet teams cried anew.
“I just hope it doesn’t mess up the balance we have on the car right now,” said Kevin Hamlin, crew chief for Dale Earnhardt, who has been the loudest whiner about aerodynamic disparity.
“I’m nervous because when they [moved the air dam in NASCAR-supervised wind-tunnel tests] with the Daytona car, it helped the front and hurt the rear [in downforce],” said Larry McReynolds, crew chief teammate, Mike Skinner.
See? You can’t please ’em–except with a common body style.
Thankfully, NASCAR is about to tell Detroit where to get off.
What a waste: Bobby Rahal never had any intention of releasing Kenny Brack from his CART obligations to defend his 1999 Indy 500 title driving an IRL car for A.J. Foyt. Last week’s stories were just more trumped-up spin-doctoring in that worn-out, old political struggle over the carcass of an American institution.
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What a pity that names once as enormous and venerable as Foyt and Indianapolis Motor Speedway have been reduced so.
Friends or foes? In Sunday’s Formula One season-opening Grand Prix of Australia, the most interesting thing to watch will be the way Michael Schumacher and his new Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, behave toward each other on the track and after the race.
It’s not clear whether the team will treat Barrichello equally with Schumacher (which Barrichello expects) or Schumacher will be treated royally, with Barrichello as his de facto valet (which Schumacher expects).