In March 2007, after seven years of development and testing, NASCAR premiered its “Car of Tomorrow” (COT) at the high-banked .533-mile oval in Bristol, TN. Many drivers had expressed disdain for the car before the race, claiming it felt “top-heavy” and was hard to handle. Climbing out of the organization’s much-heralded new racer at the end of its first race, the winner declared how much he hated the vehicle. So much for a grand entrance! Nevertheless, the car has been a success. By the end of the race, most drivers had faced up to the fact that the car was what they’d be driving in the future. They put their objections aside and went to work learning how to get the most out of it.
Working with manufacturers and race teams, NASCAR engineers at the organization’s Research and Development Center focused their engineering and testing efforts for the COT on the principal goal of safety. It didn’t hurt that the new rules also led to significant cost savings for race teams. Because so much of the car’s configuration is rigidly prescribed in the new specs, there is little advantage (or need) to build different cars for different tracks. There is far less wiggle room. As a Wood Brothers/ JTG team spokesman said, “Under the old rules, you used to be able to color outside the lines once in a while. Now you can’t!”
The COT chassis are built from blueprints provided by NASCAR. Once completed, they’re submitted for approval at the Research and Development Center. Certification is a two-part process: A thickness gauge certifies that the metal thickness is compliant and a coordinate measuring machine certifies the proper location of the frame rails, chassis tubes and suspension points. Together, the two devices take more than 220 measurements.
Although the COT is 2 1⁄2 in. higher and there’s 4 in. more width in the greenhouse, NASCAR claims that the car looks more like a production car than the old race car. That will take an experienced eye to discover, for all cars must meet the same dimensional specs for wheelbase (110 in.), body width (74.0 in.), body length (198.5 in.) and height (53.5 in.).
On completion of the inspection process, NASCAR attaches radio frequency identification chips to nine points on the chassis with a special hologram tape to assure that the chassis has been officially approved by NASCAR and is ready to go to the race track.
In the past, the big teams often had 20 or more cars in various states of readiness in their headquarters garages. Smaller, less well financed teams had come to the point in recent years where even they had to have more than just a few cars if they hoped to have any chance of success throughout a 36-race season. Starting with the basic requirement for a backup car for any given race, teams had found that there were enough differences in car setups (and, sometimes, even car shapes) that cars built specifically for certain tracks became the way to go. One pair was built for the two high-speed restrictor-plate races at Daytona, FL, and Talladega, AL, another pair for road courses like Watkins Glen, NY, and Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, CA, and still another pair for the short tracks at Bristol, TN, and Martinsville, VA. Finally, there was a variety of what we might call “regular” cars for the many oval and tri-oval race tracks that make up the rest of the NASCAR circuit. Drivers had their favorites and constantly worked with their crews to achieve a consistent feel and driveability among all of them.
Although teams struggled to make a car and its backup identical, there are always minute differences that take expensive track and shop time to minimize. Reduce the need for track-specific cars and you cut costs by the barrelful. If the same car was needed for two races in succession, the problem of cleaning up and “freshening” it after the first race frequently was avoided by sending its backup car to the next event. This practice also worked well when two successive races were scheduled at tracks located at opposite ends of the country. But you have to have enough cars and haulers to do that. Teams sometimes experimented with changes to the shape of the front end and other parts of the body to achieve real or imagined improvements in speed or handling. But each time they did, there was a cost in bodywork, painting and testing. That can’t happen anymore. Building the Car of Yesterday (COY) used to take four to five days. Now, for the COT, it’s down to three.
Building the Car Of Tomorrow
Let’s see how the basic NASCAR racer is put together. The days of pulling a car off the showroom floor, strengthening the frame, welding a few roll bars in the cockpit, souping up the engine and going racing are long gone.
The big changes began in the early 1960s as NASCAR grew and acquired the authority to mandate what was necessary to make a car eligible for racing. It started with strengthening the A-frames, moving through the 1967 entry of Ford Fairlanes with specially modified front frames. A few years later the roll cage, welded to the existing frame, became an integral part of every car.
For several years before the COT, and now with the COT, race teams started by constructing the basic frame and roll cage, then wrapping the rest of the car around it. These frames could be fabricated in team shops, but most have found it advantageous to farm out that process, buying the assemblies from specialized companies like Hopkins Racing Enterprises in Spartanburg, SC.
The frame is made of 3x4-in., .093-in.-wall rectangular steel tubing. (The frame is doubled on the driver’s side in the COT.) The roll cage is welded together using .093-in.-thick, 1 3⁄4-in.-diameter seamless steel tubing for the main shapes, smaller for supports and connectors.
Today’s car has become a very sophisticated machine, the result of a progression of evolutionary steps. Safety has been the reason behind virtually every change mandated by NASCAR. In some instances, these changes have been made just a few days following the discovery of a solution to a problem. In 2006, in an accident involving an outer concrete wall, a protruding rebar pierced the left door panel and badly injured the driver. NASCAR soon required that a 1⁄8-in. sheet steel barrier be welded to the roll cage on the driver’s side. The driver’s seat in the COT has been moved 4 in. closer to the center of the car, further separating him from the possibility of injury from side impacts.
The car body is molded of 22-gauge sheet steel, and energy-absorbing materials are installed between the driver’s side roll cage door bars and the door panels. Actually, there are no door panels as such. Because doors were always strapped or even welded shut in the early days, once the NASCAR racer became a custom-made vehicle, doors were eliminated, and the body became a smooth-sided sculpture from front to back.
Each of the four manufacturers—Ford (Fusion), Toyota (Camry), Dodge (Avenger) and Chevrolet (Impala SS)—provide their teams with nose and tail pieces for the COT, usually molded of fiberglass. The teams then build steel bodies to smoothly blend with those pieces. The manufacturers also furnish the hoods, roofs and deck lids.
A device known as the “egg crate” replaces the many templates that were once used by NASCAR to assure that all cars met the specs for shape and size. Some templates were used to assure that body shapes were in keeping with the shape of the showroom cars whose name the racers carried. Others were used to check that the aerodynamics of the car being inspected were within NASCAR rules. There were as many as 32 different templates for various cars. Checking a car took time, and there was always the possibility that a slight, possibly inadvertent, misplacement could let one car run and send another back to the shop. A so-called fudge factor was always present.
With the COT, the egg crate assures in one application that certain components meet requirements for individual car makes, and checks the key aerodynamic areas of the car. Lowered over a completed car, it can quickly show to the tiniest fraction if and where there are deviations from NASCAR specifications.
Finally, cars are weighed to make sure they meet the 3400-lb. minimum, with right-side weight at least 1625 lbs. Camber limits are 2° maximum on the rear and 8° on the front left.
With identical dimensions and after they have been covered with sponsor logos, numbers and the decals of dozens of contingency prize sponsors, individual car models can be difficult to identify from the stands or while watching races on TV. Since they supply the noses, manufacturers have begun to see the benefit of simple, more recognizable front end and grille designs. After all, that’s why they’re racing.
Incidentally, that’s not a paint job that covers most NASCAR racers. To save time and assure good looks, most teams use a giant decal to cover the car, wrapping the whole vehicle in a large plastic envelope. Here, too, there’s a time saving, as compared to priming, painting, numbering and attaching logos to the car.
The Engine
The COT’s engine is basically the same as its predecessor. The engine is a cast-iron 358-cu.-in. (max) V8 with aluminum cylinder heads that delivers 850 hp at 9000 rpm, with a compression ratio of 12:1. Torque is 550 ft.-lbs. at 7500 rpm. The one 4-barrel Holley carburetor is mounted on a Ford or Edelbrock intake manifold. The fuel used is 96 octane Sunoco GTX unleaded.
By now it should be obvious that there isn’t much similarity between the NASCAR racer and its showroom counterpart—no fuel injection, no overhead valves and no hybrids. NASCAR makes some fascinating compromises to pay respects to the tradition and the image of the sport. Safety is the primary goal of rules and standards, but along the way the rulebook is filled with a dictionary’s worth of anachronisms.
One specified component that’s probably closer to the stock cars of the past than any other is the carburetor, as compared to the now-standard fuel injection system on showroom cars. In another bow to tradition, valves on a NASCAR race engine are pushrod-actuated rather than by more efficient overhead cams.
Building race engines has become a specialty. For example, Roush-Yates supplies Ford racing engines to several teams, including their own and the Wood Brothers’ teams. Ford provides the blocks, crankshafts, valve trains, etc., and the Yates factory assembles the finished engines. A new engine is dropped into every car before a race, and then shipped back to Yates after the race for teardown and rebuilding.
Camshafts in engines for cars running at Daytona and Talladega feature a different profile than those for a road course like Infineon Raceway. (Long high-speed runs vs. short bursts require high torque.) Roller cams are not allowed in Cup racing, but they are in the Truck Series. When the engine has been completed and is judged ready to race, it’s checked on the shop dynamometer for horsepower output. For an engine rated at 850 hp, transmission and other driveline friction points typically reduce that reading to about 780.
Interestingly, after working so hard to produce such impressive horsepower from their engines, crews are required by NASCAR to place a restrictor plate between the carburetor and the intake manifold when they run on certain tracks. The plates are issued and retrieved at the beginning and end of each day of racing at both Daytona and Talladega. NASCAR acknowledges that the plates are a means of restricting the speeds reached at the two long tracks. Flat-out speeds could otherwise reach way beyond 220 mph. Giving up horsepower is definitely something race car drivers do not like to do.
Shedding the Light(s)
Who needs broken glass? Certainly, no one on a race track, so those gleaming headlights on the cars running in NASCAR races are actually decals, each matching the car’s real-life counterpart in shape and placement. There’s no need for their light (nor the mounting hardware and wiring that comes with them) when running in daylight or on well-lit tracks at night. The same is true with taillights; their purpose is simply to help with brand identity.
A 12-volt alternator, feeding a pair of 12-volt batteries mounted for quick-change accessibility just forward of the left rear wheel, supplies electric power in the modern NASCAR racer. For quick changeability, two coils and two ignition boxes are mounted on top of the dashboard, about where a glove compartment would be.
Just before being put on the hauler, a car judged ready to race is placed on the surface plate—a large, heavy, polished-steel platform that’s periodically checked for absolute flatness and adjusted to be perfectly level. Clearances are checked to assure that the car meets NASCAR rules and is ready to race at the destination track.
Does the Car of Tomorrow Work?
Although some people involved in Sprint Cup racing were slow to buy into the idea, everyone now agrees that NASCAR has succeeded with the COT. Answering the complaint that the COT has IROC-ized NASCAR, with everyone driving cookie-cutter automobiles, one longtime race fan said, “At the ballpark they’re all hitting the same ball, aren’t they? So why the fuss? It’s a better test of drivers!”
The year 2008 will be the first full season for the Car of Tomorrow (now the Car of Today). NASCAR management doesn’t like to be wrong, so expect some quick changes—even during the season—if the COT shows some weaknesses. We’re betting they won’t have to.