Clean air.
Bah humbug. I’ll take dirty air every day. At least in terms of stock-car racing.
After Saturday night’s Sprint All-Star Race provided 100 laps of mostly follow-the-leader racing, which saw a different driver win each of the four 25-lap segments, including surprise race winner Kasey Kahne, who could do no better than fifth in the Sprint Showdown — eh consolation race — but was voted into the All-Star Race by the ever-popular fan vote, the main topic of discussion was clean air.
Wasn’t that one of the things this new (Car of Tomorrow) was created for, to improve the racing and change the reliance on airflow for on-track success?
Well, don’t ask me. I’m confused and undecided on how I really feel about the new car, but what I do know is that Saturday’s race produced two distinct results. One I liked a lot and one bored me into editing stories for this week’s NSSN instead of watching the race.
There were no accidents, and the usual All-Star crashfest, producing millions of dollars worth of damaged race cars, never happened. However, neither did a great deal of competitive racing.
Why? Well, if you ask the drivers, it was the difference in the way the cars handle when running out front or when running in traffic — clean air versus dirty air. And all that led to a race where pit strategy made the difference.
Matt Kenseth finished third on Saturday night and explained why clean air is more important than ever.
“When you get behind somebody, and this car is bigger than the other one, and when you’re behind somebody, there’s a bigger hole in the air and the car is more aero deficient than the other car was, we can’t work on the bodies.”
Kenseth said, “The old cars, we could come here and test and move quarterpanels around and move fenders around and change noses and you could find an aero balance that you’d like, that maybe you could make work in traffic. But these cars we can’t mess with. We can’t touch the bodies, so we’re not going to fix an aerodynamic push situation with this car because we’re not allowed to work on it, unless there’s some kind of rules change.”
So how do you make a pass under those conditions?
“You’re just going to have to get a run at a guy,” said second-place finisher Greg Biffle. “You’re going to have to take his line away somehow, either way up at the top, get on the outside of him, or get up into the corner high, dime it down to try to get a run at him is kind of how you have to pass a guy.
“There will be passing, just not a lot, I guess.”
Kasey Kahne drove from the back of the field to win Saturday night, but acknowledged passing is difficult.
“As far as the CoT car, the tires, the tracks, it’s difficult. It’s difficult to pass cars,” he said. “It’s difficult to run behind cars. It seems like they don’t work as well. But when your car does work, you can get some speed and you can still pass. I figured that out tonight.
“But as far as getting that right setup, it takes a lot.”
So, while I love the way the new car looks on the race track, I’m just not convinced that we’ll ever see side-by-side, door-to-door racing again.
Kenseth thinks the car is going to get better and that it’s “not as terrible as everybody makes it,” and “it’s probably not as great as everybody makes it.”
Which makes it sound like there will be a lot more mediocre races to come.