the NASCAR Car of Tomorrow tested for the first time at Daytona International Speedway on Thursday. NASCAR Vice President for Research and Development Gary Nelson and his group began the latest round of on-track data acquisition for the Car of Tomorrow using the prototype produced by the NASCAR Research and Development Center and driven by Brett Bodine, NASCAR Director of Cost Research. Previous on-track sessions set performance baselines. Now, the quest to fine-tune those baselines begins at Daytona. The Car of Tomorrow, which is two inches taller and four inches wider than current NASCAR race cars, represents the sports next major step in safety and competition enhancements, and cost-reduction improvements. NASCAR is in the final stages of the five-year Car of Tomorrow project, and Thursdays test marked another step toward the finished product.
The last part of the Car of Tomorrow is, How does it run in traffic, Nelson said. The only way you can do that is in traffic. You can’t do that in the laboratory. You can’t do that in the wind tunnel. And so we’re working our way into that to close up the specification to where we have a very nice package that works on the race track and in traffic, and the leader and the overtaking cars are able to have the right amount of balance as they’re running in clean or dirty air. The tests that preceded Thursdays last October at Talladega Superspeedway, then at Atlanta Motor Speedway featured the NASCAR prototype along with teams prototypes. Although Thursdays Daytona test was open to teams, the NASCAR car worked in solitude, with Bodines laps building a framework of information to be used in the next test, next week. On Jan. 19, teams that have built Car of Tomorrow prototypes are scheduled to test with NASCAR at Daytona. Everyone will use the baselines developed in Thursdays test to see how the cars react in traffic and drafting situations.
Part of the future being tested Thursday included a wing rather than the usual spoiler attached to the cars rear deck lid. NASCAR tested the wing briefly last October in Atlanta, but didnt complete it because of a teams engine problem. Most of Bodines runs today were done with the wing rather than the spoiler, and both he and Nelson say the possibility of using a spoiler adds to the pieces teams can use to tune their cars.
