Don't Blame the Car: CoT not only factor in quality of racing

Everyone has heard the complaints: The new car is boring. Drivers can’t pass. It’s ugly. The teams can’t work on it.

To a point, the complaints are true.

To a point.

But to blame all of the lackluster races this year on the Car of Tomorrow (Today) is not the answer. The car is a beast. Teams have had to work and work some more to figure NASCAR’s IROC-style car out. While I completely believe that NASCAR needs to find a way to let teams work on the cars as individuals, I also think any sport at its top level should be hard — otherwise, anybody could do it and it wouldn’t be special.

Building the cars, adjusting them and driving them should be harder than at any other level of racing. Anyone who isn’t willing to work that much harder can go back to the Nationwide Series, Trucks or ARCA. Yes, talent is important, but so is a work ethic greater than the competition’s.

During the Coca-Cola 600, there were more green flag passes than there were in the same race a year ago with the old car. Granted, this includes lead passes during pit cycles, but there were 2,850 on track passes under green — that’s 900 more than in last year’s race, so you can’t tell me the racing was boring from the stands. Part of the blame, then, needs to be placed squarely on the TV broadcast. By showing only a few battles near the front while focusing on the race leaders is a disservice to the fans viewing at home. If there is no battle for the lead, the network should be showing the dogfights occurring for 10th, 19th and 37th place. After all, racing is racing, right? And the racing going on in mid-pack is often much more complex and exciting than the TV booth would have you believe. 

Another variable that has not changed is the racetracks themselves. The 1.5- and 2-mile tracks, with the exception of Darlington, lend themselves to single-file racing. In one sense, they do exactly what a racetrack should, which is to separate the faster cars from the slower. The problem is that the fastest car with a five-second lead on the next one isn’t exactly compelling. One complaint I heard about the Coca-Cola 600 was that when someone got to the front, he was able to open up a large advantage in clean air. And that is different from the old car… how?

Clean air improves engine efficiency, which produces more horsepower and therefore provides more speed. Aerodynamics also plays a role, as the turbulent air in the middle of the field slows cars down. You can change the cars, but you can’t change the laws of physics.

Tires also have played a significant role in the quality of racing. Softer-compound tires produce more grip and better handling cars but give up longevity in the process. Hard tires usually last longer, but make it more difficult to make a pass stick. Perhaps there is a safety gain in the harder tires (there are fewer blowouts as a result of wearing them to the cords) but there will always be cut tires in racing.

I love the safety aspects of the new car, but perhaps the sanctioning body might allow more “give-up” in the tires. Softer tires do wear more quickly, which forces another degree of pit strategy, which can be the difference between contending for a win and simply being happy with a cushy top-5 finish. Softer tires would serve as another way to separate the best from the rest.

Lastly, there is the issue of parity. Now make no mistake, I’m not against parity. But I believe parity should come not from everything being exactly the same, but from teams having the same quality of equipment and using it to make the car go faster. NASCAR will never recognize the need for financial parity, of course, as the sponsors’ stakes are too big for the sanctioning body to cap them. But trying to make every team work in the same tiny box is not parity, either — the teams with the big money still fight for the wins. And you can’t blame the new cars for that.

While it’s fine to place a certain amount of frustration on the new cars, it’s unfair and uninformed to make a blanket statement about the car causing all of the races to be boring. They aren’t. TV doesn’t show the whole story while tracks and tires restrict the teams far more than we realize. NASCAR should find ways that teams can work with the cars, be it front-end geometry, raising or lowering the splitter, building in more adjustability — whatever. But the car itself is not the flop people would like to take it for at first glance. It’s just a single entity in the many that make up the problem.

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