TBK-Light.com

Yes but it's very easy to prevent that. Like F1, fit a wooden plank under the cross member and mandate that it can't wear out beyond a certain thickness. Its surface would be closer to the ground than the splitter so there's no way the splitter can physically touch the ground before the plank hits, no matter what suspension wizardry they try.

F1 did it for safety reasons to prevent cars from bottoming out and skating off track after the Senna fatality but NASCAR can do it to prevent the front ends from being so sealed off all the time.

Imagine all the debris cautions for pieces of wood

Unfortunately, this is NASCAR we're talking about. Simple so won't go for it.

Easier solution is to use the PASS rules (I think it's PASS), they put the car up on wooden blocks and compress the suspension, the car body must compress to a point two inches lower or higher than an imaginary line (about level where the road is).

I could be dreaming, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere about this rules package, it's designed to stop them running coilbind and bumpstop setups, and apparently works pretty well.

Re-NASCAR, I think they have made the oil pan face smaller, which should reduce front down force a smidge, but it won't change the overall package, CUP will be like NWS was this year now, momentum, momentum, momentum, which is completely stupid since they had the solution staring them in the face after the Michigan test and dickface choose to ignore it.

I wonder why they didn't lowered the downforce? Would the cars look worse? Speed drops in the track avg so it would sell the product worse? Or what. Why he thinks this package is the best one and not the other? Maybe they were wanting to reduce Horsepower for a long time and there was a big momentum for this to go on.

@Ian: I didn't know about PASS doing that. That could also work I guess but the plank would be an easier and more foolproof post-race gauge as it's black and white. In the PASS procedure, seems like you could still perhaps do something between pre and post-race inspection, assuming they even do the same check post-race.

@Soul: Some in the sport have been wanting to reduce power for awhile. I remember Robert Yates also suggested a few years back that power was too much now and needs to be lowered for better racing. I respect him a lot but you can never have too much power, esp in an era when downforce is so damn high and teams keep finding ways to add more no matter how much you reduce it.

My memory isn't good but I seem to remember it was pre and post race checks to ensure shims were not used.

IMHO lower downforce, increase power, get rid of the splitter and the ground effects, put super soft tyres on, it seem to me that they don't want to do this because they've convinced themselves they can't do it or the cars will handle badly, or it'll take a lot of work to get the cars back up to speed, fuck the speed, the best racing is when cars are not glued to the track all travelling at the same speed, that's just boring.

NASCAR has fallen into the same trap F1 did about 30 years ago and been dazzled by the allure of more down force equals better racing, it doesn't, the more the car relies on aerodynamics to perform, the more restricted (worse) the performance will be.

Yeah I don't get the HP thing either. If you reduce down-force, yeah you'll have high top speeds, but you'll have low corner speeds.. and that's where the issue lies.

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Gael

They think reducing the horsepower will reduce the speed, when in reality it probably won't change it all that much, all it'll do is cause the drivers to run the higher line to keep up the momentum.

They'll get a little more side-by-side racing, but now comes the problem of not being able to complete the pass on the inside.

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Taken to the extreme, I imagine there would be more spinning and crashing with a low downforce/high power configuration. That's a concern to some extent but hasn't NASCAR caught on to the fact that even the hardcore fans are okay with a bit of that (and of course the big numbskull demographic they've been chasing for the last decade love it).