NASCAR's "Car Of Tomorrow" A Bad Idea

NASCAR has made a lot of noise about its Car Of Tomorrow, a rather serious redeisgn of a racing stock car intended to be fielded by raceteams for 2007, with a tentative debut at Talladega in October 2006. The Car Of Tomorrow - COT for short - sports a noticably bigger roofline, slightly wider overall body, redesigned rear deck area and rear spoiler, and a slightly blunter nose. The biggest change is in the airdam - instead of the flush airdam of years past, the COT airdam has a large gap with a thin splitter on the bottom. According to DEI racing director Steve Hmiel, this is designed to limit what kind of shocks teams run; if teams run shocks with a lot of travel it will grind the lip away and wipe out front downforce, thus teams are limited to shock packages that don't bottom out the nose of the car.

However, NASCAR has not been able to sell the idea to raceteams or to Detroit, and the rumor has picked up steam that the entire project may wither away before it ever sees a competitive lap.

The reasons why the project may never see a competitive lap in anger despite NASCAR spin that the project is still on are several - to convert their fleets to COTs raceteams would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building new cars, as present-day cars cannot be converted to COT specs. They'd also need new transporters, as the bigger rooflines make present day haulers too small.

Then there are performance issues with the design. As Speedway Illustrated noted in its February 2006 issue, when tested in traffic at Atlanta in late 2005 the COTs ran well by themselves but were junk in traffic. Noted Doug Gore, quoting from one of the project leaders involved, "The car performed better than expected on the track, but only in clean air. In traffic it performed worse than (raceteams') current models..." - so much so that according to the Winston-Salem Journal's online racing page at the time, teams had to use rear spoilers nearly seven inches in height to get the cars to run stably.

NASCAR, though, continues to test the idea - a day after the first round of NASCAR preseason testing at Daytona, Brett Bodine, a former driver with one Winston Cup win and five BGN wins to his credit in a two-decade career, tested a NASCAR-built COT prototype and experimented with a bizarre new angle - a rear wing instead of the spoiler blade. NASCAR said it hoped that other teams that tested at Daytona in mid-January would bring their COT prototypes with them for a scheduled test. However, only Kyle Petty participated.

Based on Indycar wings and also the wings used on some classes of sports-car racing, it is doubtful that the rear wing will improve handling in traffic, as Indycars in particular had proven less than raceable on ovals with such wings until air-displacement ailerons were added to the rear wings to make drafting more effective. One wonders what NASCAR could hope to accomplish with a rear wing.

The more the Car Of Tomorrow is run, the less impressive it becomes.