Ford gets rear spoiler break
By Dave Rodman, Turner Sports Interactive
January 23, 2002
4:44 PM EST (2144 GMT)
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Citing wind tunnel data and results from two three-day test sessions at Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR Tuesday announced a quarter-inch decrease in the rear spoiler height for the Winston Cup Ford Taurus, effective with the opening of Speedweeks at Daytona.
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Rusty Wallace's Ford goes through inspection.
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For races at Daytona and Talladega Superspeedway, all four Winston Cup manufacturers have 57-inch wide rear spoilers. With the change, the spoiler height for Dodges and Pontiacs is 6.5 inches and the spoiler height for Chevrolets and Fords is 6.25 inches.
“Evidently our lobbying is not as good as Ford’s is,” Chevrolet team owner Rick Hendrick said while attending a Busch Series test at Daytona. “Because in 2000 we were a lot worse off than the Fords are this year and we didn’t get anything. We’ll just have to show up and race.”
NASCAR announced last November that modifications to the current aero package might be necessary to assure parity amongst the various manufacturers. It was also announced that “ . . . these modifications could continue through the weeks leading up to the Daytona 500.”
“This is nothing new,” NASCAR vice president of corporate communications Jim Hunter said Tuesday. “Ford is probably going to say this isn’t enough, that it doesn’t make any difference.”
Hunter added that additional changes could be made once Speedweeks gets underway for Winston Cup teams with nearly four hours of practice on Friday, Feb. 8 -- the day before Bud Pole Qualifying for the Daytona 500. Hunter said NASCAR had no plans to take any cars to a wind tunnel once Speedweeks began, primarily due to the difficulty in scheduling tunnel time.
“To me, it’s that time of year,” Hunter said of the difficulty in determining effective rules. “The only people who come down here and give you an honest test are the ones that do not have provisionals or something else to fall back on so they have to come down and find out exactly how fast they really are.”
After six days of Winston Cup testing at the 2.5-mile track that is the site of the season opening Daytona 500 on Feb. 17, the best lap was by Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet driver Jimmie Johnson, 48.962 seconds, 183.816 mph.
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Members of the No. 28 Ford team adjust the rear spoiler.
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Fords, which when they tested had 6.5-inch rear spoilers were roundly accused of sandbagging, or holding back their best efforts, as a group. The best lap by a Ford was Geoffrey Bodine’s 49.255-second, 182.723 mph run.
That was 15th on the cumulative speed chart. Bodine’s Phoenix Racing team gets no support from Ford and has little chance of getting a provisional starting position for the 500; therefore insiders said they had no excuse to hold back.
The best “factory supported” Ford was Dale Jarrett’s No. 88 Robert Yates Racing Taurus, which ran 49.471 seconds, 181.925 mph -- good for 25th on the chart.
After the second three-day session ended Jan. 17, Fords driven by Andy Hillenburg and Rusty Wallace conducted a three-session drafting experiment in which they ran three-lap sets of laps with the 6.5-inch spoiler, followed by a 6.25-inch and six-inch blade. The increase with a half-inch lopped off the spoiler, Wallace said, was only three-tenths of a second per lap.
After testing concluded Chevrolets held seven of the top-10 spots, including three of Hendrick’s four teams. Even with the change, there was discontent in the Ford camp.
“I’ve been on that end of the stick, when you thought you were struggling,” Hendrick said. “I just don’t understand -- to me it was supposed to be the same rules as it was in 2000. They (Ford) dominated this race big-time and really that’s the reason we went to all the roof stuff, because they were killing us so bad.”
Jarrett won his third Daytona 500 in one of Yates’ Fords in 2000, when Tauruses swept the top-five positions and six of the top-10.
“If they take a little off us and they take a little off them to me it’s like we’re right back to where we were at the beginning of 2000,” Hendrick said, shaking his head. “I guess it came down to somebody’s gonna take the short straw and we took it. I didn’t think they’d do it until we ran a race or qualifying -- maybe after we run the 125s if they needed something.”
“What teams have to remember is how we got to where we are with what package we’re using now,” Hunter said. “We had an aero package and they (teams) didn’t like it -- said it was terrible. We said we would come up with something and we’ve come up with something.
“Right now, to be perfectly honest, we don’t know who to believe. With all the stuff that’s gone on during testing, not only the sandbagging but some games being played with cars vis a vis templates, that when they come back (for Speedweeks) they need to be different so we don’t know how that is going to figure into the equation.”
“I guess somebody is always gonna be complaining that they need something,” Hendrick said. “It ain’t gonna change and I guess I’m just gonna show up and race and do the best we can, and not focus that much on the rules.”
NASCAR made a precedent for changing rules once an event has started last season. It went to a smaller carburetor restrictor plate on the day before the 2001 Talladega 500 at Talladega Superspeedway.
“The balancing act that NASCAR has got to perform now is that the guys said the old package wasn’t safe -- they didn’t want to be put in that position,” Hunter said of the reaction to the rules after the last restrictor plate race, the October 2001 EA Sports 500 at Talladega. “Now it’s just a question of equating the various makes of cars to try to keep the playing field even. Whether this is the final package, who knows?”
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