(The Gas Station is where American Cars And Racing Executive Editor Gary Gastelu vents his opinions. Feel free to let us know if you think they stink.)
The Daytona 500 had a memorable ending, but many fans would like to forget a lot of what preceded it.
Prior to the thrilling four-lap green flag sprint to the finish that saw Tyler Reddick win his first Harley J. Earl trophy, it was defined by long stretches of fuel saving when the pack cruising along at a relative turtle’s pace. At one point, the graphics on the Fox broadcast showed Bubba Wallace leading the way with 50-60% throttle at around 180 mph, while the fastest lap in the race was set by Carson Hocevar at 197 mph. Lap times dropped by five seconds at some points.
Given the difficulty of passing on a drafting track like Daytona, drivers often attempt to save fuel to shorten their pit stops by a couple of seconds in the hopes that they can pick up positions by winning the race out of the pits. Michael McDowell went to extremes on Sunday by skipping the last round of pit stops altogether and running the entire final stage on one tank, which is about 75% farther than a typical stint between fill-ups. That allowed him to take the final restart in first place, but he got caught up in a wreck on the final lap and knocked out of contention for the win.
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While cars in the back of the pack save the most fuel, it’s up to the leaders to set the pace. Sometimes they back off to conserve for themselves, like Wallace apparently was, while other times they increase speed to force the cars behind them to burn more fuel.
Fuel saving has always been an factor to some extent, but it has been exacerbated by the seventh generation Next Gen Cup Series car, which is limited to 510 hp on superspeedways and has a lot of downforce. Everyone can just floor it the whole way around Daytona and Talladega with a tremendous amount of control at top speed, making overtaking runs that much trickier and the pit pass option more attractive.
Critics have offered a variety of ideas to solve the problem that range from eliminating stage breaks to adding more. Denny Hamlin, co-owner of the 23XI Racing team that Reddick drives for, discussed another potential solution during his post-race press conference.
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“There’s a way, but we’re going to have to increase the speeds by a lot. You’re going to have to make it to where handling matters. That’s going to spread the field. That’s going to make it to where we’re not — it’ll look a little more like racing from the past,” Hamlin said.
“But as long as their insurance company is okay with it, you’re going to have to speed up the cars, because right now we’re so planted in the racetrack that we can just run in this really tight pack. One of the suggestions that we talked about just a few days ago is come here next year in the Clash. Let a few of us come up with a package that we think you won’t see any fuel saving, you’re just going to see people hanging on. That would be the only fix.”
Bill Elliott set Daytona’s all-time 210.394 mph qualifying speed record 1987, the last unrestricted year, while Ken Schrader won pole position with a 193.823 mph run in 1988 when new rules were implemented to bring speeds down for safety. The cars were harder to drive back then in both configurations and the packs weren’t as big as they are today, as it was difficult for a long line of cars to stay on each other’s bumper for extended periods.
The Next Gen cars also share many of the same parts, which puts them on more equal footing than previous generations that followed a set of rules, but were individually fabricated and drove very differently from each other.
While Hamlin’s plan might be worth a shot, trying it at next year’s Clash and then evaluating the results would mean things probably wouldn’t change for the Daytona 500 until at least 2028, but I think there’s a quicker way to speed things up a little bit.
NASCAR currently has a policy that requires damaged cars to be able to turn lap times that are no slower than 115% of a target speed, or else they have to leave the race. With a swipe of the pen it could write a similar rule for the leader or all cars to maintain a minimum speed that’s faster than what would be considered fuel-saving mode. Qualifying shows how fast cars can go outside of the draft and can be used as a benchmark to work from.
Not everyone agrees anything needs to change, however, including Reddick’s crew chief Billy Scott, who was asked about it after the race.
“Well, I doubt there’s a fix to it because we’re just going to figure out the next way to exploit it, and I don’t know that it needs to be fixed,” Scott said during his press conference.
“I think we all as competitors are spending as much time trying to figure out what the next best thing is and how to combat what each other is doing. I mean, I think it would be like asking if you need to change how chess is played. Everybody is trying to react off each other and figure out a way to get in the front at the right time. That depends on whether cautions fly, like in Stage 1 where some of them were able to stretch it all the way to the end. To me, from where we stand, that’s a very enjoyable part of it.”
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