It’s becoming a weekly theme in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series but perhaps this weekend at Texas Motor Speedway is the event in which the new rules package finally overachieves.
Even though NASCAR executives won’t outright admit it, the high downforce and lower horsepower formula hasn’t performed entirely as intended.
Even if the restarts are wilder, the laps after cars get settled-out have produced similar racing to what came before — just slower and with a lot more grip.
The high-point of the season thus far has been Las Vegas, where Brad Keselowski nearly caught Penske teammate Joey Logano on the final laps, but Auto Club Speedway on March 17 underwhelmed. The race at Atlanta can be dismissed as an outlier since the racing surface is the oldest in the sport, dating back to 1997, producing the most extreme tire wear in the sport.
To be sure, Auto Club shares similar pavement characteristics, but is larger, and so were the expectations.
Following that race, Chip Ganassi Racing engineer Jeff Curtis tweeted the following tidbit concerning the kind of expectations this package had generated.
"The test grip levels were significantly higher. There is a serious lack of vehicle dynamics knowledge behind these package assessments," he wrote.
He added that NASCAR simply needs to keep a package for longer than five years to produce the optimal results and that the sanctioning body also needs to add more short tracks and road courses to create better racing.
It’s been somewhat surprising to see just how much tire fall-off the teams experienced at Vegas and Auto Club because that wasn’t the case during testing for both facilities.
But Vegas winner Logano has an explanation for that.
"We saw it at the All-Star Race and then we saw it at some test and all of the tests and the All-Star Race for that matter were 20-25 lap runs," he said. "Nobody ever made a full fuel run with this package and I think when you look at the All-Star Race I believe the first stage was the longest of all the stages and towards the end of that stage it started to get strung out and people were lifting and it got more single-file, but then the caution comes out, all the cars get bunched back up, and everybody takes back off and then those last few stages were way shorter.
"You see that with the racing we’re seeing today. Ten laps it’s a hornet’s nest. We’re all three, four, five-wide and it’s very racy, but then as the grip starts to go away and we all have to start lifting off the throttle there becomes separation in the field. I personally expected that."
He doesn’t know if NASCAR expected that.
"I’m not sure what their engineers and all the smart people that figure it out how to implement this package, I’m not sure what they saw on computer modeling and all that stuff," he said. "But from the little bit of testing that I did at Charlotte in October and kind of what we saw a small glimpse at the All-Star Race, I kind of expected that – that the racing would really be kind of crazy and exciting when we had new tires and a lot of grip in the cars, and then once the grip starts to go away and the tire falls off, the field would just separate."
One thing that did change from the All-Star Race to the 2019 rules package is that NASCAR caved to overwhelming driver response that they wanted a little more horsepower and throttle response. The All-Star Race featured 420 hp and NASCAR responded with 550 for the 2019 season.
The All-Star Race also limited horsepower through a restrictor plate, while the 2019 package uses a tapered spacer, which in theory should have provided more throttle response on initial gas.
Kyle Busch, who won at Auto Club, says the extra 125 horsepower and downforce is leading to faster corner speeds and approaching the limits of the tire … just not quite all the way to the limit.
"During the test at Las Vegas, we weren’t to the limit of the tire," he said. "We were wide open. I was wide open for 18 laps. "At the end of the race in the Vegas race, we were barely breathing it in (turns) three and four and wide open in one and two. You’re under the limit of the tire even at the 550 package."
So why did the Auto Club and Vegas tests produce something closer to pack racing than the races?
Weather, mostly.
"Ambient conditions are different and then you put 40 other guys – so we had 14 other guys on the race track versus 40 guys on the race track," Busch said. "The amount of rubber that goes, the amount of grip that you lose when rubber goes down, etc. – things happen. There’s too many variables that you’re not going to be able to simulate perfectly, exactly in a test that you would in race conditions."
So, what does that mean for Texas Motor Speedway this weekend?
Once again, it remains a mystery.
Texas is the freshest racing surface on the schedule, with the track undergoing a repave and reconfiguration in 2017. Track workers have also applied the PJ1 Trackbite traction compound and applied the Tire Dragon the upper grooves. Drivers are still going to be challenged by dirty air, especially in Turns 1 and 2, unless the traction compound really gives them something to work with. Otherwise, they will be stuck in the wake of a leader driver and unable to makes moves once cars spread out 10 laps into a run or so.
It's also the first race that teams have been able to build cars for with data gathered from Atlanta, Vegas and Auto Club.
With that said, 2015 NASCAR Xfinity Series champion is expecting a wilder race than what came before over the past year and a half.
"Five-wide restarts into turn one," Buescher said. "With (turns) one and two being as wide as they are, it’s going to be wild, wild restarts. The groove has not come in yet. So, I don’t know how that is going to work. Three and four was pretty close to wide open with the old package.
"Lots of grip over there and lots of banking, very fast. So, with this one, I know we will be wide open. I just don’t know being that there is enough banking to hold it, it might widen out better than it has in the past. That is my hope. I think you are going to see a different race at Texas than we have had with the other package. In my mind, it should maybe change a little bit more than the others have."
For what little predictions are worth this season.
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