ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 25, 1996 TAG: 9602260104
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ROCKINGHAM, N.C.
TYPE: ANALYSIS
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
Car owner Robert Yates, whose driver, Dale Jarrett, put his Ford in Victory Lane at the Daytona 500, smiles when he recalls his first trip to the wind tunnel some 15 years ago.
``The first cars almost jumped out of the tunnel,'' Yates said. ``We actually had some come off the blocks and move and slide and those kinds of things.
``It was really a neat first trip. Now, it's about the most boring thing you could do. You just watch the car sit there and you hear some noise, and you know the wind is going over it.''
Boring or not, car manufacturers, owners and almost everyone affiliated with NASCAR considers wind-tunnel testing essential to staying on the cutting edge of aerodynamics - the most controversial technical issue in the Winston Cup series. For the teams and the manufacturers, the goal is to discover - or negotiate from NASCAR - an advantage that will make their cars cut through the air more efficiently.
For NASCAR, the goal is to make all the cars equal.
``The wind tunnel has taught us that subtle changes can make big differences,'' said crew chief Larry McReynolds. One of the key questions that will be answered in today's Goodwrench 400 at North Carolina Motor Speedway and in the next few races is whether the Chevrolet Monte Carlo is still a superior race car aerodynamically to the Ford Thunderbird, as it was last year.
Even after his Ford won at Daytona, Yates said the Fords are still at a disadvantage.
``We certainly don't want to cry about this, but we do know we've got our work cut out for us,'' Yates said.
But in the Chevy camps, it was the same story from a different perspective.
``I could be 100 percent wrong, but I think when the tires get 30 laps on them, the Chevrolets are going to be in trouble Sunday,'' said Ray Evernham, Jeff Gordon's crew chief. ``I think we're going to have to work twice as hard to be half as good.''
Yates believes, as do most of the other Ford owners, that NASCAR, in effect, legislated the success of the new Chevrolet Monte Carlo in 1995 before the car ever raced. Chevy crushed the competition, winning 21 of the 31 Winston Cup races as Gordon earned his first points championship.
The controversy focused on the rear ends of the two cars. In the back, the Chevy was several inches narrower than the Ford. Chevy and NASCAR officials said the original Chevy rear end was so much narrower, it was not wide enough to accommodate the NASCAR spoiler, which is 57 inches wide. Ford officials have said NASCAR could have made the spoiler fit.
In any case, NASCAR decided to allow the Chevys to widen their rear ends several inches so the spoilers would fit. Ford officials said it was almost six inches. Winston Cup director Gary Nelson says it was less than four inches.
Whatever the difference, the widening made the Monte Carlo a better car aerodynamically, because a wider rear end meant more surface area on which rear downforce could be created. And at all the Winston Cup tracks except Daytona and Talladega, crew chiefs and drivers will do anything for more rear downforce. (At Daytona and Talladega, pure speed is far more important than downforce.)
NASCAR all but admitted that it had given too much of a good thing to Chevy in the way it reacted to the controversy. Four times during the 1995 season, NASCAR made changes to help the Fords or the Pontiacs, or both, generally by allowing them to raise the heights of their spoilers to improve downforce.
By the end of the year, the spoilers on the Fords and Pontiacs were five-eighths of an inch higher than the Chevys.
And then, after the last race of the season in November at Atlanta Motor Speedway, NASCAR confiscated the fastest Ford of the day, which was driven by Ernie Irvan, and the fastest Chevy, driven by race winner Dale Earnhardt, and trucked them off to the Lockheed wind tunnel in Marietta, Ga.
NASCAR never released the wind tunnel figures. But in an interview at Daytona in January, Nelson said the tests showed that the Chevy had superior downforce. Ford, meanwhile, had built its own Chevy during the season and conducted its own comparative tests. The results of those tests have remained a closely guarded secret.
But at Daytona, a reporter got a look at them. The Ford test showed that in the critical area of rear downforce, on a race car going 200 mph, the Ford had 419 pounds of downforce and the Chevy had 537 pounds. In other words, the Chevy had about 22 percent more rear downforce than the Ford.
NASCAR, acknowledging the Chevy was still a superior race car even after all its rules changes, made yet another change on Nov.27 to give Ford more help.
``When we came out of the wind tunnel, we told them, `You can lower your roof by a quarter of an inch and raise your spoiler an eighth of an inch in the back to get more downforce and you can lower your front air dam a quarter of an inch.' Those are the three things we gave them,'' Nelson said.
But Ford still isn't satisfied. To fully equalize the cars, ``it would take more than an inch,'' said Ford's Lee Morse. ``NASCAR is going in the right direction, but they're very much concerned with going too far.''
``It's not an exact science,'' said Nelson. ``And what we're trying to do as best we can is to make it equal.''
LENGTH: Medium: 97 linesby CNB