There is of course the underlying problem that the NASCAR management actually sort of likes to see very big accidents because they think that that plays well on television; which might very well be true for a highlight reel but in the moment is very boring in the aftermath as marshalls and clean up crews have to clear the wreckage. In my opinion, four seconds of excitement is completely not worth the payoff of wondering if a driver has been hurt or not and then having to sit through the boringness of the cleanup.
Nevertheless, NASCAR is looking to replace the current Generation-6 version of the cars with the Generation-7 version which they want to be safer and provide better racing. Before the current omnicrazy unpleasantness, NASCAR was undergoing testing of various components of the Gen-7 car and throughout this process they have asked the general public what they think.
If there is one thing that I do not particularly like with the current cars, it is the way that small wiggles caused by small bumps between cars, has the potential to cause massive accidents. As a race fan, I want to see racing and care not for the extended periods of boringness caused by 'the big one'. Drivers are paid to drive motor cars and being involved in an accident due to a micro wiggle is not exactly fair for anyone.
If I could contribute anything, it would be to do with the shape of the rear wings and the following implications which follow.
Although air is for all practical purposes invisible, it is still real and has mass. A thing moving through the air encounters resistance because it takes a force to move the air out of the way. You can feel this when you put your hand out of the window and pretend that it is a dolphin, as the air pushes against your hand and causes it to move.
A second thing that lines up behind a first thing, generally finds it easier to move through the air because the first thing has already done a great deal of work to push the air out of the way. This is why you see cyclists, birds, trucks and cars line up behind each other. As the thing behind has an easier job, then this means that it can either save the fuel that it otherwise would have used to push the air out of the way or expend the same amount of fuel to push harder because it doesn't have to push the air out of the way. There is a minor effect caused by air rushing in behind the first thing in the queue but that's nowhere near enough to suck along a car which weighs more than two thousand pounds; it is enough to suck along bits of newspaper behind a train in an underground railway (for a bit).
The other thing of note here, is that the air which has been disturbed in the wake of the first thing in the queue, is of lesser pressure than it otherwise would have been if it had been just standing around doing nothing; all of these things taken together have measurable effects.
The shape of the disturbed air following a car with a wing on the back which is designed to cause downforce is like a giant rooster tail following the car. A moving thing through a fluid causes a wake to form behind it which would normally be shaped like a cone except that in the case of a car, the road surface forms a flat plane which cuts off the whole underside of the cone.
Although a car which is sitting inside that rooster tail of disturbed air is getting an easier job cutting through the air because it is less dense, that same less dense air also has a small yet noticable effect on the aerodynamic parts of the following car. A car which is in marginally less dense air has aerodynamic parts which are creating marginally less downforce and this difference although small is very noticeable when speeds are well above 160mph.
The Car Of Tomorrow (Gen-5) was designed in a wind tunnel and wasn't of itself a bad design. The reason why it provided such terrible motor racing was that the front splitter on the CoT was better at providing front end downforce than Gen-4. Remember, a car which is following another and which is sitting in the wake of the car in front is also inside a rooster tail of less dense air. You can go back and watch races from the period and it is very noticeable that at some point a following car loses just a wee bit of front end downforce and what this means as far as the handling of the cars are concerned is that following cars all have a tendency to push.
The CoT which then gained a reputation for providing bad motor racing, was then marked by implication when there were a series of flips; which if you actually compare the frequency to any other season, is more or less identical. The rear wings on the back of the cars also looked really really doofusy, even though they worked very very well.
Part of the problem that the CoT had was that the front splitter had no way to contain the air which met it. Most formula cars have end plates on their front wings and modem Le Mans Prototypes achieve the same ends by shaping the front of the car to channel air inside the front wheel wells. A NASCAR Cup Series car is a big dumb object with basically the front end of a brick for a nose and so there is no real way to contain the air that meets the front of it.
If you can not contain that less dense air which is hitting the front of the car, then the aerodynamic parts do not work as well as they do in clean air; which explains why there were so many occasions of cars holding back a couple of lengths.
All of this changed by the end of the CoT and although fans mainly saw that the dumb looking wing on the rear of the cars had changed, it was actually the change to the front splitter that has allowed cars to follow each other more closely.
NASCAR removed the rear wing and and went back to a duck-type spoiler; citing safety concerns after 3 acrobatic accidents between May '09 and Mar '10 but the '11 season is where the improvements in racing were actually seen because they decided to make the splitter present more of a flat brick surface to the air at the front of the car. This is where the organisers are on the horns of a dilemma. Always you have questions of relative downforce at the front and underneath the cars which is determined by the shapes of the splitters and diffusers and putting the power down to the road.
Part of the problem is that NASCAR wants to hamstring the cars due to the fact that KE=½mv²
The jump from just:
200mph - 5.89212 MJ
to
205mph - 6.19041 MJ
0.3MJ is about the same kind of energy as carrying a pound of TNT in the car; which has to be dissipated; preferably not into the bodies of the meatbags behind the wheel or into the bodies of the meatbags behind the fences (like what happened at Le Mans in 1955).
The truth is that 550bhp is already sufficient to do ridiculous speeds; so I have no problem with this aspect.
In soliciting suggestions for Gen-7, NASCAR has asked for opinions and my opinion is that they need V8Supercars style rear end plates on the cars. The cars have very big rear wings with see through sections for the superspeedways but if the entire rear wing was raised up and out of the view of the drivers, then they'd be looking through a hole behind their rear window.
The end plates on the rear wings would act like giant stabilising fins in the same way as aircraft have vertical tails, like Formula One and Le Mans Prototypes have both played with 'shark fins' and which a NASCAR Cup Series car already has with the so called glass components which are on the outside of c-pillar on the left hand side of the car.
Since the existing cars already have a rear wing which creates a rooster tail and moving where that rear wing is, relative to the rear deck lid of the car, is not the biggest determinant on the effects of the air behind it, then I think that this is a pretty good answer to improving the stability of the cars. The current cars already create massive amounts of downforce by presenting a big dumb rear spoiler to the air but by placing that rear wing higher and into cleaner air, it also creates the ability to stabilize the rear end of the car.
Since the front of the cars has already been improved from the CoT to a setup which is less front end aero dependent, then a change to the rear of the car isn't going to upset it all that much.
I like the idea of Supercars/1970 Aero Warriors/1960 Plymouth Fury style wings/fins, not because of the downforce but because the end plates provide stability in a straight line. NASCAR in particular has the unique problem where tagging people is tolerated. If you look at the incidents which caused Brendan Gaughan to flip at 'Dega last year, or Ryan Newman at Daytona this year, they are both caused by cars becoming unstable in a straight line and then causing a secondary impact.
If you had some end plates on the rear of the cars which ameliorated the wiggles which cause those accidents, I wonder if they mightn't have happened at all.
Also, fins look cool.
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