Race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest has confirmed that acceptance of the entry from Hendrick Motorsports for the grid slot – reserved for what it describes as an “innovative car” – is dependent on the Chevrolet Camaro ZL-1 running an energy-recovery system.
That would give NASCAR the chance to test the hybrid technology on its Next Gen machine in competition ahead of its introduction in the premier Cup Series, which could happen as early as 2024.
- Autosport, 18th Mar 2022
When I heard this last week, I immediately thought that this was a simultaneously brilliant, hideous, amazing, and bonkers idea, all at the same time. The truth is that American race teams aren't exactly heralded outside of North America because they invariably end up being rubbish against better engineered opposition. At home where they race on high speed ovals where power is everything, American race teams are king. Formula One is the domain of British and Italian engineers, sports car racing belongs to the French, Germans, Italians and Japanese, and although Americans occasionally make the odd foray into the rest of the world, they demand instant success and when they don't get it, they give up.
Entering a NASCAR Cup car in an invitational class at Le Mans, will not change the overall result. The last time that NASCAR Cup cars did attempt the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the furthest that any of them got was 11 hours. Although a NASCAR Cup car produces more than enough power, it is all of the other stresses to do with braking, multiple gear changes, change of direction, and the sustained running for 24 hours, which breaks cars at Le Mans. It is not uncommon for a team with three cars at Le Mans to send out one as a hare with two tortoises following and for the hare and a tortoise to break. Very occasionally a hare will win the race and this causes everyone up and down pit row to build a faster car for next year and the cycle of breaking fast cars begins anew.
A NASCAR Cup series car is a massive thing. At 1500kg, they are 150kg heavier than a V8Supercar, 400kg heavier than a GT3 car, and more than 500kg heavier than the fastest Le Mans Prototypes. At identical speeds, all that extra weight has to be sprung, mounted, carried, and moved through the corners. Objects are lazy and they like to keep on doing whatever it is that they are doing unless they are forced to change their behaviour by something else. That something else is brakes, tyres, suspension, aerodynamic devices; and it should be pretty obvious that a heavy thing which contains more mass is going to need more force and more stress to change its behaviour than a less massive and more nimble thing. This is the reason why womens' figure skating exists at the Winter Olympics - originally there was only an open event but women who are generally smaller and more nimble, end up being magnitudes better than men for this very reason.
It is they physical size of a NASCAR Cup car that will be its downfall against smaller and slipperier opposition. A NASCAR Cup car is an exceptionally huge thing in the world of motor racing and that's in part because of the story of how they came to be. In the 1960s and 70s when petrol retailed for mere cents per gallon, nobody in America cared about trying to build sophisticated machinery. It had to be reliable and fast; thus, NASCAR Cup cars made exceptionally fast, exceptionally big but dumb power. It was only in the 1980s that they reined in the size of the cars to what people drove on the street and even then, the platform was still very wide.
At 110in (wheelbase) by 76.5in (track) a Cup Series car is an exceptionally wide thing. 110 inches is about the same wheelbase as a large family sedan, which is very quickly becoming extinct. The VE/VF Commodore was sold in the United States under the name plate of the Chevrolet SS and for a while became the pace car for NASCAR. When directly compared on track to the NASCAR Cup Series cars, the Commodore looked tall and skinny. Anyone who owns a Commodore though, knows that they are a massively massive family sedan.
The Oreca 07 which is one of the standard prototypes used at Le Mans has a 118in (wheelbase) and 61.8in (track); which means that they'll be about as long if you allow for bodywork but at almost 15 inches narrower that's absurd. From the side, the NASCAR Cup car will look about the same size but from the front it will look like someone is racing a wide wall.
In terms of going out and being competitive, I expect the project to be mostly a failure and for the prototypes to us the Cup car as a drafting plug but it will be interesting to see if it survives at all; let alone how they work out changing drivers, brakes and maybe rotors on the fly.
The thing is though, failure is the perfect option. Failure is useful because it tells the engineers and boffins where stuff breaks so that they can improve it. One of the things that NASCAR is learning on the fly this year is that lower profile tyres have a habit if separating from wheels at the bead when pushed through sideways skew forces across the face of the tyre. It's tolerable but borderline embarrassing.
Why bother sending a NASCAR Cup car to Le Mans? The Le Mans 24 Hour Race is a test bed for trying out new stuff until it breaks. NASCAR and Chevrolet want to be able to test a hybrid system and they want to do it in the white hot heat of competition but that's impossible in the regular NASCAR season. My suspicion is that this entry will be on a hiding to nothing and won't make it into the top 10 outright, but I guess it is the perfect place to use as a test bed for new stuff.
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