Change of pace. Pace. Race. Race pace. NASCAR. Tired racing series suffering from the woesy woes.
NASCAR appears to be losing its way. And its simple. In the beginning, before the green flag dropped. NASCAR began with racing everyman's car. A hopped up virgin of the car you drove on the street, raced for the checker with the other guys car.
The decline of the American Auto industry seems to follow the highs and lows of NASCAR. Over the last ten years NASCAR abandoned its fundamental reason for being. It no longer is a technological research tool of the auto industry. The cars are all alike.
Originally NASCAR wanted every car maker to be competitive. They achieved it. But they have gone too far. Its now very boring.
For the longest time I had hoped that NASCAR would abandon the carburized V-8 for the mainstay of its racing engines. Almost every common car either has a type of 6 cylinder or 4 cylinder engine.
They would spark almost a massive curiosity as to the racing for these engines. V-8's are almost always used for trucks. And those engines are almost always fuel injected or diesel fueled. NASCAR grew out of the social activity of the North American car culture. Its changes on the racetrack effected every road car. Returning to that mission would renew NASCAR.
Changing to a six cylinder format would allow more variance in engine designs. Changing to a fuel injection mode could provide almost the same racing speeds although on the big tracks like Talledega, Daytona, Michigan and Texas the top speeds would be reduced into the safety margin.
Going to the 6 cylinder, permitting different block designs, would court the interest and more funding from car makers. It would also provide the format for the elimination of the restrictor plate and the dangerous killing crashes that device creates.
2 comments:
I am surely not a racing aficionado but this certainly seems like an interesting idea. It's also very timely, with GM sort of biting the dust yesterday.
A lifetime ago I used to attend races in person and I was always interested in which brand won the race and how they enhanced their vehicles, right out of the factory, to enable them to do so. I was probably a bit naive.
When all the cars started to seem like the same car, only with a different number and different advertisements on it, the brand utterly unimportant, I stopped watching.
The other day I was channel surfing and for old time's sake, I stopped to watch a NASCAR race for a few moments and it occurred to me, race cars today are a lot like floats in a parade. What's on the outside is a shell that bears absolutely no relationship to what's inside that shell.
Then I moved on...
Nascar had in the 1990's and maybe early 2000 a v6 series called Busch.
The engineers had a bitch of a time trying to lessen the vibration of the smaller engine. The evidence is clear the V6 engine designed for NASCAR racing was a vibrating embarrassment and the drivers soon lobbied for a smaller displacement V8. which they run today.
It seems lately NASCAR is having to deal with the Big 3' financial woes, the costs of competing,discontent drivers....a rumor is Hendrick's Motorsports will manufacture all of Nascar's engines very soon.
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