Nationwide Series teams to race new car in four events next season

By SceneDaily Staff

Friday, August 28, 2009

Joe Balash is the director of the NASCAR Nationwide Series.

Sam Cranston
NASCAR Scene

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NASCAR Nationwide Series teams will run the new car in four events in 2010, beginning with the July race at Daytona International Speedway and then race it about once a month in a slow debut for the model.

Nationwide Series Director Joe Balash says that series officials handed teams the rule book for building the new car following a recent series of meetings with owners and fabricators.

Balash said those meetings helped the sanctioning body finalize some steps of the process, while others are still in the works. The series will use tapered spacers at all events, abandoning the usage of restrictor plates to harness horsepower at superspeedways. A tapered spacer serves the same purpose as a restrictor plate, but it is a thicker device.

"[We] got a lot of feedback from them in regards to the type of tracks they would like to see us get some experience with and also some input on the rules package," Balash said Friday at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Canada, site of this weekend's NAPA Auto Parts 200. "Later on that day, we had a meeting with the fabricators that will actually build the cars and we released to them the rule book to build the new Nationwide car and kind of some thoughts on what we would do at a Talladega test to finalize, kind of, gearing and the tapered spacer that we would use. Our plans are to stop using the restrictor plate and use the tapered spacer at all events with the new Nationwide car. We also talked to them about the timing of when we would go out with the new car."

He says that after the July Daytona race, the series plans to race one event a month with the new car.

"We still have to finalize a couple of things on the overall schedule before we can announce what tracks we'll be on, but our goal is to have the teams race the new car once a month for four months and then we'll stay away from that last month with the last three races leading into the championship for the Nationwide Series," he said.

Balash added that the four events will all be on ovals, but that it will be a diverse group to help the teams.

"We'll get a mix of tracks between some short tracks and a superspeedway and kind of an intermediate track," he said.