Cars will be slower at Talladega, but will they be safer?
NASCAR is sucking some of the air out of restrictor-plate engines for the Nov. 1 Cup race at Talladega Superspeedway as the holes in the carburetor plates will be 59/64ths of an inch instead of 60/64ths.
That likely will sap 12-15 horsepower and cut qualifying speeds by 3-5 mph – a change NASCAR officials say wasn’t prompted by Carl Edwards’ frightening airborne wreck at the end of the April race, but by the fast speeds in general.
Cup drivers agree with NASCAR officials on one point – that reducing horsepower won’t necessarily prevent big wrecks.
“It seems like the smaller the plate gets, the more we wreck,” driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “The smaller you make the plate, the more on top of each other we race, the more we’re going to wreck. Every time that plate gets smaller, it gets more dangerous. … You run three-, four-wide, and if you’re in the second lane or the third lane, you’re boxed in.
“You have nowhere to go. You can’t pass. Nowhere to go. You can’t do anything about your position but sit there and ride and hope that maybe you can push your lane forward. And that sucks. That’s boring.”
Restrictor plates are designed to reduce speeds and keep cars from getting airborne and flying off the track. Unrestricted engines would likely reach 850-900 horsepower and speeds of 220 mph or more.
“I think that smaller restrictor plates will keep the speeds down,” said Edwards, whose car got airborne and flew into the Talladega catchfence after being hit by Brad Keselowski and Ryan Newman on the final lap in April. “That’s probably a good move considering we’re already nose to tail wide-open the whole time.”
Edwards averaged more than 200 mph the lap before his accident.
“We watch [the speeds] every time we go race, and if it warrants a plate adjustment to put us in the zone that we’re more comfortable with, then we make that,” Sprint Cup Series Director John Darby said. “This isn’t the first plate change we’ve ever made, and it won’t be the last.
“The speeds were OK [in April], but we’d rather be in the lower side of OK.”
That still doesn’t mean everything will be OK.
“Back when the rules weren’t this tight, you had more separation in the cars,” team owner Rick Hendrick said. “It’s a huge IROC race with restrictor plates. There’s no answer. If you’ve got a 440-horse[power], 430-horse motor, everybody is running around there wide open, having to depend on sucking each other around.
“Somebody has got to make a mistake [to make a pass]. I don’t know the answer to the deal. The fans love it.”
The drivers know that the size of the plate won’t necessarily impact how they race.
“I don’t care if they go down or if they go up, you’re still going to be in a big pack,” driver Jeff Burton said. “The only way they’re ever going to change the pack size is to take the plate completely off or to make them where they drive so bad that we can’t all run in one big group, and that’s just not going to happen. I think the plate has minimal impact.”
But it will reduce speed.
“Just pure speed, the faster we go, the more likely we are to get airborne,” Newman said. “You take horsepower away, you are taking speed away and, therefore, I think it is going to be safer from that respect. … [The] ultimate answer still is whatever we can do to help keep the race cars on the ground aerodynamically.”
