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A NASCAR BLOG BY Rea White

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Teams eager to learn about new car

Mar 2

Finally, teams will get some answers about NASCAR’s new car today.

After much preseason testing and many questions that seemed to go unanswered, the groups headed to Las Vegas Motor Speedway still somewhat uncertain about what the race would hold. The model is new to this 1.5-mile speedway and has yet to be tested in a full-length intermediate track race.

That should have happened at Auto Club Speedway, but Mother Nature intervened and disrupted the event, allowing teams a glimpse of what this type of racing promises, but no full-length test of what they think it takes to make the car work.

So now teams combine information from that race, which concluded just six days ago, with data from test sessions at both Las Vegas and California and hope they have it figured out.

In a few hours, they’ll know if those calculations were correct.

Then they’ll gather even more data, though this time on a 1-mile track, Monday and Tuesday at Phoenix before preparing to race at Atlanta, where they’ve also tested with the new car. The notebooks are growing.

Perhaps this time next week, there will be less uncertainty about what the race as a whole will be like. Perhaps this time next week, crew chiefs will be more confident that the changes they have made to the car will really impact it the way that they want.