Sketchpad: NASCAR Car of Tomorrow

A next-generation race car makes the sport safer and more cost effective. The challenge: keeping the thrill alive.

With the deaths of several drivers in 2000 and 2001--including the sport's biggest star, Dale Earnhardt, in his last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500--NASCAR accelerated its driver-safety innovation projects. "It was a great loss, someone who personified and embodied the sport," says Brett Bodine, a driver in that Daytona 500, and now NASCAR's director of cost research and chief tester of the Car of Tomorrow. His designers faced numerous challenges, including how to keep the cars drivable. "We didn't want to make our drivers learn how to drive something totally foreign," he says.

"The No. 1 goal was improved safety for the drivers," Bodine says. To get there, his team needed to alter the "greenhouse," the area where the driver sits. In the new car, the greenhouse was made 2.5 inches higher and 4 inches wider, and the driver's seat was moved 4 inches toward the center of the car. "We wanted to get the driver as far away from the left side of the car as possible in the event of a collision, but we didn't want to make it so that only 5' 5" guys could fit inside."

"The first car that we built was generic, didn't have any identity, and was very bland looking. A lot of people saw that and formed an early opinion on how the car was going to look. People called it the 'flying brick.'"

The larger greenhouse made the car far less stable. "We dedicated quite a bit of time trying to replicate the performance with better-gripping tires, but we just couldn't make it work," Bodine says. "Through testing in wind tunnels and the track, we came up with the idea of a front splitter--an adjustable sheet of metal under the bumper that increases the amount of air pushing down on the car to keep the front end on the ground."

Shock-absorbing foam is already used around the sides of racetracks to successfully lessen the force of collisions, so designers considered how to add it to the car itself--to protect a driver when he's "T-boned"--without adding much weight. "We'd been through some different types of energy-management materials and pieces on the car," Bodine says, "but Dow Automotive's impact foam on the outside of the greenhouse gave us the performance we were looking for and didn't weigh as much as other materials."

"We tossed around several ideas for keeping the rear of the car stable, from running a spoiler with a gap in the center, or spoilers only on the corners. I was probably one of the strongest proponents of the rear wing, and after we tested it on the track in Atlanta, it grew legs from there. Then we did a two-car test at Daytona with Kyle Petty, and we both found that it was easier for drivers to follow a car that had a wing than it was to follow a car that had a spoiler on it." The wing, along with a smaller fuel cell, will create new race strategies.

More stringent safety guidelines mean that crews can make fewer structural modifications than before. "In the past, teams could change the shape of the car to control its handling on the track. They can't do that anymore, so our engineers developed these adjustable end plates on the wing to return that control to the teams."

To make sure all new cars are up to spec, NASCAR created a template dubbed "the claw" that measures a number of specific dimensions on the cars. In an attempt to foil notoriously crafty crew chiefs--a number of whom were fined for violations at the start of this season--NASCAR officials will affix 9 RFID tags to critical pieces of the new cars and then scan them prior to race time to make sure they haven't been tampered with.

By mandating one design, NASCAR hopes that teams won't need as many cars (some now have 20, customized to different tracks), helping to reduce costs and keep smaller teams in the sport. Sixteen races this year will feature the Car of Tomorrow, and it's expected to roll in all of them in 2008.