When the NASCAR Cup Series returns to Daytona for the Coke Zero Sugar 400 on August 29, the cars will be making just 465 horsepower. The 45-hp reduction from the previous Superspeedway package means the Ford Mustang Dark Horse-branded Cup car will have less power than the stock Mustang GT, which is rated at 480 hp, and 35 hp less than the (non-supercharged) Dark Horse road car. But there is a reason for that.
The reduction in horsepower compensates for the reduction in downforce, which NASCAR is implementing in hopes of improving performance. For the next Daytona race, the rear spoiler will be reduced from 7 inches to 4 inches, NASCAR said Earlier this week. The reduced spoiler height – currently used at intermediate tracks such as Atlanta – is expected to allow single cars to go up to 3 mph faster and thus make overtaking easier. This follows the trend of de-emphasizing horsepower in the next generation era.
The change – which is not expected to affect the speed of the cars running in the pack – is the latest effort by NASCAR to improve superspeedway racing, where track position is often earned in the pits because cars are not as fast on their own as they are in a pack. Shaking things up and giving individual cars a speed advantage over the surrounding pack will hopefully prevent drivers from getting stuck in the middle of the field and having to bounce around until cautions straighten things out, or the final pit window arrives.
“I can tell you from the driver’s seat what happens for us is that we spend the entire race saving fuel-mileage for that last stop,” driver and team owner Denny Hamlin, part of a working group that came up with these rule changes, said on NASCAR. inside the race This week. “We basically know you have to be in the top four inside the final fuel window to have a chance to win, unless there’s a major crash. I mean, if you get 10th, you’re log-jammed; you’re going nowhere.”
Hamlin said the smaller spoiler should make it easier for drivers to break away from the pack while racing, as well as create more space between cars so they have room to back off after making a move, “so it won’t scare them so much that they make a bold move by saving 30 laps.” He cited more aggressive racing during the Cup Series’ most recent visit to Echopark Speedway, the small oval formerly known as Atlanta Motor Speedway, as a model. But he said “this is our first bite of the apple,” and the numbers so far indicate “it’s going to be about a 33% gain in the right direction.”
A low-horsepower, low-downforce superspeedway package will be introduced for the last race of the regular season. The postseason race at Talladega is scheduled for October 25, so there will be an opportunity to use the modified package with the championship in the game. The postseason remains a playoff-style tournament for the top 16 drivers from the regular season, but this year, NASCAR brought back the Chase branding previously used from 2004 to 2016 and changed the rules so that drivers no longer earn berths simply by winning races.
