I was having some dinner at Outback last night and I saw the first commercials of the year for the Daytona 500. I pointed them out to my friends and they laughed at me and told me that had been on for atleast a week. Even so, it is getting close enough that you can almost smell it, can't you. Apparently there is still going to be a Pre-Season thunder event at Daytona this year, but no fan that is interested in the racing more than the soap opera will go (I hope). With no testing going on, it will merely be a an autograph session. Meanwhile the teams will still be scrambling in NC and Denver, CO (the 78 car) to make preparations for the race, even if they cannot test on the beach.

I went to two years of Daytona testing and it was one of the most boring experiences you can imagine. It was a 3 day test. Normally, the first day was all single car runs, then the next 2 days were single car runs in the AM and drafting in the PM. During the single car sessions they would only let 3 cars on the track at one time. So you would go out and make a run, come in, make a change, the car would go out again and you would wait on the pit road for half an hour until the 20 cars ahead of you in line made a run. During the drafting sessions you were on pins and needles that there would not be a wreck.

From an engineering/data perspective, it was sortof a mind fuck. You put all this instrumentation on the car, but most of the time you were looking at the pitot tube trace (wind speed sensor...basically) to see if the lap time change was due to the wind or something you actually changed on the car. The wind is so brutal there sometimes that the car would exit turn 2 and the RPM would stay the same the whole way down the backstretch due to the headwind.

Before the test you spend a bunch of time in the wind tunnel testing body panels, and then you would bring the best of the bunch and try to run them on the track to see if the gains were real, but at times it was really hard to tell.With the old cars and the current Busch cars and trucks, the premium was to get as much rear shock travel as possible to get the spoiler low and out of the air. The COTs still like the rear of the car to travel alot, but the sensitivity is much lower with the wing on the back. Spoilers make downforce (and drag) from slowing the air over the surface of the car, where as a wing speeds up the air on the lower surface of the wing and makes a suction force that acts down on the car. With a wing there is less drag penalty due to its small profile. All of the manufacturers run ride height windtunnel and simulation tests to find the shock travel that results in the lowest drag, and the crew chief would try to figure out how to achieve that with springs and bar and whatever.

The other thing that always seems to be a gain with the COT is running it as loose as you can. Running a loose setup will require the driver to turn the wheel less and the tires will not scrub as much in the corners and there will be less speed loss. Daytona is all about eliminating drag in everything from the engine and drive to the tires. Of course the cars that are locked into the feild will be more worried about having a stable car that stays consistent late in a run...But that will more difficult to achieve without testing.