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Stagger-ed

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Posted: Thursday July 15, 1999 03:01 PM

NASCAR Know-How CLICK THE IMAGE TO LAUNCH CLIP How staggering works Start (640 KB .mov) Archives • Click here for past editions of Rusty Wallace's NASCAR Know-How

Stagger used to be a big deal with the Winston Cup teams. But it no longer is, and here's why.

When the NASCAR Winston Cup Series used bias ply tires in the '70s and '80s, teams would use stagger to help their cars turn better. Basically you could make the right side tires bigger than the left side tires and the car would have a tendency to turn left, which would help especially at tracks like Martinsville.

Here's the best example of stagger. Take a drink cup. It's bigger on one end than it is on another end. Pretend one side's the right side of the car and the other side is the left. When we roll this cup, it just wants to turn to the left ... and that's the same result with stagger.

Starting in 1993, Goodyear introduced the radial tire to NASCAR. Radials don't expand like bias ply tires, so stagger is no longer an issue because you can't make one tire bigger than the other.

Now we use things like air pressure as an adjusting tool for tires.

 

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