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Plates the issue Whatever the result -- Loudon will be interesting
Things are getting really different really fast this week. NASCAR has told everyone that we are going to be using restrictor plates this weekend at New Hampshire. That’s far from the norm. The only other places we’ve ever used restrictor plates were Talladega and Daytona, but New Hampshire is an oval a little more over a mile long. The speeds aren’t nearly what they are at the Daytona and Talladega tracks. But this is in response to the problems we’ve had at New Hampshire this year. We’ll see what they do. The plate fits between the carburetor and the intake manifold on the engine. It has four holes in it -- at New Hampshire these will be one inch in diameter. What that does is regulate the amount of air that can get into the manifold at any one time. The less air you have, the less gasoline you can use. The less air and gasoline, the smaller the "explosion" in the firing chamber of the engine. The smaller that explosion, the fewer horsepower. The less horsepower, the slower you run. The thinking is it should take maybe 300 horsepower off these 750-horsepower engines. That’s going to slow the cars down considerably, especially on the straightaways. The slower you are on the straightaways, the slower your car will be going into the third and first turns. That means if you do have a problem there, you will have more time to react and you will hit the wall not quite as hard. Are (restrictor) plates the answer? In my opinion, no, not for the long term. But NASCAR was under a lot of pressure to do something quickly, something that would at least answer New Hampshire. What else was there to do? Yeah, soft walls -- if you have the time to test them, build them and get them up. They’ve already addressed the throttle issue from two different ways, the cutoff switch on the steering wheel and the brake-pressure systems that Jack Roush has been working on. This addresses the speed issue -- how fast you go into these corners. It’s not the perfect solution but, for right now, it may very well be the best solution anybody could come up with. You can sit there and disagree with NASCAR on things but, when it all comes down to it, there is no way to say they do not care about safety. From the first day I walked through the gates of a Winston Cup garage, all I saw was how much they care about safety, not just for the drivers, but for the crews, the over-the-wall guys, the fans, whoever. It’s their number one issue, and it should be. Would I have gone with plates? I don’t know. Probably not but how do I know for sure what I would have done? In the back of mind, I know I wouldn’t have gone with plates because I’m a racer and racers, for the most part, just don’t like the plates. But that kind of thinking is the reason you have a NASCAR sitting there making hard decisions. I didn’t have to decide. It’s a lot easier to make the decision when you aren’t the one having to make the decision. The easy thing to do is sit there and criticize. The hard thing to do, and that’s where NASCAR has been, is to sort through all of this stuff and make a hard decision. You have to support them for doing that. Yeah, I know there are guys who will call the media up in their trucks and tell them what a bad deal it is. And there are others who will talk about they should have done this or should have done that. But those guys up there in the red (NASCAR) trailer had to face the fire and they had to decide what to do. It’s a whole different deal when the decision comes down to you. The safety deal has pretty much been a “what are you going to do?” deal. There are probably better long-term solutions, and I’m sure NASCAR is looking at those types of things. But we’re racing New Hampshire this week, so there isn’t a lot of time. They acted. Everybody was on them to do something and they did something. You can’t sit there saying, “Do something, do something,” and then, after they do something, step back and say, “Hey, we didn’t mean that!” It looks to me like a whole lot of people are working together to make this thing better. A couple of teams have been working on the “dumb switch” (brake-pressure systems). Some people went up to New Hampshire to take a look at soft walls. There are guys trying all sorts of different things, working with NASCAR. We put together a new seat after I wrecked at Indianapolis. It pads the area around my head more than I’ve ever seen a seat padded. The guys on the team call it “the recliner,” and I guess it does have that look with all of the padding there. But I kept thinking things had to be better in a wreck if my head hit something soft rather than something hard. It got tested a little bit at Darlington (when Mayfield was wrecked while leading the race) but I think it will get a real test if we hit something really hard. Hopefully, I’ll never know. It’s not anything scientific necessarily, just a lot of additional padding around the head area. But a lot of people have been over to look at it, and I think it’s another example of everybody working together to make the sport better. I don’t think anybody really likes running with plates. It just changes everything. It’s fair -- everybody has one. But it’s just not as much fun. Still, there aren’t a whole lot more solutions right now either. So we go with it. There is a big unknown there - what will the plates do? Nobody knows for sure. We know it’s going to cut back on horsepower, and it should cut back considerably. Where will be feel it the most? How fast will we or can we go through the corners? How will it affect handling? We know it’s going to cut back a lot of horsepower, but there is a question as to how much speed? Getting through the unknowns will be the key to the weekend. The teams that do that the best will be the ones running up front. We’re going to do everything we can do to get this Mobil 1 Taurus to the front of the pack. I have a feeling track position is going to be more crucial at New Hampshire than ever before, so we have to get this thing up front and keep it there. That will be our goal all weekend long. Penske-Kranefuess driver Jeremy Mayfield won earlier this year at Pocono and California. His column appears weekly on CNNSI.com.
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