Motor Sports

Picking Up Speed

The fortunes of the Indy Racing League have brightened considerably since the end of last season. In January the IRL signed a five-year sponsorship deal worth more than $5 million with Pep Boys, the auto-parts chain. Then, in last month's season opener at Disney World Speedway, for the first time there were more entrants than starting spots for a race other than the Indy 500. Though it wouldn't be an IRL race without a slew of crashes—there were nine at the Mickyard, as the Disney track is known—no one was hurt in that race, thanks largely to tougher car safety standards implemented this year. What's more, the league has its first star driver in Tony Stewart, 26, the 1997 IRL champion who continued his winning ways in Orlando.

The only cloud in this otherwise sunny picture is that Stewart is angling for a full-time ride on the NASCAR circuit next season. "At the end of the year we're going to run him in three or four Cup races, and next year-he'll be full time with us in Winston Cup," says car owner Joe Gibbs, for whom Stewart is running Busch series races this year when they don't conflict with IRL events.

"He's going to get offered a lot of money to drive in Winston Cup," says IRL executive director Leo Mehl. "We would miss him, but I think we have other Tony Stewarts here in our series." If that's true, it would be even more good news for the IRL.

New Taurus Rising
Built for the Short Tracks

Ford's Taurus may well wind up dominating the 1998 Winston Cup season. The Taurus's extra aerodynamic drag, a liability at the giant 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway, creates desirable downforce through the tight corners of shorter tracks such as the one-mile oval at Rockingham, site of Sunday's race. "The Taurus might be at a slight disadvantage to us at Daytona and [2.66-mile] Talladega," says Richard Childress, who fields Chevrolet Monte Carlos for Dale Earnhardt and Mike Skinner, "but it'll be a kick-ass race car every-where else we go."

The rear roofline of the Taurus curves downward more sharply than mat of the General Motors entries, the Monte Carlo and the Pontiac Grand Prix, sending a greater volume of air onto the spoiler and thus creating the downforce that increases traction and maneuverability.

Winston Cup cars have for decades been anything but stock, but they maintained the silhouettes of the street models whose names they bore. But to make the Taurus race-ready, Ford engineers got permission from NASCAR to raise the car's nose seven inches and the trunk lid five inches. The result is a race car that bears scant resemblance to the Taurus, that staple of rental fleets. That doesn't sit well with GM teams. So watch for NASCAR—in an effort to create a level racing field—to jigger its rules on spoiler and front air-dam heights as the season goes on. And bet on the whining about unfair rules to continue from both sides of the Ford-GM divide.

Team Uniformity
Penske Shows His True Colors

Roger Penske and his Winston Cup racing partner, Michael Kranefuss, have introduced a revolutionary concept to NASCAR: a team that actually looks like a team. The pair have painted their Ford Tauruses, driven by Rusty Wallace and Jeremy Mayfield, in nearly identical blue-and-white schemes and eliminated about two thirds of the decals that adorn most Winston Cup quarter panels. Both drivers and their crews wear uniforms that are, well, uniform. The result is higher visibility for each car's sponsor, in this case, Miller Lite and Mobil Oil.