Well, it's here. Memorial Day weekend. First of all, let me express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to those men and women who have served, and are now serving, in the uniform of the various militaries of the United States. And please, a doff of the cap and a moment of silence for those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.
I guess the next thing to say is, Drivers, Start Your Engines. Got a couple races already in the DVR to watch, and as I write this the Grand Prix of Monaco is just finishing. I've shut the TV off so I can watch the whole thing later on. Then there's the Indianapolis 500, on its 101st anniversary, along with what we used to call the World 600 from Charlotte. That's after the Rolex Grand Am series race, which I believe was yesterday at Lime Rock. Or is it today? Not sure. Been busy.
Oddly enough, I won't be watching many of them. The Grand Am race should be on my DVR, along with Monaco, but I have no plans to watch either Indy or NASCAR today or any time soon. That's sad, really, but for me not as sad as watching the races.
Have you ever heard the term, "Spec series?" Spec is short for . . . hmm, what is it short for? Specific? Specialized? Certainly not Special, or Spectacular. Spec refers to the fact that everybody's race car has to fit specific guidelines and parameters.
Well, now, wait a minute, isn't that just rules? Every race series has rules, right? Makes it fair, and makes it safe. Ah, but there's a difference between simply having rules, and making everybody drive the same, identical car with the same, identical engine. That's what a spec series is. Cookie cutter cars.
You've probably gathered by now that I'm not too into that sort of thing. I understand the whole motivation behind it, of course. Makes the racing close. It does make me wonder, though. If the final lap being a nail-biter down-to-the-wire heart-in-your-throat event, then what's the other 100 or 250 or 500 laps for? Why not just have the one lap?
I think major league racing the world over has forgotten what the original point was. The original point was to find out which car was the best. Not which driver, but which car. Back in the day, the reason for racing was not so much to impress ticket buyers and television viewers, but to find out something. The Indianapolis race was 500 miles long because it wasn't known if any of those cars could even go that far. And because they did, then it became an issue who could do it the fastest, and this led to improvements for everybody's car.
After all, what does the phrase, "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" mean anyway? Why does winning on Sunday count? Because it's solid, documentable proof that your car is better! That's the biggest difference, looking at it in terms of devices, between cars and airplanes. Airplanes' biggest proving ground has always been war. Good fighter planes led directly to better private planes. Good bombers were the precursors to cargo and passenger planes.
But for automobiles, racing is the crucible in which new ideas are put to the test. Speed, safety, reliability, all is revealed by setting a long-distance goal and mashing your foot to the floor. Improvements in every aspect of automobile manufacture, from tires to chassis structure to windshield wipers, can be traced to success on the race track. It's where countless new technologies have been conceived, tested, and either proven or rejected. Go look at the car in your driveway. Even if it's a humble minivan or econobox, there's hardly anything on it that didn't begin its life as a new idea for a race car.
That's all gone now, for the most part. Oh, yes, there are little things that do get tried on racers that will eventually find their way onto our road cars, but for the most part racing has become, more and more, mere entertainment. It is all managed in a way that makes the last lap the most exciting one, and everything else is just dramatic embellishment. It sorts out the larger group into a much smaller group of a few players who will be eligible for that last-second push for the victory. The only thing that makes it a sport is the fact that, so far as we know anyway, none of the result is decided in advance.
It used to be a lot more wide open, of course. Even in the world of stock cars, there were huge differences between the cars in any given race. Did you know that a NASCAR stock car race was once won by a Jaguar? You could race literally any stock automobile that would pass the safety inspection. I'm not going to go into the history of NASCAR or any other race series, because anyone reading this is probably already aware of anything I could say about it.
I believe the eventual direction will be for all the cars in a race series to be provided by one garage, in order that they will then all be prepared as identically as physically possible. That would be the ultimate in "fairness." It will also emphasize the drivers above all else. It will be a clash of personalities, disguised as a car race. They might as well be wrestling, or playing ping pong, but they'll be in high-powered mega-safe practically identical automobiles.
And all this has happened in my lifetime, or at least most of it. Back in the early 1950's Mercedes-Benz put a body with fenders on their Formula One cars for high-speed circuits like Silverstone and Monza. The FIA, which then as now was the sanctioning body for F1, mandated that all their race cars should be open-wheeled. If they had been allowed to continue as logic dictated to their engineers, it would have led to the whole field being closed-wheel, probably at every track, and this surely would have spilled over to Indycars and so on. And Dan Wheldon would still be alive. And so it goes.
Or look at what NASCAR did in the '60's with the Chrysler Hemis. Dodge and Plymouth came out with the hemi in late 1963, making it available on a limited basis on their road cars so that it was legally a stock car. These cars dominated the 1964 season. So NASCAR banned the hemispherical head starting in 1965, in spite of the fact that Ford had gone ahead and prepared a hemispherical-head engine of its own. In response, Chrysler pulled all their factory teams for the '65 season. Richard Petty went drag racing, Ned Jarrett won the championship by a country mile, and attendance was down by, in some cases, half or more. So NASCAR gave in and allowed the Hemi, but it was certainly not the last time they banned a new idea because it won too much.
The same thing happened at Indianapolis. Everything from diesel engines to supercharging to turbines got slapped with restrictions until they were "managed" into uncompetitiveness. The Indycar series now runs one chassis, made by Dallara in Italy, and there are three engine manufacturers whose engines all have the same number of cylinders, the same displacement, and are allowed the same amount of turbocharger boost. They might as well be making the same engine, because they essentially are. Same with the chassis and engine rules in NASCAR.
Even Formula One, which has usually maintained the high ground in race car technology, has gone to mandate things to the Nth degree. But at least you can still park a Ferrari, a McLaren and a Red Bull side by side with no markings and tell them apart. If you parked the race cars driven by Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, and Greg Biffle side by side with no markings, you'd have to pop the hoods and look for the brand on the valve covers to pick the right ones.
Personally, my favorite race series right now are the Grand Am and Continental Tire series. Which are, surprisingly, both owned and sanctioned by NASCAR. These are all road course races, which I like anyway. Each series has several different chassis and engine manufacturers. Last year's Daytona Prototype champion in Grand Am drove a Riley chassis powered by BMW, and the Riley looked a fair bit different from the Dallara and the Coyote chassis that they beat. For this year, the rules were tweaked so that they can look, and be, even more different.
I tend to lean the strongest toward the Continental Tire series, which is actual stock cars. The second-tier Grand Am series is the Grand Touring class, with race chassis but bodies that match the templates of cars like Camaro, Mustang, and Porsche among others. But in CT, they are actually the cars they look like, as they come from the manufacturer, with roll cages and safety equipment installed. The races are shown on Speed channel, usually delayed a week or two. The fields are huge, sometimes having 60 to 70 cars in two classes. Their Grand Touring class is, again, Mustangs, Camaros, Porsches, BMW 3-series and so forth. The Street Tuner class is for anything smaller, from Minis to Kias to Mazda Miatas and the like.
So far, it doesn't seem as closely managed as the bigger series. Yes, if someone begins to dominate, the rules are adjusted somewhat to give everyone a better chance. But basically there's not enough money or prestige on the line for BMW or Chevy to make huge changes to a whole line of cars. And as a bonus, they get to find out just how good the cars in their dealers' showrooms hold up over some very tough miles.
So basically, as far as I'm concerned, there is one word that describes the kind of racing that will be held today in Indianapolis and Charlotte; fake. And I'm sorry, I have no use for fake racing. They might as well have Milli Vanilli lip-synch the national anthem. I am convinced that any good shade-tree mechanic with plenty of local racing experience and ten thousand dollars to play with could build a car that would last 500 or 600 miles and beat whoever wins either of those races today. They just wouldn't be able to do it within those rules.
Then again, I always liked home-made chocolate chip cookies better than Chips Ahoys.
No comments:
Post a Comment