I don't often pontificate about the state of what would be considered Major-League racing; at least, not here. But recently I was talking with a couple other race fans and wound up going off at length at what I DON'T like about modern racing.
I must confess, I no longer watch NASCAR or Indy car racing. I do like Formula 1, and I've taken a shine to the Rolex Grand-Am series, especially it's Continental Tire classes. I grew up in the 1960's and 1970's, which I feel was a particularly fertile time for racing. Maybe even the peak of it all, with a steady decline since then.
My big complaint is that I think the Powers That Be in big-time racing have forgotten where it all came from. Racing is now being packaged as a battle of personalities; Earnhardt, Jr. against Johnson against Kowslowski against Busch and so on. In the name of Fairness and Safety, the cars in both NASCAR and Indy Car are all essentially the same. Even the engines, which are built to ever-tighter regulations.
Imagine if you will the first time that two cars met up on the same road. It's been long thought that this was probably the setting of the first car race, and it's probably not too far from the truth. Was it a battle of personalities? Most likely not. That could have been solved by a fist fight, or by having a pretty girl pick the one they liked the best. No, it was a battle to decide who had the best car.
It's why the 500-mile and 24-hour race soon became the standards to which any great race had to aspire. In the early days of racing, these were ridiculously long, arduous distances that would prove beyond any doubt who built the better car. Now, the finish of these races are manipulated artificially so that the winner is decided by a car length or less. And if, Heaven forbid, the agreed upon distance should transpire during a caution period, it is artificially extended so they can finish with a two-lap Green-White-Checker finish.
The car at the top of the page is the one that came within two laps of winning the 1967 Indianapolis 500. It was commissioned and owned by Andy Granatelli, who at that time ran the STP oil additive company. It had four-wheel-drive and was powered by a turbine engine taken from a combat helicopter. Most of the rest of the field was propelled by either Offenhauser or Ford piston engines. Andy thought he had a better idea, and almost proved it with a dominant performance by driver Parnelli Jones. An engine bearing ended his race six miles from the end.
This is the Chaparral 2J, designed and built by Jim Hall. He's the man, with the earlier Chaparral 2-series, that put spoilers and then wings on race cars. He also whipped everybody else's, ahem, derriere with them. So everybody else had to put spoilers and then wings on their race cars to keep up. His innovative imagination led him to this, which found an active way to do what the wings and spoilers did in a passive way. He used vacuum power to suck the car to the race track, which meant it had just as much adhesion to the track in slow corners as in fast straightaways. Alfa Romeo used the same idea on an open-wheeled Formula One car.
And speaking of wings, the first race car in history to log a lap of more than 200 miles per hour was NOT a sports car, NOT an Indy car, NOT a Formula one car . . . it was a stock car! This stock car, as a matter of fact. Bobby Isaac's 1970 Dodge Daytona, at Talladega Motor Speedway. Damn, ain't it pretty! Yes, there was a time when the fastest race cars in the entire world were NASCAR stockers.
This NASCAR stocker, the Can-Am "sucker car" and the "Whoosh-mobile" Indy car all share one thing; they were all outlawed. The real reason for this was that they were just too damned fast. And these cars were hardly the only ones. Chrysler's Hemi, Mazda's Wankel rotary engine, Williams Renault's active suspension, Mercedes' Streamliner Formula One car, the Tyrrell Ford six-wheeler, and many other innovative ideas came and went, not because they failed, but because they succeeded too well.
And even in failure, they made a serious impact on the cars we drive today. Anybody seen any of those bumper stickers that say; "Yes, it's a Hemi"? Ever see an econobox with a wing and an air dam? Noticed how aerodynamic foolish little things like side mirrors have gotten? And while there are no turbine cars on the road, there are plenty of turbine-powered trains, helicopters, and Army tanks out there.
For aircraft, war is the great stage for innovation. You can watch the progression of history in planes from the Sopwith Camel to the F-18 growing through warfare. The automobile, by contrast, has grown and changed on the race track. New ideas come about and get tested and adapted first on race cars. Most of the differences between the Model T Ford and a 2014 Ford Fusion were first tested at Indianapolis or Le Mans or Daytona or . . . From the engine under the hood to the tires holding it off the ground to the upholstery on the seat.
Time for another gratuitous race car picture. Pop quiz; if you go into the headquarters of Cummins Diesel, you will see a vehicle that was powered by one of their engines. If you guessed a John Deere tractor or a Peterbilt truck, you were wrong. What you'll see is this:
This car won the pole and led more than fifty laps of the 1952 Indianapolis 500 before succumbing to some minor mechanical glitch. I guess I don't have to tell you what's under the hood.
Now, I would agree that you can't just take the lid off. With today's technology it would be relatively easy to build a car that would go so fast it would be no fun to watch. So fast there would be no way to make it safe enough for the driver to survive a crash. There are good, practical reasons for wanting race cars to be limited in how fast they can go.
The problem is in how this has been done. It's been done by making it so you can't innovate. Formula One and drag racing are the last major racing series where you're not forced to race the same car with the same engine as everybody else. And even they have tightened their rules to ridiculous lengths, on their way to yet more "spec series." Plus, certain facts of life have, unfortunately, remained in place. For instance, the cars that win regularly are still the ones with the most money. Only now, instead of looking for an advantage that helps you complete the distance or win by a long way, it helps you get a 1- or 2% gap over the rest of the field.
A race series like Sprint Cup or the Izod Indycar series has a gap of about two seconds a lap between pole position and dead last. Two seconds! And the only way that last car is going to get to the front is with an infusion of millions of dollars. And the really funny part is that any decent shade-tree mechanic with twenty grand and access to a decent junk yard can build a car that can beat them all. It won't fit within the rules, but it will be faster. There's something ridiculous about that.
The man in the picture is Art Arfons, a shade tree mechanic and independent drag racer from Akron, Ohio. He built this car, known as the Green Monster, in the early 1960's for under a hundred thousand dollars. The engine is an Army surplus GE jet from an F-4 Phantom fighter plane. He set the Land Speed record in this car three times, the fastest being 576 mph. Craig Breedlove, in a similar machine, beat it and raised it to just over 600. Art got back in, and his airspeed indicator told him he was going about 650 when he blew a tire. He walked away from the wreck.
I'm not ashamed to say I miss those days. And I miss seeing some nut-job show up at Indy or Le Mans or Daytona with a Wankel engine, or a turbine, or a new kind of wing, or extra tires. There are ways to make race cars safer and slower besides stuffing them into ever-smaller boxes. Plus, I'm not convinced that the cars we drive on the street are perfect. They should get better gas mileage. They should be able to run on a variety of fuels, and there should be a greater variety of fuels for them to run on. They should be safer. And cheaper. And last longer, and be more comfortable, and carry more. And they should continue to improve in all these areas forever.
But racing is no longer allowed to be a crucible where these things can be tested. Racing has devolved into 200-mph wrestling. It's one of the reasons I still love local racing at local tracks, because the people that race there still get to innovate, even if it's on a small scale.
Rules makers for race series should look at their current fleet of race cars with this thought in mind; what about this car could be improved? The tires? The fuel? The body, frame, engine, safety equipment? For those things, the limits should allow for their improvement instead of their homogenization. Engines too powerful? Limit their size. More variety of engines? Limit the amount of fuel they can use. Tires stick too well? Make them narrower. But don't just make everybody run the same car.
And if somebody comes up with something so good nobody can beat it, just let it run. Find small ways of limiting it, and wait for nature to take its course. Before very long, the people coming in second-through-last will get sick of it and figure out a way to beat them. In the sixties, Chrysler's Hemi engine dominated until NASCAR banned it for the 1965 season. You want to know who protested the loudest? Ford, because they'd just come up with their own version of the Hemi. There is no innovation that can't be improved upon.
