Ray Evernham says he has enough soon-to-be obsolete cars (about 50) to start a media-only circuit. Richard Childress hopes his outdated fleet can fulfill a fan’s dream.
“If you want a car to sit in your living room, now’s the time, ” Childress said. “It’s certainly a buyer’s market. “
NASCAR’s switch to the Car of Tomorrow full time in 2008 has triggered the stock car fire sale of the century as teams scramble to dump inventories of cars that cost about a quarter-million dollars to build.
Roush Fenway Racing President Geoff Smith estimates that leaves about 600 cars ticketed for extinction. The primary options are selling them to ARCA Re/Max or Busch East teams. Nate Ryan, USAToday.com
So the big complaint about the car of tomorrow is they’re too much alike and that means all of the cars go the same speed. And if the cars are going the same speed, then nobody can pass anybody. So the racing is bad, and that’s the car of tomorrow’s fault.
The old car has been around for a couple of racing generations. Teams have vast storehouses of knowledge about what makes it work. They’re just starting to figure out this new car, and some will do that faster and eventually better than others.
If you hear people saying that NASCAR needs to “fix: the new car, or that Goodyear needs to build a different tire so it will race better, what you’re actually hearing is, “We’re getting beat and we can’t figure out why, but it can’t possibly be our fault.”
But so what if the car winds up being so much alike that it doesn’t really matter how many engineers you have working on it? So what if NASCAR keeps the rules so tight that the difference between winning and losing is not what a mechanic does to the car, but what a driver does with it? David Poole, ThatsRacin.com
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