Rusty Jarrett / Getty Images North America
Much to the chagrin of Juan Pablo Montoya, NASCAR announced Tuesday that it will not consider installing speedometers in race cars any time soon.
Montoya, as you remember, was penalized for speeding on pit road during the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard nearly two weeks ago. He came into the pits with a five-second lead, but was found to be 5.11 mph faster than he should have been.
NASCAR typically gives a 5 mph cushion above the pit road speed limit that teams are all made aware of during pre-race driver meetings, meaning in essence that Montoya was charged with being. 11 mph over the cushion NASCAR allows.
I would love to see speedometers in NASCAR race cars, but at the same time, I can understand the sanctioning body’s reasoning not to, including using the tachometer (which is what currently is used to estimate speed on pit road and the race track) for a variety of measuring elements, including speed.
NASCAR series director John Darby told the Associated Press that the sanctioning body believes tachometers to be truer as measuring devices, and that it doesn’t really want to add more equipment to a race car (although, how much can a speedo weigh, maybe five pounds, tops? ).
So, let’s play devil’s advocate for a second and try to please both NASCAR, which doesn’t want speedometers, and those teams, drivers and team owners that would like to see speedometers.
What I propose is to use either the Camping World Truck Series or Nationwide Series as a test case, a guinea pig if you will, and allow the installation of speedometers into the dashboard – but with a caveat.
Pit road speed would still be measured by tachometers, but at the same time, the measurements from the speedometer would be recorded by the “black box” data recorder installed in all cars (primarily to measure the G-force impact of crashes), and then use that data for comparison purposes with the data derived from the tachometers.
That would be a near-foolproof way to make everybody happy, while at the same time, lay the groundwork for a potential change in the future, if it’s needed, to switch to speedometers.
There’s an old saying that goes “nothing ventured, nothing gained. ” While I understand NASCAR’s reluctance to add speedometers to the mix, instead being content with the current status quo, I’d like to see Darby, vice president of competition Robin Pemberton, president Mike Helton and chairman Brian France all be open-minded enough to at least give speedometers a test run over a full season.
Who knows, they might be surprised at the results.
Catch you Thursday, right here at ARD.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/05 at 10:23 AMWell I was wrong Jerry You made since when you said It was Montoyas fault NOW you want speedometers? come on man. maybe Montoya needs a tac in roman numerials the other drivers dont have a problem with it.There hasnt been a big deal made of this by any driver thats been caught nor any team until now Is this the demise of clear thinking or have we run out of material on Mayfield.OR is because JM is——-
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