Jul 28, 2008

There's No Business Like Show Business

“Racing improves the breed.”

How often have you heard that old saw? How often has that premise been used to justify major auto manufacturer dollars spent on racing? “Sure, we should spend the money,” the racers say. “The technology’ll end up in ordinary passengers’ cars pretty soon, so it’s worth it.”

Well, that was then and this is now. In a move that totally contradicts the above-stated premise that racing improves the breed, NASCAR has decided that the Toyota engines used in the Nationwide Series -- the series that is essentially Sprint Cup’s Triple A minor league -- are just too powerful. In a bid to even out the competition, NASCAR has just required all the Toyota teams to back off their engines’ horsepower, starting this past weekend in Indianapolis. 

Are we the only racing fans out there to think that this is crazy? 

Granted, Toyota-powered cars have won the majority of Nationwide races this season. But is that a bad thing? In the old days of racing, that simply meant that Toyota was doing a better job of getting horsepower from its engines than its competitors, which is what auto racing of days gone by dictated you should be doing. But in these upside-down days, Toyota is essentially being penalized for being too good.

One thing you can give NASCAR officials credit for is honesty. They flat-out told Toyota teams to back the engine horsepower off so that the other teams could compete. In the old days, they and other sanctioning organizations might have tried to accomplish the same thing by more clandestine means, like requiring the cars to be heavier or changing their template to reduce aerodynamic efficiency. 

NASCAR claims that the requirement to use a smaller “spacer” in the Toyota engines, therefore dropping their output by about 15 horsepower, was justified since Toyota teams are using engines that have been engineered more recently than the Dodge, Chevrolet and Ford power plants. We remember fondly the old days when the factories were given engine “formulas,” usually revolving around displacement, and then they were largely free to have their engine builders develop race motors that produced as much horsepower as they could wring out of them. That brought on wild bouts of innovation. Like my youth, those days are apparently long gone.

This is just another indication that, to NASCAR, the show is the thing. Technical development is just a cost factor rather than a benefit, and as the sanctioning body sees it, it might actually be antithetical to its overriding quest -- putting on a good three-hour TV show each week.