2015 Rules Changes: Testing

One of the biggest changes NASCAR has instituted for the 2015 season is eliminating individual team testing at any tracks. In 2014, teams were limited to four tests and were not allowed to test at tracks that were included in the schedule.  NASCAR may run some limited tests, but they won’t be having the week-long marathon that was Daytona Speedweeks.

Given the intensive schedule in February, most teams are happy to be losing the Daytona tests. A lot of focus for one race – and a race in which the probability that the car comes home in one piece is vanishingly tiny.

Will It Save Teams Money?

Even though some teams will amp up other types of testing, eliminating sending a dozen people and a car out to a track will most likely result in a net savings of money.  NASCAR’s done a good job lately talking with the teams and most teams were in favor of the new rule.

Perhaps more important than the dollars saved is the time and energy of the team members. The season is already 36 points-paying races, plus the week before Daytona and All-Star week. That’s a lot of time to be away from home.  Even when they are  in Charlotte, the team members are at the track enough that they don’t really have time to be “at home”. They get to sleep in their own beds, which is nice, but it’s still pretty intense work.

A lot of NASCAR crew members simply burn out. It’s fun being part of a traveling circus – for a little while.  But eating out all the time, getting irregular sleep and dealing with the stress of the race weekend takes its toll. Once you start having kids, or a crisis at home, being on the road becomes a huge barrier to living the rest of your life. There are a lot of former crew chiefs who are very happy working out of the shop.

The few at-track tests that will be allowed will be run by NASCAR, and one assumes that they will schedule those immediately before or after race weekends, which again will minimize transportation costs, although it’s another day away from the shop for the participating crew and the driver.

Types of Testing

You can divide “testing” into two broad categories:  testing with the driver and testing without the driver.  NASCAR has historically come at it from both sides, hoping they’ll meet in the middle.  The testing rule has effectively taken away a lot of the tools on one side with the intent that tools from the other will compensate.

Remember that NASCAR’s goal isn’t so much keeping the status quo. It’s ensuring that whatever the rules are, they don’t give one company a huge advantage over the others.

So here’s my breakdown:

You’ll notice the driving simulators are in a different color – that’s because that’s the only type of ‘testing’ that really involves only the driver. Teams are trying to use this tool in a more scientific way (see my blog on the Ford tech center, for example), but it still doesn’t address the communication between the team and the driver – which I happen to think is one of the most critical aspects of driver-involved testing.

 

With Driver vs. Without Driver

Some properties of a car are driver independent.  Drag is never a good thing, so any testing that shows you how to lower the car’s drag is useful and requires absolutely no input from the driver.  Similarly, downforce is almost always good, so changes that increase downforce are also good and will be the same, regardless of who’s inside.

But a lot of the magic in setting up a car is finding out what your specific driver prefers for specific conditions at specific tracks. Someone who comes from a dirt-track background has very different preferences than someone who grew up racing open-wheel cars on asphalt.

All drivers want more grip, but different drivers can make do with different levels of grip in different places along the corner. The really successful long-running crew chief/driver combinations (Chad/Jimmie, notably) work because the driver and crew chief have learned how to communicate. The driver can express what the car is doing and the crew chief knows how to change it so that it favor his driver.

What They’re Losing

This will be one of the few seasons where teams have no say in where and when they test. This eliminates their opportunity to strategize. When there were no rules regarding numbers of tests, you did as many tests as you could afford. You might test at places you were historically good at to optimize your changes of winning, or you might test at places you normally didn’t run well at so that you could get better.

When numbers of tests were limited, teams had to strategize. For example, some teams decided to make sure they were really good at one of the three races in a each segment of the chase eliminations. If you won one of those races, you were automatically in. And just about everyone who was in the Chase wanted to test at Homestead. Now those choices are out of the teams’ hands entirely.

Goodyear will run tire tests – but they aren’t promising they’ll include everyone. Tire tests exist for Goodyear to get the information they need to produce a good tire. That goal is often at odds with the information the teams would like to get from testing. Goodyear prefers 3-5 cars in a test.  You need one from each manufacturer at a minimum to ensure fairness, but you don’t want too many voices providing feedback because it becomes impossible to get detail.

Goodyear also has drivers and teams they like testing with. Some drivers are better at providing the kind of feedback Goodyear would like. And, frankly, some teams are just easier to work with than others. If you mandate that every car running the full season get to participate, that disadvantages Goodyear – which means disadvantaging the rest of us.  That kind of scheme means more Chevrolets test than the other brands, simply because there are more Chevrolet cars.  But if you limit the test to one or two teams per manufacturer, then some Chevy teams will be disadvantaged because there won’t be enough slots for everyone.

NASCAR-run tests are the best shot most teams will have to get real testing with the driver in the car.  The tests will be open, so everyone has a shot at participating. The disadvantage is that NASCAR decides the tracks. Given history, NASCAR is likely to hold tests at tracks that have been repaved, or for which there are new tires. Helping teams perform in the Chase is not part of their strategy.

Although both tire tests and NASCAR-run tests will allow the driver and crew chief additional practice at communicating, drivers who are changing companies and/or crew chiefs are the ones who will suffer most from this testing ban. The crew chief-driver relationship is critical. I maintain that one of the reasons Tony Stewart struggled the first part of this year (I’m talking before the accident in New York) is that his time out of the car with the broken leg the year before interrupted his developing the routine week in-week out relationship you need with your crew chief.

If I were Rick Hendrick, for example, I might put Keith Rodden (Kasey Kahne’s new crew chief) and Kasey in an XFINITY Car (that still sounds weird) just to give them some quality one-on-one time during an actual race. Because the cars are different, not a lot of specifics will transfer; however, the practice in driver giving feedback and crew chief adjusting is absolutely critical. Those lower-level series may be the only opportunity some drivers get to forge a bond with a new crew chief.

Without the Driver

I’m going to cover each of these techniques in a little more detail over the break, but for now, suffice it to say that the type of information you get from a technique like a seven-post rig or a wind tunnel is much more general. Yes, the particular car being tested will have the setup (springs, shocks, etc.) that the driver favors, but you’re missing the crucial component of the driver telling you how it feels.  All the charts and graphs in the world do not compensate for having a driver’s butt in the seat.

Below is what the underside of a seven-post rig looks like.  The four large pillars make the tires go up and down. You program the movements of those pillars based on sensor data you collected from on-track testing. The quality of the results go up the better input data you have. If you have data from a couple years ago, or data from the car with a different driver, you’ve lost some fidelity, some precision.

And the unfortunate fact is that we just don’t know enough about reality to be able to replicate it in our theories. A wind tunnel has a huge advantage over a computation fluid dynamics simulation because one of the hardest things to simulate in a computer is turbulence (shown below, in red just because turbulence looks way cooler in red.)

Will The New Rule Level the Playing Field?

One of the claims I’ve heard people make is that banning on-track testing will help the smaller teams. Let’s start by saying that there are very few teams that are single-car operations anymore. Not because a given company has more than one car, but because manufacturers are doing a better job sharing information between their teams. So the question of one-car vs. multi-car really isn’t a relevant as it used to me.

The question of smaller vs. larger teams, however, is very relevant. Anyone can book time at a wind tunnel, but with time running $1200-$1700 an hour, smaller teams will spend much less time in the wind tunnel than teams with higher budgets. Larger teams have their own seven-post rigs, so they can run 24/7 if they are so inclined.

But even if NASCAR limited wind tunnel time and even the amount of computational fluid dynamics calculations you can make, it still wouldn’t be even. Smaller teams pay less. They generally have less-experienced crew and smaller R&D divisions. If you gave everyone exactly the same amount of data for their cars, the smaller teams would not gain as much as the more experienced teams.

RCR has (at last count) five Ph.D.-level people on staff.  The whole point of getting a Ph.D. is that you are being trained not to implement things that are already known, but to figure out things no one else knows. That is the level at which teams are analyzing this data. If I want to work at SpaceX or Orbital Sciences developing the next alternative to the Space Shuttle, there is a very well-defined path I take.  I train for eight to twelve years, learning as much as I can about what we already know. Then I strike out and try to learn things we don’t know.

There isn’t a Ph.D. level program in race car engineering in this country. The folks who are working in the industry have created their own set of knowledge and boy, is it proprietary. Their experience isn’t in books. So even if a team suddenly got a windfall and can hire smart people, they have to find a way to pull them away from the existing teams. I’ve got a Ph.D., but I couldn’t walk into a race team and help them. It would take me months, maybe years, to understand what they’re doing and what they know before I’d be able to make a contribution.

I think the upshot is that the new rule will keep things pretty much the way they are already, with the exception that teams with new driver/crew chief combinations are going to be at a disadvantage because of the lack of on-track testing.