Charlotte Motor Speedway lowered the Roval turtles immediately following the Xfinity race to lower. The change came after several cup drivers complained about the effects of cars landing after launching off the barriers in the frontstretch chicane.
Track Limits
NASCAR also reminded teams this morning that they would strictly enforce track-limit rules. The operative part of the rule is:
You will be judged as missing or shortcutting any turn… when all four tires are on the non-track side of the red-and-white rumble strips that define the apex of the turns.
NASCAR enforces this rule using a camera that gives the race control tower a line-of-sight view of the chicane. Some poor soul must spend his or her race staring at this picture.
Last-Minute Changes
The crew returned this morning to re-examine their changes in the light of day. The shot below shows you what the turtles look like. They are asymmetric pyramidal pieces of metal that are bolted to the track. The modularity allows tracks to make quick changes.
The old barriers were a maximum of 4 inches high. The replacement barriers are only 2-1/4″ high, so that should make the bumps a little more tolerable.
This morning, Michael McDowell and his team were out measuring the new configuration so that Michael would know how far he can go into the rumble strips. That’s McDowell kneeling.
Here they are with the tape measure.
A Reversal of Turtles
A subtle detail many have missed is that the track also rotated the outer turtles on the exit of the frontstretch chicane. It’s a little hard to see in the photo below, but if you focus on the direction the peaks are going, you can see that the turtles are rotated by 90 degrees.
This caused the track a little bit of trouble because the bolt holes are not rotationally symmetric. They had to drill new holes in the asphalt to accommodate the rotation.
The track hopes that changing the direction of the turtles on exit will decrease how much the cars launch and therefore how hard they land.
Please Don’t Say ‘Concussions’
“It feels like you get a concussion every lap, basically, if you hit them,” Martin Truex Jr. said during his media availability Saturday. “It’s not much fun.”
The symptoms of a concussion mimic the symptoms of many (many, many) other things. Without actual data (and barring MTJ having earned an M.D. in his spare time), I wish the media wouldn’t use the term. It confers a significance that just isn’t there.
We’ll have to see how lowering the Roval Turtles impacts the drivers and the race itself. But if you’re looking to start a business, one that makes turtles with symmetric bolt holes would definitely find a buyer in NASCAR racetracks.
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