NASCAR addressed Next Gen car safety and headless dummies at testing today in Charlotte
Speaking with media during a Next Gen car test session at the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course, NASCAR’s senior vice president of racing innovation John Probst addressed concerning rumors that swirled on the internet and in the garage earlier this year regarding crash test results.
On Monday, Probst said that NASCAR feels “very comfortable” with the car safety as it stands.
“I heard (the rumors) as well of dummies’ heads flying off,” Probst said. “At no point did a dummy’s head fly off. We never even had a dummy act up ... None of that was based around anything concrete in what the (testing) activities were on our end at the time.”
In late June, NASCAR ran a crash test with the Next Gen car at Talladega Superspeedway, pivoting from its preferred crash testing site at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), which the industry has long collaborated with to develop safety innovations in its racecars and at its tracks. NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition Scott Miller told NASCAR Sirius XM Radio in July that the change in testing site was a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and scheduling backlog at the UNL facility, suggesting that the delay in testing (and thus a delay in released test results) caused speculation regarding car safety, but that the rumors were unfounded.
“We see absolutely nothing in the data that’s alarming, but we want to have a comprehensive report,” Miller said following that test.
An independent panel of safety experts reviewed NASCAR’s crash data from Talladega and the industry has since advanced with other test sessions for the new car, which is set to debut in competition at the Clash exhibition race at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in February before the Daytona 500.
Probst said Monday that safety remains at the forefront of developing Next Gen as NASCAR conducts its latest test session with 21 cars at the Charlotte Roval this week. The daylong tests Monday and Tuesday are not crash-specific. Probst said “Crash testing for us is always ongoing. It will continue to be ongoing, even after we get through all these rounds of testing.”
“Safety for us is a journey. It’s not a destination,” Probst continued. “We’re going to continue to work on the safety of our current car. We made changes as recently as Daytona adding the bar after Joey (Logano’s) crash at Talladega.”
“Our intention on that front is we will continue to make safety updates to the car whenever we feel we need to,” Probst continued. “That won’t change with the new car, and we’ll test whenever we feel like we have a significant upgrade that we need to correlate or quantify that all of our modeling matches what we expect the update to bring.”
NASCAR and its teams are working out other issues in the car throughout the two-day session at Charlotte, including excessive heat in the cockpit that drivers mentioned following an eight-car test at Daytona in September. Probst said that NASCAR is working at “full-blast” to address the heat concern, including moving the exhaust pipe forward in four cars while testing, adding slits to the rear windows and ventilation under the car to keep air flowing between the undertray and chassis.
Although outdoor temperatures are 10-15 degrees cooler at the Concord, N.C., track than they were in Daytona Beach, Fla., for the earlier test, Probst said that the cars are equipped with temperature sensors in order to quantify the efficacy of changes.
“When we come back here for the oval, we’ll land on a particular solution pending the testing today and the testing tomorrow and the intention will be for the cars to come back here in November with all those cooling updates implemented,” Probst said.
There are more rounds of tests scheduled. NASCAR has organization-wide tests set for the Charlotte oval next month (Nov. 17-18), Phoenix (Dec. 14-15) and Daytona (Jan. 11-12). There will also be tire tests scheduled with Goodyear at Atlanta following the track repave at that facility, as well as at Bowman-Gray Stadium in North Carolina in preparation for the Clash and at Wythe Raceway in Virginia in preparation for the Bristol dirt race with additional testing and timing to be finalized.
Drivers participating in the test session at the Charlotte Roval are expected to speak with media on Tuesday.
