Thoughts. After having a talk with Moyer’s crew chief at the World 100 Saturday......

[Josh Bayko]

Too many factors come into play when you just focus on one thing .... Teams that races for a living are gonna find the speed vs the weekend warrior .... Look at how screwed up the tire rule was .... IMO the scales are another rule that needs to go ..

No minimum weight is a rabbit hole that nobody wants to go down. Even 410 sprints have weight limits now.

[dirtcrazy4u]

It's funny how you get a group of guys talking about expenses and how to make things better overall. Bodies, motors, shocks and tires. Everyone has had there opinion on what needs to change but no one steps up to make a change. For change to happen you would need to have lucas, woo and a few others in the industry to sit down and map out a strategy. Never going to happen. They don't care about local racing, they would rather have guys that are spending way to much following there program.

Bodies, I like the looks of today's SLM. Everybody can afford a body. What is it 8, 9 sheets of aluminum. That body creates a tremendous amount of downforce.
Motors, now where getting to the good stuff, it's the biggest expense for a team thru the course of a year. You start with 2 or ideally 3. After a race such as eldora not 1 team is going to knoxville with the same powerplant in hopes of winning.
You could limit the cubic inches, that's not changing costs, the engine builder is still holding his hand out and saying 65k please. Remember everyone saying 360 motors where going to save sprint car racing. It just drove the costs higher.
Shocks, a yes shocks, as someone said. There is a difference in a guy that just puts a set together and the guy that understands every movement the car and that shock make.
Tires, well most sanctioning bodies have eliminated cutting tires. So today teams sand them. The part of the tire that has seen the most attention over the years has been sidewall technology. You have to be able to feel the car rolling over on the sidewall and be able to adjust.
Technology, which you can never stop, is what's killing the sport. If you take that body away that I think looks good.
Do you need the motor, No.
Do you need the shocks, No
Do you need the tires, No
Without all that downforce, the best tires, motor, shocks wouldn't make a difference.

[Rocky]

Too many factors come into play when you just focus on one thing .... Teams that races for a living are gonna find the speed vs the weekend warrior .... Look at how screwed up the tire rule was .... IMO the scales are another rule that needs to go ..

Minimum weight is actually a safety rule.

[hucktyson]

Check the deck height after the race as soon as the car pulls in. The cars go from 39” to 45” just by turning the wheel left on pit road ... and why is the deck 39 instead of 36 like it always was ?? Why do we have to allow 15” of RF clearance ? That just allows people to manipulate deck height with super soft stacked RF springs and setting that corner extra high making the LR extra low. How about this , tell them you can run whatever ground clearance you want but it has to be the same on both sides. You want 15” ok great make the left side 15” also. The shocks are what allow the car to maintain that dynamic posture but if you just put insane rebound in both fronts and make the LR like a solid rod the car feels like a buckboard on square wheels and a 2” hole throws the car like a 2ft hole. So you have to figure out how to keep that posture and handle holes. Racing does not need to be this expensive or this complicated. My favorite part is the local dudes posting on here that I even don’t think are winning locally feel that no rules is the best way as if they have it figured out as well as Davenport and team zero lol lol lol . No one was in davenports League this week and he didn’t get there but running off the shelf longhorn shocks. These guys run 15 seconds when eldora is blowing dust , a few years ago those were 17 second conditions lol

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Everyone wants to do nothing, or get lost in the weeds, when the big, giant body is staring them right in the face. Wedge bodies killed engines in cars with monoleaf suspension and Monroe shocks! Let that sink in.

[JabberJaws83]

Every car I watched pull into tire tech at the World looked like the right rear was broken. The car leans so much not even under load. Like I said in a post before, I saw one of Josh Richards' right side door panels for sale in the pits at the Dream I thought it was fake that it was so small.

[JabberJaws83]

Everyone wants to do nothing, or get lost in the weeds, when the big, giant body is staring them right in the face. Wedge bodies killed engines in cars with monoleaf suspension and Monroe shocks! Let that sink in.

You are exactly right. Everyone from the sanctions to Mark Richards talk a big game about saving late model racing, but no one wants to actually step up to the plate to do anything about it. Racers are their own worst enemy and they are steering the sinking ship. They need a Bob Memmer to put a cork in the ship.

[hardracer32]

My 2 cents: Implement the "Droop Rule" in all series, and at all tracks, in all Late Model-type classes. Lower the max ground clearance for nose to 10", put decks back to 36" at ride height, make maximum nose width somewhere UNDER 8 freaking feet wide! Make Right Front wheel be inside the confines of the body, +/- 1", and also maximum of 2" past Right Rear. ENFORCE current rules about keeping doors flat, not dished, ENFORCE rules about dishing front panels, etc...Then, MAYBE take a look at trying to put a handle on some of the shock/spring technology. Like limiting the number of springs on each coilover/corner of the car, and how many adjusting devices are allowed, etc.

All of these things would be very minimal cost to change or phase in. But they would have major impact on downforce, traction, etc. If you only changed that much, it would level the playing field for smaller budget teams that are running lower power engines and older chassis that weren't designed to race with the rack and pinion plowing up the race track and the spoiler sticking up 8 feet in the air. Heck even now I've seen CT525's win races against the latest and greatest engines on the track. But the circumstances have to be just right for that to happen. If you reign in some of these things though, it would make it much more feasible for a guy to go out and be competitive on a regional or even national level and spend less money to do it. But what do I know.

[Rocky]

I am definitely not winning locally and Eldora and such might as well be a different planet than I live on. I certainly am not the guy to make up rules to try and reign in the best in the business. However I know that whatever they come up with those guys will work around the clock to beat it. You could give me JD’s shocks and he’s still gonna lap me. I definitely am not the guy to tell anyone else what to do. Eventually all this stuff trickles down to the lappers like me, used and out of date. Do I really care? Nope. Did my crew guy go on deployment and I don’t have anybody to bench race with? Yup. Can somebody reign it in? Maybe, but it’s not me.

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Hardracer,

Guys are not going to give up load curves that work. Those proposed rule changes to springs just made the chassis very expensive, as the spring must now be hidden in plain site. As in a part of the car becomes the spring. That rule is too far in the weeds. Who cares how high a car hikes if it has a flat deck and no spoiler?

[hardracer32]

MasterSbilt_Racer,

If the deck is 6 ft in the air the whole car is a spoiler. It turns it into an even bigger wedge than they used to run back in the day. And as far as load curves etc, there's only so much "tuning" you can do with a chassis, and putting some wording into place for construction and tubing requirements before that Pandora's box is opened would help mitigate that anyway. No different than a lot of rule books now that are pretty specific about chassis/roll cage construction. Especially in asphalt and road racing.

P.S.- I always look forward to your replies and debating with you, btw.

[batman]

Personally if somebody wants to spend a million dollars to win $1000 and a plastic trophy who am I to stop them. This is America.

Lol seriously this really sums it all up at all levels of racing

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

MasterSbilt_Racer,

If the deck is 6 ft in the air the whole car is a spoiler. It turns it into an even bigger wedge than they used to run back in the day. And as far as load curves etc, there's only so much "tuning" you can do with a chassis, and putting some wording into place for construction and tubing requirements before that Pandora's box is opened would help mitigate that anyway. No different than a lot of rule books now that are pretty specific about chassis/roll cage construction. Especially in asphalt and road racing.

P.S.- I always look forward to your replies and debating with you, btw.

The downforce is still greatly reduced from today's numbers, with a flat deck and no spoiler. How are you going to determine if a chassis is a spring or not, in tech? We need simple rules enforced with simple tools. Or the rules are useless.

PS. I enjoy civil debate. Thanks.

[Rocky]

Lol seriously this really sums it all up at all levels of racing

I have plenty of friends that have borrowed money against their houses for street stock engines.

[hardracer32]

I'm not sure I see that chassis thing as being a feasible issue. There are ways to tech wall thickness etc, but also I think that would sort of police itself because there is only so much you can do with a chassis before you start making it completely useless in regards to safety, durability, etc. All you have to do is look at what Rocket and some of the other builders did right before the current trend. Some of those cars were flexing so much that they were wearing out after just a few races, or guys were having to constantly weld up tubing that was cracking. They were already getting to the limits of what a chassis can do as far as being a spring.

But aside from the aerodynamic and cost aspect of the cars, I hate the current bodies because they just look stupid. The cars look like they've been wrecked before they ever pull out on the racetrack. It's ridiculous. One of the things that makes racing attractive is the construction of the cars, the beauty of the machines themselves, and here lately, in my humble opinion, the cars are looking kind of dumb. The most important thing though is cost and performance.

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

I'm not sure I see that chassis thing as being a feasible issue. There are ways to tech wall thickness etc, but also I think that would sort of police itself because there is only so much you can do with a chassis before you start making it completely useless in regards to safety, durability, etc. All you have to do is look at what Rocket and some of the other builders did right before the current trend. Some of those cars were flexing so much that they were wearing out after just a few races, or guys were having to constantly weld up tubing that was cracking. They were already getting to the limits of what a chassis can do as far as being a spring.

But aside from the aerodynamic and cost aspect of the cars, I hate the current bodies because they just look stupid. The cars look like they've been wrecked before they ever pull out on the racetrack. It's ridiculous. One of the things that makes racing attractive is the construction of the cars, the beauty of the machines themselves, and here lately, in my humble opinion, the cars are looking kind of dumb. The most important thing though is cost and performance.

It would be easy to incorporate a torsion bar into the coilover mounting system. It would be fairly easy to hide.

[hucktyson]

Hard racer it’s impossible to debate MB racer on this subject because he starts from the baseline that he has an engineering degree so engineering is free for him so rule changes would cost him money. The concept and rule changes make stuff obsolete is absurd to because people are always buying the newest best thing anyway. If you got rid of stacked springs and specified linear rates only , made a 7” stoke limit on the Lr shocks front and rear , got rid of bumpstops of all types , made the decks 36” inches AFTER THE RACE and the front ground clearance the same on each side measured after the race also. You’ve now eliminated , super soft left rears , super high rebound front shocks, the hundreds of hours of tuning stacked spring combinations and lock out settings , you’ve eliminated the ability to hike to 58”. You’ve eliminated the ability to hold rear ends up and front ends down , you still have an enormous window of adjustability but you got rid of “ dirty air “ and you also got rid of 15 second laps at eldora when it’s blowing dust. Winners will still win , guys will still spend a lot but it will close the gap to a point where your 500 laps of testing is erased by jumping the cushion one time. Don’t give me this bullhit that you can make a car react the same exact was as before those changes by making the car a spring. Cars need unhooked, without any kind of local super lates feeding it , the touring super lates will eventually die also

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Huck,

We agree on a lot of it, but very specific suspension rules are exactly what get the engineers involved. A spring is a spring. You can put it anywhere in the system as long as you get the desired wheel rate. I'm not talking about making the car a spring. The car still needs the correct torsional rigidity compared to what the suspension load is applying.

You take 600# of downforce off the cars, it's a whole new ballgame. It can be done without dumbing the cars down. You are confusing dumbing it down with making it cheaper.

[Rocky]

I can agree on that Huck. On nights I don’t drive I crew for a buddy with a street stock. We pit in the infield in turn 3 and one of the fast guys sailed off in really deep lifted rotated and jumped on it. My other friend said you need to do that, the only way I could reply was that if I tried doing that in my car I would hit that motor home parked over there. Do I need to work harder, yeah sure, but you know what it’s like just doing basic maintenance without a ton of help. That’s a lot to try and do. Not whining, just keeping it as real as I can.

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Some people are not famous deck builders with a racing budget big enough to replace everything every year. So, I guess they can't debate with you.