CoT and Unintended Consequences
We’ve all had personnel experience the the law of unintended consequences. Who hasn’t sprayed green pea puree all over the wifes kitchen.
You never intended for it to happen, but it did. All ’cause you reached for another beer instead of the blender cover before hitting the on/off switch.
Stuff happens.
The arrival of NASCAR’s CoT has had stuff happen that was unexpected. As background here’s a quote from RCR’s Jeff Burton concerning why the team has not tested an approved CoT to this point:
The approval process is very difficult today. The reason we haven’t tested a car that’s an approved chassis is because we had a firewall that was off thirty thousandths of an inch. We had a roll bar that was off 100 thousandths of an inch. We had things like that. You don’t cut that bar out and put it back in, you have to take the car home and resubmit the car however many days later. So if you have something that doesn’t sell, it takes forever to get it checked. The cars that we are testing, if they aren’t legal, it’s by 100 thousandths on something that doesn’t make a difference on speed.
By way of comparison a sheet of computer paper is approximately .0034 of an inch.
NASCAR has evolved far from the days of the backyard mechanic, as if that needed to be said, but in some ways the CoT has taken that a step further. The likelihood of any of Jimmie Johnson’s Championship winning Chevy’s meeting that roll bar standard is slim to none.
Ray Evernham has started using a new construction method to cope with not only the close tolerences required during the built-up of the CoT chassis but also as a way to place more emphasis on research and development vice hands-on construction.
Evernham Motorsports is the first NASCAR and Dodge team to enter the robot age.
