When Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 crew chief Adam Stevens sends out driver Christopher Bell for the start of the Coke Zero Sugar 400 on Saturday at Daytona, he will have no idea what to expect, nor any idea of where his driver should run approaching Turn 1.
Everything is a virtual unknown.
“This is going to be total chaos and calamity,” Stevens told Motorsport.com after the race at New Hampshire. “I’m not sure where the safe place will be (on) Turn 1, Lap 1. It might be dead last and 30 car lengths back. Nobody has any idea how (the cars are) going to handle once they get up to full speed. It’s going to be something.”
Why the unknown?
In the name of eliminating fuel saving tactics and the inability to pass in these cars due to their inherent dragginess, NASCAR shortened the rear spoiler from 7” to 4” and decreased horsepower from 510 to 465.
However, the race weekend will not feature any practice sessions for drivers to get a feel for what to expect when placed into a pack racing environment.
“Everyone is in the same boat on this,” said Daniel Suarez during a media availability over the weekend. “Everybody knows what we have on paper but nobody really knows how it’s going to play out.”
His Spire teammate Carson Hocevar says he likes it.
“There’s no sim or data or anything,” Hocevar said during his media session. “You have to just go out there and adapt. We are going to have to try everything as the race plays out and see how the car reacts.”
Speaking on his Actions Detrimental podcast this week, Denny Hamlin said there is the potential for explosive racing in both good ways and bad.
“I think this weekend has potential to be absolute chaos,” said Hamlin. “Just from the words I’m getting and the data I’m seeing on this new package, I think the cars could be far more out of control when they’re trying to push each other, which could cause smoke.
“And when there’s smoke, there’s a wreck.”
On the other hand, Hamlin does believe that making the cars less bogged down in traffic will create passing opportunities. Hamlin believes he could win on Saturday the way he used to on superspeedway races by intentionally lagging back, missing the big crashes, and making all of his passes in the closing laps.
That just wasn’t possible in the first four years of the NextGen car.
“So, before we had Next-Gen superspeedway racing, I used to not care about stages, and I would just ride and ride,” Hamlin said. “There would be big old wrecks. I’d miss them and then I would go race, and we would go win.
“I catch a lot of flak about, man, for 70 percent of this race, ‘You’re putting around in the back and trying to miss wrecks.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I think that’s the best strategy for me.’
“I think especially this week, it could be a good strategy because I do think the ability to go from the back to the front will be easier than years past. And points don’t matter. Stages don’t matter.”
Joey Logano thinks there’s an element of classic Daytona and Talladega racing coming back with this package too.
“I’m assuming it’s going to look more like the old Daytona years ago before they repaved it – a little bit more that direction,” Logano said. “Or like Atlanta, where handling is going to come into play to some extent. I just don’t know at what point in the run does that happen.
“Are we packed up for the first 10 and then you start to see the cream rise to the top? You start to see the best cars start to move their way through the field. I don’t know. Maybe.”
Crew chief of the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5, Cliff Daniels, believes qualifying speeds will be up and expects that will help the racing in the pack too.
“Hopefully we’re not quite as stuck when the pace of the pack picks up because to be honest with you, I know it’s really difficult to watch the saving fuel racing, but then once the pace of the pack does pick up, it’s been really hard to get a run and get another lane moving and generate that energy,” Daniels told Motorsports over the weekend. “So I think on paper, this is a logical step to try.
“Hopefully, that will allow guys to just build more of the energy and build more runs and we get to see more just mixing up within the pack. If that happens, I think it’s going to make for a really good race.”
All told, Hamlin just wishes NASCAR would have given them practice.
“That’s going to be scary,” he said. “I mean, I’m not a practice proponent but this is one where I would not mind NASCAR saying, ‘You know what, let’s just do 20 minutes, guys.’ “All we need to do is just get out there with three or four cars, get close to each other to figure out what we got. But I think sometimes that element of surprise, I think it’s two-fold.”
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