NASCAR still a few weeks away from releasing EFI data

Sprint Cup Series director John Darby said on Friday at Bristol Motor Speedway that officials remain a few weeks from releasing EFI data and determining exactly what data will be released. But Darby was skeptical that the information, regardless of what is released, will help one driver improve on restarts. "It's not about what a guy is doing with his throttle on a restart," Darby said. "It's more about how the fuel maps and the original run tables that were set up for the race. The purpose of it is to help educate the entire garage on what's good for fuel strategies and what's not. It's not about pinpointing every time someone stepped on the brake. Or when somebody had their foot to the floor. They can get that off the TV telemetry now." Darby said the data collection should be completed in a few weeks, giving teams a sample of a restrictor plate race, two short tracks and a couple of mile-and-a-half tracks. "Once we get the tables like we want them, we'd be able to send every race,'' Darby said. "Typically, we download everything sitting on pit road after the race."

Darby acknowledged there have been minor issues with EFI through the first three races, but nothing to set off alarms. He said Brad Keselowski's issue at Las Vegas was a failed fuel pump. "We've got out of the habit of blanketing fuel injection, because it's almost as bad as saying did he have a problem with his race car," Darby said. "He had a fuel pump fail. Well, we had fuel pumps today and fuel pumps with carburetors. I'm a little defensive probably because everything wants to fall in the lap of fuel injection, where 99 percent of the problems that we've had up to this point in the year have nothing to do with fuel injection." ESPN