Richard Petty has idea on how to bring more competition back into NASCAR

Richard Petty

Carl Edwards’ fuel gamble provided an unexpected and exciting end to last Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. It also steered the focus, if for only a moment, away from a lack of competition at the front of the pack. But the problem certainly didn’t go away.

There were 22 official lead changes among nine drivers in the 600-mile marathon at the 1.5-mile track. In reality, there were only nine in 400 laps under green-flag conditions, and none in the final 21 laps.

While everyone continues to complain about “aero-push," only a few seem to have a way to fix it.

With nearly 57 years in NASCAR, Richard Petty believes the problem could be erased by stepping back in time.

“Up until the last seven, eight years they got into the downforce deal," Petty said. “I think they looked at Indy cars, sports cars, formula cars. Everybody’s going downforce, downforce. So NASCAR got caught in a trap. When they did that, they took a lot of the racing part away."

Aero-push is a condition created by turbulent air in traffic. Cars now have front valances instead of bumpers to hug the car to the pavement. The lead car has the benefit of clean air to provide downforce, while everyone else is caught in the wake of dirty air that follows.

Petty’s solution is simple: Take away the snowplow-like valiances and make the cars more reliant on old-fashioned shocks and springs.

“The deal is, what’s taken part of the racing away is the way NASCAR’s got their rules," Petty said. “When we used to do our deal, the cars ran on suspension. They didn’t run on downforce. In fact the cars lifted off the racetrack. We had to do everything when you worked on the car."

Petty knows a little bit about racing. He won a NASCAR-record 200 races and seven championships. He’s remained in the sport since his retirement after the 1992 season as a car owner.

“I know they don’t pay any attention to me, but I got experience," he said. “I got my own idea of how things should be run and it’s not necessarily the right way.

“My recommendation for the whole deal is to take away downforce and put them back on springs and give all the horsepower they want because you’ve got to have horsepower to pass people."

Drivers want more control of their race cars. They want to work the gas and brake pedals in the corners instead of staying glued to the bottom groove.

“NASCAR hates it when I say this, but I firmly believe that we should not be racing with downforce, sideforce and all these aerodynamic devices," Carl Edwards said. “We do not need splitters (front valiances) on the race cars and giant spoilers."

In short, make cars more “stock" and less of an engineering project.

NASCAR recently tested several new devices that were supposed to reduce aero-push. The sanctioning body now believes the current package works best.

That’s not good enough for Petty.

“I know it’s a lot of expense for us to go through it," Petty said. “Right now we’re just band-aiding the thing and all the Band-Aids are not helping anything. Every once in a while they make a change that’s going to help, but we’ve not seen a change in the last year, basically, and it’s not getting any better.

“I’m very concerned about us not putting on a good race so the spectators keep coming back."

Which should be a concern for everyone in the sport. Augusta Chronicle