Does this safety foam catching fire concern anyone else?
I found this article on NASCARS website talking about it. It has caught fire twice now, once in Kenseths car, and last weekend in Harvicks car.
Discuss.
I found this article on NASCARS website talking about it. It has caught fire twice now, once in Kenseths car, and last weekend in Harvicks car.
Discuss.
MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- Crewmen pulled pieces of melted foam padding out of the side of the No. 29 car, which smelled like a fireplace after the embers had been put out. Yellow dust covered the floor of the vehicle, and a hole had been burned in the right side. Meanwhile Kevin Harvick stormed out of Martinsville Speedway, his race ended by material meant to keep him safe.
"I mean, this thing just started burning up," he said. "It's almost turning into a joke now."
For NASCAR, it's turning into the most challenging aspect of the Car of Tomorrow -- protective foam meant to absorb side impacts, but instead burning or melting because of close proximity to heated tailpipes. Three teams reported problems last weekend, when the new vehicle debuted at Bristol, Tenn. Sunday, the foam in Harvick's car started melting for reasons officials are still trying to figure out.
The foam melted despite a heat shield installed in the right side of the car. A NASCAR spokesman said the sanctioning body will bring either the car or parts of the car to the series Research and Development Center in Concord, N.C., for examination Monday.
"We had three last week, and one obviously this week. If it's as big of a problem as I think it is, we've got to find out why and stop it, obviously," said Nextel Cup director John Darby. "But there were a whole lot more cars that didn't [have it] than did, and that's a good thing."
Drivers and crews continued to learn more about the new vehicle, which will sit out the April 15 event at Texas and return for the April 21 race at Phoenix. As it is right now, it tends to struggle in traffic and flourish in clean air. Its matched-height front and rear bumpers, different from the uneven bumpers on the old car, make it more difficult to nudge a competitor out of the way.
And the absorbent foam is subject to melting or catching fire, despite teams' attempts to install barriers between it and tailpipes. Last week, ruptured or broken tailpipes caused foam to burn and noxious fumes to invade the cockpits of drivers Matt Kenseth and Brian Vickers. In response, NASCAR asked teams to construct their tailpipes out of thicker material for the Martinsville event.
But Harvick's crew chief said Sunday that there were no obvious cracks to the exhaust pipes on the No. 29 car.
"I'm not real smart, but at the end of the day, you put [foam] over a fire, and it ain't going to be great, no matter where you put it," Todd Berrier said. "Heat rises, so how far we gotta raise it? I'm not very smart when it comes to that, but I'm smart enough to know that [foam] melts."
One interested onlooker was Robbie Reiser, Kenseth's crew chief. His driver competed last weekend at Bristol with a basketball-sized hole burned into the side foam of his No. 17 car, and felt ill all week. NASCAR told Reiser that his team had installed the foam improperly, a charge the crew chief refutes.
Not that he'd talk about his foam incident.
"NASCAR said we didn't have one," Reiser said when asked if the damage to Harvick's car Sunday was similar to what Kenseth's car suffered last week. "We put it in wrong. I'm not getting involved. I'll end up paying the price for it."
Darby checked out all three Richard Childress Racing cars after the event, and said Harvick's was the only one with a problem. The vehicles of teammates Clint Bowyer and Jeff Burton, he said, were cool enough to touch.
"Todd mentioned one thing that he noticed his car was doing, as it was going into the corner it was bellowing out a big ol' flame ball," Darby said. "They had taken the extra steps to put up a heat baffle, and even some Nomex-like material to help insulate it. For whatever reason, they had seen some moderate melting on the 29 in testing, and tried to insulate it well. Why it's individualized to one car on the team, I don't have an answer for that yet. But obviously, what we need to do is to get some more free air moving underneath the foam to keep it cool or to keep the heat waves out."
That could entail something as simple as cutting small louvers into the rocker panel to keep air moving beneath the foam. NASCAR has three weeks to work on the problem before the series heads for the 1-mile oval in Phoenix, the first time the COT will venture off a short track.
"It's not an incurable problem, by any means," Darby said. "It's something we're going to have to work on pretty hard, pretty quick."
One COT feature, the matched bumpers, came into play at the end of the Martinsville race and prevented runner-up Jeff Gordon from pulling the bump-and-run move on eventual winner Jimmie Johnson in the final laps. On the old car, the front bumper was lower than the rear, allowing the driver in second place to nose an opponent out of the way.
Now, that move is much more difficult to execute. And Johnson was just fine with it.
"I think it's a good thing," he said after his third victory this season. "The guy behind you can't just go in there and knock him out of the way. You've actually got to drive the car past him."
Just as NASCAR had hoped.
"The thing that's really impressing me is that with the bumpers being lined up, cars aren't spinning each other out when there is nose-to-tail contact," said Brett Bodine, NASCAR's director of cost management. "That's what the whole bumper design was about."
Something else was evident Sunday as well: the COT seems to be harder to handle in traffic, at least on a short track like Martinsville. Numerous times in the Goody's Cool Orange 500, drivers like Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Denny Hamlin pulled away when leading on restarts, and built wide margins on the rest of the field. Put those same drivers in traffic, and they struggled to find as much speed.
Crew chief Chad Knaus "used amazing pit strategy to get us track position or get us up front, and once we were up front, I picked up a lot of time," Johnson said. "The guys who were leading like Junior, who had to come trough traffic, just didn't have the speed. One reason is, it's just really tough to pass here. But it does seem like you lose a little bit of front grip in traffic as you're racing people. Clean air does help these cars out a lot."
Sunday delivered arguably a better race than the COT's debut at Bristol, with more side-by-side action and drivers leaning on one another for position. But to Gordon, none of that really matters. The bigger tracks, he said, will be the true barometer of the Car of Tomorrow's potential.
"We're wasting out time trying to even comment on the Car of Tomorrow at Martinsville and Bristol," he said. "You can hardly tell anything about this car right now. ... Yeah, it was a little bit harder to pass. Yeah, I couldn't drive in as deep. But these are all the things you expect with this car. We've just got to get used to it."
