Last year NASCAR introduced the Next Gen car and like any new product there were some issues with the car.  NASCAR has been working to rectify those issues.

The Next Gen car was designed to represent more of a stock car with elements of a street legal car.  The car also featured a new wheel locking system that uses a single hub lug nut in stead of the five lug nuts on previous models; which caused a number of issues with cars losing tires.  The car was also designed to withstand impacts during crashes.  The result was a stiffer car that transferred the energy to the cockpit and the driver; resulting in a number of injuries including two concussions; one of which led to the retirement of a driver.

In recent months NASCAR has been working with the vendors who provide the parts for the cars in order to make the cars safer for drivers, crews, and fans.

When the cars take the track at the Memorial Coliseum this weekend, the rear of the car will use new clips to the chassis that will allow the car to absorb more of the energy during an impact.  NASCAR has also been working with Technique Chassis to help improve crash impact zones in order to deflect more of the impact energy away from the driver.

NASCAR is also removing some of the bars and are adding “pivot points” called “triggers” to help protect the oil tank and fuel cell; as well as, allow for more absorption of energy during an impact.

NASCAR’s vice president of safety engineering John Patalak spoke on the changes saying, “it’s not any one of those things by themselves that was the key.  It was the cumulative effect of the whole assembly working together. And so this was kind of the final validation of that. All of those changes were put together through computer modeling all sorts of different crash scenarios at the race track.”

Patalak added, “we took the rear bumper struts.  They’re made out of aluminum, and so they’re made out of thinner gauge than they previously were. So they collapse at a lower load; their buckling loads are lower.  And then the rear clip, we removed and/or replaced structures with different cross sections, meaning we weakened the structures so that they would deform under less load. And you have to be very specific and careful where you do that so that we don’t introduce problems in other circumstances where you don’t want it to bend or where you can’t have it bend.”

Beginning with 2023 NASCAR will require incident data systems in all Cup Series cars in order to study impacts and their damage.

Patalak noted, “in 2002, we started with our black box or our incident data recorder that goes on the left frame rail [of the chassis.  There’s been several iterations over the years. In 2018, we added a high-speed camera. So this year in Cup, it is a completely new system from the ground up. This will give us more data channels, will give us dedicated GPS data as far as the speed of the vehicle, and we’ll have a lot of those things all synchronized in time. So when we do our crash analyses, we will have a more powerful data set to work with.”

A type of “human data recorder” is also available to the drivers on a voluntary basis in the form of a mouthpiece sensor.

Palatak continued, “we talked about the data recorder, it’s on the chassis of the car. So that’s what the car is experiencing.  But ultimately, what we want to do is make the driver as safe as possible. So this gives us a data point from the drivers from their body themselves. And that’s informative on our computer model in our testing, whether we’re using crash test dummies like physical dummies in the crash lab, or doing human body modeling, numerical simulation, it makes all of that research better. It gives us more confidence in what tools we use. It helps us when we go to make changes and evaluate better strategies.”

Palatak concluded, “the drivers had come to us about this information as we started to exchange this information with them — how can they better digest and they better consume that information and implement into their cars.  And so right after Thanksgiving, early December, David Green from our Cup safety inspectors and officials [team] went and scheduled shop visits with all the drivers who wanted to participate. And so we had the bulk of Cup drivers and their interior specialists, oftentimes their crew chief, have a car ready at their shop and just go and spend an hour to three or four hours with them and walk through all of these issues. And I think the results of that were very positive.”