NASCAR Post-Race Teardown

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

As you probably know, the racecars that compete in NASCAR’s top series are subject to ongoing, nearly constant inspections from the moment they roll off the trailer at any given track. When I was in Dover last weekend, one of the things I was especially curious about was the post-race teardown, where inspectors nab the winning car and a handful of randoms and then break them down into nothing but a heap of components, going through the car with a fine-toothed comb to rule out cheating. So as soon as the race was won and the Victory Lane celebrations were over, I high-tailed it over to the garage area to watch Greg Biffle’s No. 16 Ford, still sticky with Gatorade and confetti, get transformed from a race-winning Sprint Cup car to a rolling shell and a rubble of car parts. Read more…

In the garage I caught up with the No. 16, as well as Ryan Newman’s No. 12 Penske Dodge which was a little further along in the teardown process. The first thing they do with the cars is roll them through the same stations as the pre-race inspection, re-measuring things like ride height and total vehicle weight. Then they’re pushed off scale and the real fun begins.

It’s worth pointing out that anyone from fans to rival teams’ engineers can stand by and watch the tear-down—as long as you have a garage pass, you’re good. NASCAR is big on keeping the process as transparent as possible, to diffuse suspicions of conspiracy, favoritism, and other forms of skullduggery. The atmosphere was for the most part pretty chill—though some inspectors eventually got nervous about my lurking around—and Jack Roush himself was there hanging out with his teams, clearly over the moon at their fantastic finish. The only thing you can’t do as an observer, apparently, is snap photographs while the cars are all apart. So you’re going to have to make do with the couple of pics I took of the tarred-and-feathered-looking winner car before they started really breaking it down.

As soon as they rolled the No. 16 off the scales and into its stall, the team put the hood up, siphoned the oil, and started unbolting things. Off came the air cleaner, carb, intake, and headers. The radiator was drained (these cars run straight water) and pulled. The shocks were unbolted at the towers and the car was raised for the suspension to come apart. This dissassembly is done by the teams, not the inspectors, and I noticed quite a bit of collaboration from other Roush-Fenway guys—there were crew members in uniforms for both Carl Edwards’ 99 and Matt Kenseth’s 17 helping out. They try to keep a NASCAR inspector on every side of the vehicle at all times during the disassembly, but the surveillance isn’t absolute—I’m not saying it’d be easy to get anything by these guys, but you could see how teams inclined to cheat might think they could get away with something, especially an easily pocketable part like perhaps the magnetic throttle spacers used by the Gibbs Toyota teams in the Nationwide Series.

The inspectors’ job largely consists of weighing and measuring. Fuel is tested for additives, bore diameters are carefully checked, and internal components are weighed to make sure no one’s trying to get away with lightweight aerospace metals. Overall, the amount of attention devoted to different systems on the car will vary by track. For example, at the restrictor-plate superspeedways Daytona and Talladega, the cars will get hellaciously scrutinized for whether any additional hp-boosting air is getting into the intake, whereas cars at downforce tracks will have their bodywork gone over in greater detail. Here at Dover, a fast, high-banked intermediate track, I’d guess that the extra attention would be devoted to the suspension setup—however, vehicle dynamics is one of the things that gets tested in the labs back in Charlotte, and most of what I watched after the engine got pulled was just that: the engine.

I have to say, it was pretty damn cool watching those Sprint Cup drivetrains getting craned out of the cars—I saw them pull both Ryan Newman’s Mopar motor and Greg Biffle’s Ford. For those who don’t follow NASCAR, the standard Sprint Cup engine is a 358 cubic-inch carbureted pushrod V8, tuned to get about 860 hp. It runs through a purpose-built race transmission, a 4-speed with what looks like a tiny clutch. Once the trans is broken off the motor, and the motor is on the stand, it starts getting taken apart—valve covers off, rocker arms unbolted, head bolts pulled, etc. The heads are removed and taken over to a huge test bench to be put through a series of inspection stations, similar to the way the cars themselves were. One guy minutely studies the head gasket, another applies a spring compressor and pulls the valve, and all the valvetrain components go away for weighing and measuring. Same thing for the cam. The stripped head is turned over, studied with a flashlight, and then lined up to a metal template that indicates the correct spacing of all the holes: for valves, ports, passages, spark-plug holes, everything. Then the heads go to the next station, where the combustion chambers are sealed and filled with neon-yellow fluid to measure their volume in cc’s. It’s real white lab-coat, mad-scientist type stuff—you should’ve seen this giant glass beaker they put the fluid in.

Anyway, it was at around this time that one of the inspectors started getting seriously spooked by my hanging around, especially after I started asking some questions about the cylinder head templates (no, they’re not the exact same for each manufacturer—interesting!). So I decided it was time to make myself scarce. But I left with a new appreciation for how involved a process the NASCAR inspections really are. They say it’s two hours from Victory Lane to completion of the teardown, but it was well after dark by the time I left. It felt like the whole fascinating process took much longer.