Redesigned Cars Run With Familiar Whine

A Pontiac pace car and a Pontiac that was the fastest qualifier will pace the 40th Daytona 500 on Sunday, but behind them will be an intriguing mix of unknown quantities, known as Fords and Chevrolets.

The Fords have a new chassis, the four-door Taurus. The Chevys have a new engine, the SB2, for “small-block-second generation.”

The Taurus replaces the venerable Thunderbird, a winner of five Daytona 500s and 184 Winston Cup races since 1978. It was not supposed to be phased out until 1999, but Ford Motor Co. officials decided last summer that it had to be done this season.

The SB2 engine marks the first time in 43 years that a Chevrolet small-block V8 has been developed specifically for Winston Cup competition. It will also be in the Pontiacs.

Question marks surround both.

Many of the questions may be answered today in the Gatorade Twin 125-mile qualifying races.

How cars finish in the two races will determine how they line up behind pole-sitter Bobby Labonte’s Pontiac and his brother Terry’s Chevrolet for the $7-million 500.

“The 125s will be a great test session for us to find out how good our car is handling,” said Jeff Gordon, defending Winston Cup champion and last year’s Daytona 500 winner.

“It’s hard to do it in practice and the Bud Shootout because we don’t get 30- or 40-lap runs, and that’s what we’ll need in the 125s and the 500. Hopefully, we’ll learn from Thursday’s race and be able to set the car up for Sunday.”

Whatever happens, one thing is certain: There will be controversy.

If the Chevrolets run up front in both races, Ford owners and crews will complain that the modifications the Taurus received were not enough.

If the Fords dominate, the Chevy clan will protest that NASCAR gave up too much in order to keep the Ford folks happy.

Although both sides acknowledge that the test will be in the racing, whining has been commonplace from both Ford and Chevrolet devotees since the switch to Taurus was announced last March.

Mark Martin, who won four races in a Thunderbird last year and finished only 29 points behind Gordon’s Chevrolet in Winston Cup standings, is not happy.

“Changing over to the Taurus has turned everything upside down. We just aren’t ready, and that’s a fact,” he said.

Darrell Waltrip, a longtime Chevrolet driver, complained:

“They used to show the media that all the templates fit all the cars. I’d like ‘em to pull a Taurus out there and show me that all the templates fit all the cars. It can’t be done. There’s no such car. They could have easily called that thing a Mustang. What difference does it make if it ain’t going to look like nothing anyway?”

To which Preston Miller, Ford’s NASCAR technical director, replied:

“If Chevrolet says they are running a stock car, let’s go to a Chevrolet dealership and buy a Monte Carlo Winston Cup car. They have no doors, they’ve got a 16 1/2-inch window opening, they’ve got bars all in the interior of it and it seats only one person.

“If that’s a stock car, then I haven’t seen one for sale at a dealership in a long time. And you’re not going to see one, either, not a Taurus, not a Monte Carlo and not a Grand Prix.

“Even Bill France says we haven’t raced a stock car in many years. So this whole issue of the Taurus not fitting the production templates and of it not being stock is ridiculous.”

And the engines are no more stock than the chasses.

Robert Yates, one of NASCAR’s premier Ford engine builders, longs for the days when the engines, like the chasses, were at least similar to production models. But he realizes that day is long gone.

“On one hand, we need to race stock cars, but we are getting further and further away from stock cars,” Yates said. “It’s not really NASCAR. NASCAR is in show business. Ford and Chevrolet are in the racing business. I think it’s almost something that we have to get together and say, ‘Hey, this is our future engine and transmission and fuel system we are going to race.’

“Bill France is going to keep it as simple as he possibly can. It’s certainly not bad now, but I would hate to think that my grandkids are going to be working on large engines with restrictor plates on them.”

Unlike the nervous concerns Ford teams have about the Taurus, most of the GM teams are confident with the new SB2 engine. General Motors has been developing it for two years, running it in the ARCA series. It features revolutionary new cylinder heads that are expected to be 20 horsepower stronger than the old models.

The question mark is their durability.

“We’ve got a durability engine going right now,” said Doug Duchardt, GM motorsports engine manager. “It’s what we call a cookbook engine. It’s basic, then different teams run different valve springs, different piston combinations. Until we see them in the racing mode, we’re going to be doing a little bit of durability [checking] as we go.

“We haven’t seen a whole lot of durability issues, but we’ll have to keep an eye on it.”

So far during Speed Weeks, the battle has been about even. Chevrolets qualified three cars in the top six, and the first Ford was eighth. But in the Bud Shootout, Rusty Wallace, Kenny Wallace, Bill Elliott and Jimmy Spencer gave Ford a one-two-three-four finish, though Spencer was in a leftover Thunderbird.

Neither side felt it meant anything.

Gordon’s Chevy and Spencer’s T-Bird, which he decided to run to save his Taurus for the 125s and the 500, dominated the race until a last-lap restart shuffled the field.

“I had no business finishing third at all,” Elliott said. “Circumstances led to too much jockeying. Without those two late restarts, I would probably have finished 10th.

“There are still a lot of unanswered questions. We are crossing that bridge of uncertainty.”

Elliott also noted that as models change and speeds escalate, so does the money it takes to run a Winston Cup car.

“When I came here in the late ‘70s when my father was trying to get me started in racing, we could probably come to the race and race for $2,000 or $2,500,” he said. “Now if you count salaries and labor and everything else, it’s way over $100,000 a race.”

Changing models is not new to NASCAR. Chevy went from Monte Carlos to Luminas in 1989, then back to Monte Carlos in 1995. Pontiac introduced a new Grand Prix in 1996.

The problem, as Ford owners and builders see it, is self inflicted. There just hasn’t been enough time to develop the Taurus’ aerodynamics for the most important race of the year, Sunday’s 500.

“It’s been rush, rush, rush,” said Rusty Wallace, whose Penske Racing South team was given the job by Ford of developing the race model.

“You can’t believe the work we’ve done, and what the other Ford teams have done with us to get ready for Daytona. We’ve had seven different bodies on the car and 14 different wind tunnel tests to get the aerodynamics right. We even went to England to exchange ideas with Formula One teams in the wind tunnel.

“Right now, we’ve got a new car, they’ve got a new motor, and by far, it’s not an even deal.”

Why the rush to introduce the Taurus so soon?

“It’s really simple. Ford decided to stop building Thunderbirds because they weren’t selling,” Wallace explained. “And Ford Motor Co. doesn’t need to be racing a car that they don’t sell. Their best-selling car is the Taurus, so it made sense that it needs to be a race car.”

While the Ford and the Chevrolet drivers and crews study each other, the sleeper could be the Pontiacs.

Four of the first five cars in today’s first 125-mile race are Pontiacs.

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Daytona 500 Facts

* What: Daytona 500, first Winston Cup race of NASCAR’s 50th season.

* When: Sunday.

* Preliminaries: Twin 125-mile qualifying races, today.

* Where: Daytona International Speedway, a 2.5-mile, high-banked tri-oval track in Daytona Beach, Fla.

* Purse: $7 million, with $1 million guaranteed to winner.

* Defending champion: Jeff Gordon, Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

* Qualifying: Remainder of field to be determined by finishing positions in two 125-mile qualifying races today.

* TV: Twin 125 qualifying races, Saturday, Channel 2, 7 a.m. (tape); Busch Series 300, Saturday, Channel 2, 9 a.m.; Daytona 500, Sunday, Channel 2, 9 a.m.