INDIANAPOLIS — Elton Sawyer laughs. It’s all NASCAR’s Vice President of Officiating and Technical Inspection can do when I ask how much the inspection process has changed compared to what it was 10 years ago. “A lot,” he says while holding his phone in front of him, refreshing a program that offers live updates on the inspection status of all 40 cars in the field, and whether they’ve passed or failed at the five inspection sites behind the garages.
It’s a significant departure from the days when logs were kept by pen and paper. Don’t worry, they still are, just in case. A healthy distrust in digitizing everything completely remains in NASCAR. This is the sport started in the hills of Appalachia, when bootleggers and moonshiners got together to race their modified stock cars that were designed to out run and out maneuver police. Today’s NASCAR events would be unrecognizable, but the battle between the race teams and officials remains true to that original spirit, as engineers and mechanics look to out maneuver race officials to get every possible advantage they can out cars that have been standardized down to every 1/16th of an inch.
Sawyer doesn’t mind. He knows their job is to walk right up to that line and see if they can edge ever so slightly across it. In a sport where a race can be decided by hundredths of a second, each extra bit of downforce, horsepower, or aerodynamic slippage a car can create makes a difference. His job, and NASCAR’s team of inspection officials, is to keep them inside those boundaries, with an array of tools to measure every aspect of the car in as efficient a manner as possible that is ever changing.
At the five inspection points all 40 cars go through on race day, every detail of the car is looked at to ensure no tomfoolery has taken place in the garage. There are modules to measure the body and ensure it fits within the guidelines and even the LIS, a laser inspection station that measures the car’s chassis to ensure it matches, to 1/1000th of an inch, the chassis NASCAR was given prior to the car’s build.
Everything in NASCAR is changing.
Many of the sport’s iconic drivers of this past generation have begun to move on. Jeff Gordon is in the Fox Sports booth. Joining him on the broadcast side of things next year will be Dale Earnhardt Jr., easily the most popular driver of the past two decades, when he moves to NBC. Junior’s final Brickyard 400, much like many races of his final season, ended in disappointment as a crash led to an early exit. In the pits next to Dale Jr. for the Brickyard was another icon of NASCAR, the Tide Ride.
NASCAR is unique in what fans latch onto. Teams exist, like Joe Gibbs Racing and Hendrick Motorsports, but drivers and sponsors tend to mean much more to fans than a team. There are some sponsors that have been a part of NASCAR for generations, and their paint schemes are iconic and can gain loyalty like a driver, even if the man behind the wheel changes. The Tide car is one of those iconic paint schemes, with the bright orange unmistakable on the track.
Tide hasn’t been a regular sponsor in NASCAR for some time, but recently returned with Matt Kenseth on the No. 20 car for a three race run in 2017, to the delight of many. Tide’s re-introduction began at Darlington in 2016, when NASCAR paid homage to the iconic paint schemes of the past with a throwback night. However, even then – and in the three races Tide signed onto for the 2017 season – the effort to balance the past and present was evident in the car’s design.
The Tide Ride that Darrell Waltrip, Ricky Rudd, and Ricky Craven made famous got an update for the 2017 version, as it became the Tide Pods car, promoting the latest in laundry detergent technology with the small pack of 3-in-1 detergent. The updated paint scheme looks very similar to the Tide cars of old, with the same iconic orange covering most of the car with the massive Tide logo on the hood, but tweaks include a blue rear of the car, along with other details (like pods being added to the Tide logo).
It’s a fitting visual that’s representative of NASCAR in 2017. It’s the push of new technology, while also trying to honor the traditions of the past that are so important to the sport’s identity.
Joe Gibbs has been a NASCAR team owner since 1992, building Joe Gibbs Racing into one of the true powers in the sport with four cup championships and more than 140 race wins under his belt in the cup series. Those trophies and accolades fit right in with the three Super Bowls he won as an NFL coach.
On the track prior to the Brickyard, Gibbs grinned with glee looking at the Tide Pods car, cheerfully explaining how the return of the Tide Ride was a huge hit for the team in creating buzz on social media. The last thing I expected to get from the 76-year-old Gibbs was an explanation of the social media impact the Tide sponsorship had gotten him, but here we were, on racing’s iconic speedway discussing retweets and social media engagement while waiting for the national anthem to start.
“Social media definitely continues to play a larger role in our sport,” Gibbs said. “I know our sponsors are always very interested in what we are doing on our social media channels and it has proven to be a great way to communicate directly to our fans. The Tide announcement was a great example of that. We were able to partner with them to produce content our fans really enjoyed and the success was something we could measure to show how it achieved all the goals for the program.”
It was a glimpse into the ever-changing world of team ownership and NASCAR salesmanship, where pitches to prospective sponsors go far beyond race success to get your car on the television broadcast as much as possible. It’s now almost as important to note how much content can you produce on your social channels and how much reach you have to make those impressions for people that might not even have the opportunity to watch that day’s race.
Winning is still the order of the day, though, and the surest way to please the team owner and sponsor. In the pits, Kenseth’s team executed a near flawless race, hitting their marks on ever pit stop and getting the 20 car back on track either in the same position or up a spot or two on nearly every stop. Like the engineers and mechanics that try to get every bit out of the cars, the pit crews do the same with their equipment. Practices three days a week keep them sharp and constant tinkering with equipment, especially the air guns for getting tires on and off the cars, attempts to shave precious fractions of seconds off of stops.
Prior to the race, front tire changer Houston Stamper walks me through the intricacies of his air gun and how he and the engineers at Joe Gibbs Racing constantly look to make improvements to get more power out of the gun to shave time off of stops. When a new gun is finished, it requires a change to his rhythm of hitting the five lug nuts in order to handle the timing of the speed of the new gun. It’s a unique challenge, but one that can make big differences in the all important race for track position.
When he handed me his current model to hit the practice wheel on the side of the pit box, he gives me the simple instructions. Hold it wide open — finger mashing the trigger all the way down the entire time — and hit all five lug nuts in a circular motion. Easy enough.
After a trial run to get hitting the lug nuts down, I rip through them in 2.6 seconds. A major improvement on my lug wrench in the back of the Jeep. Then he settles in, and 0.8 seconds later, the five lug nuts are on the ground and he looks up with a smirk. I won’t be getting a fire suit and stealing his job any time soon.
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After a stunning wreck where Martin Truex Jr.’s car got loose in Turn 1 trying to hold his spot on a restart inside Kyle Busch (looking for a three-peat at the Brickyard and the best car on the track by a significant margin on that day) and took both the leaders out in a fiery wreck, Kenseth suddenly became the favorite. The Tide Pods car is fast on long runs, but not at its best on the restarts in traffic, so he needs the lead and a lack of cautions.
Unfortunately that wouldn’t be the order of the day. A long green flag run calls for a pit stop, and he returned to the track eating up seconds on the leaders to return to the top 10 before a wreck brings out a yellow flag and sticks the Tide 20 car in the pack. He never fully recovers, earning a fourth place finish, but the mood in the pits isn’t of celebration, but of frustration at the fickle nature of racing.
The Gibbs favorite was taken out by a car that had nothing for it all day and their second best hope got caught in the purgatory of constant restarts among the pack.
The Tide Pods car will be back for the final race of the three-race deal at the Charlotte race in October. If they need to, they’re one of the lucky few that can bring back the same car from Indianapolis as they emerged miraculously unscathed from a race littered with wrecks that brought out yellow and red flags.
In the meantime, Kenseth’s team, Joe Gibbs Racing, and the rest of NASCAR will continue to toe the fine line between tradition and technology, always moving forward but trying to maintain the identity of the past.
