FRENCHTOWN, N.J. — In racing, there’s always a hot new idea or trend that everyone just has to have.
A new part or chassis design will come along and once someone wins with it, everyone will instantly jump on board. It could be something completely unheard of or something old that’s made its way back around again.
It can be something as simple as the graphic styles on the race car or something more complex like the design of the rear suspension.
Just like anything else in life, it’s all about staying ahead of the curve and paying attention to the trends.
The biggest recent development in dirt modified racing is that J-Bars and 4-links have made their way back into the picture. These are things that some people were winning races with two decades ago.
How come they’re back after 20 years? Manufacturers have learned how to educate customers to better assemble and adjust their cars than they were able to years ago. Nowadays, there are more competitors and not as many secrets.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of secrets. Everyone still tries to cover things up on their race car so nobody can see what they have, but eventually everyone catches on to what you’re doing.
I recently caught myself in the same situation. I was going through the pits doing promotional work for a client. I was going around taking photos to promote some drivers running our products and got yelled at for taking a picture of the back of someone’s race car.
People work hard to make gains and get ahead, and they don’t want anybody coming into their pit taking pictures of their secrets to share with the world. That one secretive part they spent all winter working on, I could have unintentionally snapped a picture of it and posted it. Their secret would be gone just like that.
I learned my lesson to ask before I get all up under the back of someone’s race car to take a picture. I know how hard it is to bust your butt to try and get ahead of the game.
When you see cars covered with tarps or mats, there’s obviously something there they don’t want you to see.
If you really want to play head games, you put a tarp over your car on the same side everyone else is covering, all meanwhile, you aren’t running what everyone else is running, you have something else, something even better. See what I mean? Even covering your race car becomes a trend.
This sport is constantly evolving with more and more rules being added or changed every year; things that didn’t used to work, do now. It used to be the guy with the best engine who won the most races. Now, just about every team has the necessary horsepower. It’s not just your engine package anymore.
Back in the day when the 4-link was too complicated for everyone to figure out, a lot of the teams couldn’t afford a powerful enough engine for that package. Now, everyone has enough horsepower to get the 4-link system to hook up.
There was a time when drivers were just drivers. Today, a driver needs to know the car better, or at the least be able to communicate with a crew chief who has car setup mastered.
An example would be years ago at the New York State Fairgrounds mile in Syracuse, everyone was designing their bodies to be sleek and low drag. Then the last few years that race was run, it was won with a standard short-track body because everyone had enough power that the car needed more downforce.
Let’s take it to a fan’s perspective. Back in the day, fans could really get into racing because they could learn from what the drivers were doing on the race track and apply it to their hot rods or their street cars. Today, the race cars barely resemble street vehicles, making it harder for the fans to relate to the cars.
From the fans’ point of view, they just see two different colored race cars. The color of the car obviously isn’t the reason the red car outran the yellow car.
One thing that has evolved from that to make it more exciting for the fans is race monitor. Now with race monitor you can keep track of your favorite driver’s lap times versus other drivers, you can watch their line on the track and see when they got faster or slower.
What the fans see from the grandstands is one driver outdriving another to win the race. But it’s really not that simple. There’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes to make that one driver and his car go faster than the others.
Every race team is out there working on the next best thing to set the world on fire. Some of these hot licks are new and some have made their way back around. As our sport is ever evolving, so are our drivers and race cars with every new trend thrown their way.