CONCORD, N.C. — This year’s Monster Energy NASCAR All-Star Race is expected to be wide open — both in trying to identify a favorite and with drivers mashing the gas pedal all the way to the floor for the majority of the way around Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Saturday morning practice offered a sneak preview, with one driver making a direct comparison to Mario Kart-style racing.
Drivers won’t have turtle shells or banana peels at their disposal, but sweeping aerodynamic updates and engine restrictions intended to tighten the competition are in place for Saturday night’s showdown (8 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM). The non-points event presents a perfect opportunity for experimentation, but with intermittent rain curbing much of Friday’s on-track schedule at Charlotte Motor Speedway, the sample size left many teams trying to anticipate the unknown.
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That changed to a degree Saturday morning with a compelling one hour of track time that gave teams at least a taste of what the evening might hold. Packs formed and the familiar restrictor-plate concepts of momentum and drafting were recurring themes, with two- and three-wide action springing up through the hour. Spotters were far more animated in guiding their drivers through traffic, almost at a Talladega-like cadence.
“I still think you’re going to have that gaggle of cars and some excitement within there,” Clint Bowyer said after exiting his No. 14 Ford. “You can still get runs, so that’s going to lead to blocking. Cars get side by side and that punches a bigger hole, and that car behind there gets an advantage. You get a million dollars on the line, we’re going to make it interesting, I promise you that.”
The package for the annual invitational uses a variety of aerodynamic modifications and an engine restrictor plate in place for the first time on the 1.5-mile track. The aero changes were on display in the garage Friday, most visibly the 6-inch tall spoiler with 1-foot-wide, 2-inch tall “ear” extensions to add drag.
Teams will also use manufacturer-specific air ducts in an effort to minimize the advantage of leading cars in undisturbed air. The ducts were deployed at an Xfinity Series race last season at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a change that produced a record for lead changes for the series at the 2.5-mile track.
NASCAR competition officials are hoping for more of the same in Saturday night’s Monster Energy Open qualifying race and the main event. Friday’s on-and-off precipitation at the track prevented a full-fledged preview, with no cars turning more than five laps in the abbreviated attempts at practice. That prompted officials to add Saturday morning’s hour-long session, a boon for number-crunching crew chiefs.
“Obviously, we’ve got a lot more data now than we had before,” said Mike Wheeler, crew chief of the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 Toyota for Denny Hamlin. “We made a bunch of long runs there to get an idea what happens on the long versus short runs, how it drives in traffic. … Fortunately, we made it through with the same car. That was one of the big goals. Didn’t damage anything in the process and we’ve really got our work cut out for us. There’s no clear person that’s ahead of somebody else, so we’ve really got to try to see if we can get a little more out of the thing to be one of the top-five cars.”
The major discovery for teams that got on track Friday was how much the aero and engine changes reduced speed. Kyle Larson’s top speed in Saturday’s practice of 173.305 mph was well below the chart-topping 189.274 mph he established in All-Star practice last season. And in single-car qualifying, telemetry showed speeds barely inching toward 165 mph with drivers at full throttle.
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“I’ve never been in anything like this,” Jimmie Johnson said after Friday’s qualifying. “This is way different. I did have a few laps in a late-model stock car years and years ago, with the scale of this track and the power and just the way the car drives it kind of reminds me of that. Everything I’ve ever raced had way too much power, so this is a much different environment.”
Drivers spent more time in that environment Saturday morning, with the early reviews from those directly involved largely positive. Those raves ranged from NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer Steve O’Donnell’s “excited to see what happens tonight,” to Darrell Wallace Jr.’s forecast of “real life Mario Kart rainbow road type insane.”
The new-look All-Star style of racing may well mean a new challenge for drivers, but also for crew chiefs. Justin Alexander, crew chief of the Richard Childress Racing No. 3 Chevrolet for Austin Dillon, said that the process of applying the parts and pieces was relatively simple, but adjusting to the unknown with limited track time presents a weekend-long trial.
“It’s to give the fans something else to see and maybe we don’t end up with this package in the future, maybe we end up with some sort of modified version of it, but whatever makes the racing better, I’m a fan of,” Alexander said. “Throwing this, especially into the All-Star Race, a non-points race … when we have to do this stuff on a points weekend, it gets stressful and it’s tough. But a non-points race, right here racing for $1 million, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll just go out and it’s fun.
“We get to work on it, we get to do some changes that we don’t typically make on the cars and kind of go see what it’s got.”