Rain washes out two days of practice at Kentucky
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SPARTA, Ky. -- Making a dry run with the new NASCAR Sprint Cup Series rules package has yet to materialize in two days of trying at Kentucky Speedway. There's been scarcely little dry -- dry anything -- to speak of in general.
Rain-related delays played more havoc with the 1.5-mile track's schedule Thursday, washing out an extended Sprint Cup practice for the second straight day and throwing an even bigger question mark onto the preparation and running of Saturday night's Quaker State 400 (7:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN, PRN, SiriusXM). With zero track time thus far and relatively little data to go on, how the new lower-downforce package will perform in race conditions remains the subject of speculation and educated guesses.
"To some extent, it's an educated guess every week, right?" Dave Rogers, crew chief for the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 Toyota driven by Denny Hamlin, told NASCAR.com. "You're always trying to make your car faster and be better than the next guy. With the package change, it makes it more difficult. The less downforce is definitely going to load the four springs differently, and it changes a lot of things, but at the end of the day, the entire field is playing by the same set of rules and the same situation, so they're going to hand the checkered flag to the team that is best prepared on Saturday night. It is what it is."
Sprint Cup teams expected to get their first full-fledged session Wednesday with the new reduced downforce setup, where aerodynamic rules changes -- a shorter rear spoiler and an altered front splitter and extension panel -- were expected to make cars more difficult to drive, requiring more driver input and potentially promoting more side-by-side racing. But persistent rain and the presence of "weepers" trickling from the track surface scrapped the pair of two-hour sessions.
Thursday's schedule was overhauled to allow for a one-hour, 55-minute Sprint Cup session, but ongoing weather woes thwarted that plan, raising the prospects of a congested schedule on Friday, when the forecast also includes potential precipitation.
"I think we could probably race this package without testing it," Greg Biffle said. "I doubt whether that will happen. I think that we'll at least end up getting some practice. I think we'll need some practice on the race track to race this package because we have gotten as close as we can with the setup and the springs and the shocks and the wedge and the front swaybar as we could possibly get, but I think we're gonna need at least an hour practice session to get it, 'OK, it's not spinning out and I've got it fairly decent.' Now, do we need four hours of testing and then an hour-and-a-half of practice and qualifying and all that? No, we don’t need all that, but we do need some track time."
The idea of some track time would be as welcome as blue skies over the Bluegrass State, for drivers, crew chiefs and NASCAR officials alike. Without the benefit of laps and the associated data, all sides are feeling the effects of the time crunch on a busy weekend with all three NASCAR national series occupying the same race track.
"I really don't know. It's really a tough spot for them to be in, too," Cole Pearn, crew chief for the Furniture Row Racing No. 78 Chevrolet driven by Martin Truex Jr, said of NASCAR's contingent. "I think general consensus from a lot of other teams is they wanted to stay with this, just because we're here, we've done all our prep work for this, we'd be better off. We've tested it at Charlotte; other teams have tested it at other tracks, so it's not like it's totally unknown. I don't know. It'll be a curveball."
While teams have had time to adjust to the new rules, the tires provided by Goodyear specifically for the Kentucky race had already been produced by the time the new rules package was announced last month. The tire-setup combination is expected to be more fine-tuned for the Labor Day race at Darlington Raceway, where a similar rules package is scheduled to be used.
Meanwhile in Kentucky, Sprint Cup teams kept their eyes looking skyward, left to wait another day to get out on track.
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"We all want to get out there and run and try to see what this package is about -- first of all, for curiosity, but second, just to try to get your car handling the best you can," Rogers said. "You know whenever you take downforce off, you're not going to improve handling. They're going to be a handful to drive. Then this is a situation where we took the downforce off but we didn't really bring any more tire back to compensate. So everybody's curious to see how it's going to play out, but then there's things like gear ratio and did we select the right gear, what's the pace going to do with laps, and really NASCAR needs to see that as much as everyone else so they can make rules accordingly.
"But there's nothing you can do about it. We're fighting Mother Nature and sometimes it is what it is and you're not afforded the luxuries you'd like. But like I said, we're all in the same boat, but we'll make the best of it and see what we can do."