NASCAR took six total cars — two from each manufacturer — following Sunday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race to study in the wind tunnel later this week.
The cars collected were: the No. 1 Chevrolet of Jamie McMurray (third at Texas) and No. 9 Chevrolet of Chase Elliott (11th); the No. 4 Ford of Kevin Harvick (second) and No. 22 Ford of Joey Logano (sixth); and the No. 18 Toyota of Kyle Busch (winner) and No. 20 Toyota of Erik Jones (fourth).
The objective of running these cars through the wind tunnel is for NASCAR to gather and study data from all three manufacturers.
“The reason that this weekend got chosen by us is, it’s early in the season, we changed the inspection process, we changed the splitter rules. Those two things we knew were going to have an effect on the aerodynamic properties of all of the manufacturers’ cars,” NASCAR Senior Vice President for Competition Scott Miller said Monday morning on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “Now that we’ve raced a few times, we’ve seen what the racing looks like, we figured it was time for us to sort of fingerprint the cars. We want to just understand as a sport where we are, to get data where we are on downforce levels and evaluate our product.”