With omnipresent AI, endlessly churning supercomputers and precise simulations, it’s hard to fathom what happened to so many powerhouse teams at the Southern 500.
The championship stakes were sky high in the Cup Series playoff opener at Darlington Raceway, and many of the best and brightest in NASCAR’s premier series mostly failed to deliver the goods.
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Mistakes by title contenders have been an enduring theme for years in the playoff opener, but never has there been a flop to this degree — nor in these circumstances. The errors usually come from drivers who overcooked a corner, got overly aggressive on a restart or pushed a late pit stop past the boundaries of the speed limit.
These blunders happened much earlier in this case — in the days and weeks before the green flag dropped. The typically reliable armies of razor-sharp engineers clearly misjudged the setups of several championship contenders, and the results shook up the playoffs.
It was evident from the first lap when the underside of Josh Berry’s No. 21 Ford began violently bouncing on the weathered asphalt of The “Lady in Black.” Berry understandably crashed his ill-handling car and was the worst-finishing playoff driver in last place, but many hardly fared much better.
Team Penske, which is strongly aligned with Berry’s Wood Brothers Racing team, couldn’t crack the top 10 with Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney and Austin Cindric. The best finisher of Hendrick Motorsports’ four playoff Chevrolets was Chase Elliott, who lamented trying to grind out “a top last” in 17th. He still was ahead of Alex Bowman, Kyle Larson and regular-season champ William Byron (“we’re embarrassed,” crew chief Rudy Fugle said plainly on the No. 24 team radio.)
“We just missed it on the raw speed side,” Logano said about finishing 20th in a race the three-time champion won three years ago. “It definitely wasn’t what we were looking for, there’s no doubt about that. We wanted to have a faster car, and I really expected to have a faster car in Darlington considering our history there, but unfortunately, we didn’t bring enough speed.”
It’s not unusual for a first-class team to make a wrong educated guess on its setup. Sometimes, those missteps are magnified in contrast to a teammate’s car built under the same roof. In the 2004 Coca-Cola 600, winner Jimmie Johnson led 334 of 400 laps on the same night that Hendrick teammate Jeff Gordon was a staggering seven laps down in 30th because the four-time champion barely could keep pace at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
But the across-the-board vulnerability among the elite at Darlington was stunning, and it raised an intriguing question to consider.
Was there an element of groupthink at play?
So much of modern-day NASCAR depends on feeding the right numbers into simulations that spit out suspension settings that often are spot on from the first lap of practice. In an era of limited real-world testing, the dependence on Big Data is essential for predictive modeling of the behavior of a vehicle traveling 200 mph.
The flip side is the risk of a “garbage in, garbage out” element to such sophisticated simulation tools. What if widespread miscalculations were made off using the same baseline assumptions that turned out wrong?
It wouldn’t be the first time that big teams have gravitated toward similar setup conclusions, but the outcome typically has been largely positive.
When their teams routinely dominated Cup in the mid-2000s, Jack Roush once speculated his employees were exchanging ideas with Hendrick Motorsports team members at the restaurants that line the Interstate 85 highway separating their shops (which are located roughly 5 miles apart).
“As much as I dislike it, and I’m sure Rick (Hendrick) dislikes it, there’s a lot of cross-pollination with people that move around and have breakfast and lunch together in the Charlotte area,” Roush said then.
That was 20 years ago, but the idea still applies. Trade secrets filter throughout Cup as team members migrate around the greater Charlotte area. And with so much more information being shared and critically applied in highly technical software programs, the margin for error might have grown for a collectively big miss, as what seemed to occur for so many Chevrolet and Ford teams at Darlington.
Consider that Toyotas, using their own proprietary data and simulations, took six of the top seven spots at the “Track Too Tough to Tame” as Chase Briscoe dominated with Tyler Reddick in hot pursuit.
“Whether we missed it or the Toyotas got that much better, it’s kind of hard to answer that,” Logano said. “But you look at the front-running cars there, and they had one thing in common. There’s probably some work to be done from that standpoint, but we definitely weren’t the best Ford either, so we’ve got some work to do.”
The Southern 500 was a good reminder that even in the age of data-driven racing, the best teams can get it completely wrong.
Which will learn fastest from their mistakes over the season’s final nine races?
Adaptability and intuition could now be the most important tools for the teams whose simulations let them down at Darlington.
