While in the past the cars were radically different, with the COT there is a basic car template/chassis and those are tuned and built for a particular race. Someone earlier in the thread state it was a spec series but it's not more a spec series than F1 is a spec series. While the package of rules is identical for each team, there are some variations that some teams build into the cars and the engines are very different from manufacturer to manufacturer though all must meet the same spec. How them implement that is what makes them different. One big difference in the cars is that there are no computers of any kind on a pro level stock car. They only allow data acquisition on test days. It's mechanical and electromechanical and changes during the event are based on measuring, observation of the car and seat of the pants from the driver.

You are assuming that all ovals are able to use basically the same setup and that's not true in circle track racing anymore than it's true in road racing. While it's only left turns, each oval has its own personality that requires different approaches just as on a road circuit. One difference between the two types of racing is that for road racing you have to optimize the car to turn both directions, on little to no banking or camber in many cases. While on a oval car you only turn left, you have to optimize for the particulars of that track as one would road racing. I've road raced for about 10 years and just last season started racing short track. Got into trouble a bit earlier by not treating it as its own sport and relying too much on what I'd learned road racing. The opposite I think happens to some of the circle track guys when they come road racing but if you approach each type with the particulars required for that style of racing it's not too bad adapting.

For sure, Nascar is very difficult.
Look at Mansell and Montoya examples.
They were able to dominate F-Indy in their first year, but JPM have just made the cut in 2009, after 2-3 seasons, racing for the same Ganassi.
If the transition to Nascar were so easy -as the car is less complex - JPM should be nailling more victories by now, and we know Nascar has much more races per year.

Its better than "Man who never quite understood Formula 1, tries to form an opinion, with help of comments from someone, who has more than a decade of firsthand experience of driving formula 1, on some discipline on which Man also has no understanding of, which the formula 1 veteran happens to have just actually tried, and given an opinion on.."

..or something..

several levels of cluelessness (?) never hurt anyone, has it??

ganassi arent as good in nascar as they where in cart/indycar where they where always a front running team, the nascar team was very much average... and oval racing is very different from circuit racing

Adjustability of the car is not necessarily a positive, at least from the engineering perspective. If you design the car correctly, you don't have to tinker with it that much to get it to run well. Of course, when it comes to quality of racing, bad cars are much more preferable to good cars.

The fact is that NASCAR is a lot more competitive than Indycars ever were. In hindsight, the high profile of Indycar racing compared to NASCAR in the 1990ies was largely undeserved (although NASCAR itself went through a revolution when sprint car drivers migrated).

That statement is not accurate. There are issues that change on the track surface, layout, amount and kind of rubber down, the differences in tire sets and environmental factors that weigh into the equation. While the changes themselves might not be in large increments, there could be several changes being made over the course of the race to give the car the sort of feel with which the driver is most comfortable.

Fundamentally good cars are not sensitive to changes in conditions.

That statement tells me you have zero experience in building, maintaining and driving race vehicles. If anything the best cars are the most sensitive to changes.

trulli is truly right about napcar.....nothing like a good wreck to get the blood flowing.....

pop a wreck again
it is time for another beer and stack of ribs....


been five minutes since i done finished the last bunch....just gotta remember to spit out that chaw of tobacco....otherwise the ribs taste funny

That's just silly. Everyone knows a real redneck can eat with the chaw still in...

You're right about that, but you're also missing my point. Good cars should be sensitive to setup changes, but they shouldn't be sensitive to changes in conditions. Are you saying that a car that stays in its sweet spot in a wide range of conditions is worse than a car in which you have to constantly chase the setup?

You're leaving out the equipment level. JPM moving to Ganassi is the equivalent of someone like Shrub moving to maybe a BMW or Toyota level team (I know they are both out). Two teams with some moderate success and still moving up with some bumps along the way.

The majority of people who know would agree that in Hendrick or Gibbs equipment Montoya would have multiple victories by now.

In the Indy side Mansell and JPM were with teams that are the equivalent of Gibbs and/or Hendrick.

u don't know what you talkin...ribs taste funny and worse is sometime the chaw goes down when you swallow a big bite of ribs, and then the chaw gets stuck in your throat.....Phooeyy

That's exactly what I think.

Not at all. What happens is that conditions DO change the way a car responds to driver input. The ability for a car to hold settings and the flexibility to be able to tune a car to a given condition is what makes a good car. For example if I test during the day then the next day run that same track at night with cooler track temps the car using the previous days setup will not respond like it did in the day. A good car will have the ability to be incrementally adjusted over varying conditions while maintaining the same relative state of feel to the driver. The notion that a good car is unaffected by changing conditions is not at all accurate.

Excuse me, Are you one of the members of Axisofoversteer?
I like the blog very much but hey you definitely put wrong headline here. you should have read trulli's interview from autosport where he also said driving the cars is easier in nascar as you have a lot of thing to worry about but they happen far slower than in F1 and you can give big corrections without losing it.

As the other said, i think the series are totally different and that pretty much everybody who tried nascar coming from F1 said that.

Exactly ! Stop getting paranoid you lot. Enjoy them all.

All demand different types of skills

Trulli will be driving in F1 next year, says the situation is evolving rapidly.

NASCAR in the future it seems as he didn't rule it out, he says the test only satisfied his curiosity.

Montoya gave him advice to help him out as well.

Jarno, I'm gonna tell you a secret...
eat a lot of hamburgers, hot dogs and tacos...
it helps to put "ballast" in the wright side of the car.

Vettel about Nascar

Q. Are you curious to drive one of these cars and see what they're like?

SV: Well to have a try probably yes and to see how it is in the oval. Speaking to Juan and other drivers, obviously the cars are much heavier, lazier, there's a lot more movement whereas a Formula 1 car is very sharp and reactive and everything happens very fast - you have to catch the car quickly. Here you're sliding and making a lot of movements with the steering wheel. To have a try in a test would be nice.

Obviously going into races it's a completely different story because it's one thing to control the car on your own, but another one to control it with 40 people around you and probably five or six ten centimetres away from your car. It's not easy, and that's another step up.

Well said!!!

What vettel says is exactly what modern open wheeler (and F1 is the pinnacle of this) are about: Driving on the track. nascar is about car control.

That's two different kind of racing and both a interesting because they require different skills.

I think F1 is more about car control, driving the track & being really aggressive when it counts. It is engineers who figure out the setup, from there your task is to survive crazy 2 first laps, and basically pull off consistent laptimes. Overtaking, unfortunately, is nonexistent in F1.

In NASCAR "pure" driving is lesser issue; but getting the setup even slightly wrong means you´ll be hopelessly slow. And unlike in F1, drivers actually play big role here. Then you have more wheel to wheel racing, more saving your equipment, more strategy, etc. Lots of things.

If you made 10 average Cup drivers to switch places with ten average F1 drivers, chances are initially Cup drivers would struggle much more. I honestly cannot see average Cup driver posting competitive laptimes at Spa, after one day of testing. But come race day, you´d get similar results. F1 drivers struggling in Cup race, and Cup drivers struggling in F1 race. Only for different reasons. That is what Trulli and Vettel are trying to say; even if Cup cars are easier to drive, that doesn´t mean Cup racing is any easier.

Finally, while we can discuss the differences, it makes no sense to fight about which series is "harder". We cannot even make valid comparisons, as nobody from NASCAR has ever made the switch to F1.

I disagree. Car control means that you have to manage the car so that it can go where you want to go, i.e preventing it from over/under steering, losing traction etc..
That's precisely what nascar is all about and that's also why the set up is so hard to be the fastest.

Modern open wheelers are just the opposite, the cars are easy to drive, they will turn when you want them to turn, go on the kerbs with ease and be stable on braking and acceleration. Down to the tires they are done to corner with the throttle applied so that the cars do not lose speed.

The result is a far greater speed, and thus the skill required here is all down to the speed, you have to push the cars just under the limit but you can't overshoot it or you lose far too much time, all is about finding the best line while pushing.


The same goes for karts too, the faster they are, the less you have to worry about details, you actually have to find the best line to exploit them at the limit, if you don't you either far too slow or in the wall/grass which is quite thrilling because the competition with the other pushes you to the max.

In NASCAR you have to predict what the car would do after your input from the steering wheel. In F1 the car does exactly to the millisecond what you tell it to do from your steering input and they are glued to the track where the cup cars are sliding all over the place..

Vettel also says that you are busier in NASCAR with everything that is going on around you.. Trulli said that you have be very smart in NASCAR not so much in F1..

Vetter: "Obviously going into races it's a completely different story because it's one thing to control the car on your own, but another one to control it with 40 people around you and probably five or six ten centimetres away from your car. It's not easy, and that's another step up."

What a misleading title, haha.

F1 Around.