That's being passive aggressive. You absolutely accused them of trading safety for money. You admit you don't follow the sport, then you claim they haven't done enough. They done plenty but there is still more to go. At these speeds with the way the cars develop there will always be room for improvement. They do care about the safety of the drivers and the fans though your point of view doesn't square with that.
Reduction in downforce to slow the cars is something they are always working on to tame the cars at a plate track. The difficulty comes from the aero interaction between the cars. The balance is being able to get the car so it handles well alone and also in packs. What works well for one may not work well for the other. F1 has that issue now, when they pull up on a guy, it washes out the front wing which makes not only
passingovertaking more difficult, it make it more dangerous because the car is more likely to developundersteera push as the downforce is taken off the front of the car. It's only been within the last 5 years or so that they seem to understand better the forces at work in packs of cars from an aero standpoint. They are working both in tunnels (they rent Windshear) and using CFD to better understand what they can do to minimize risks and still provide for close racing. One way they could start (and I reckon they will before the next plate race) is further limit the pushing of cars in a line. The guys that were in the pack behind Dillion said they were being pushed and were pushing and that's what caused them to bunch up at the start. It's also not only the doing of the mechanical configuration. In the end there are humans that are driving these cars and they are doing all they can to win. Many of them are far more aggressive than they realize particularly when after the fact they complain about what happened on the track.
Man, what is it about this board and people putting words in your mouth when they disagree with you? It's not being passive aggressive. It's just what the words say. I hoped it wasn't down to money. I feared that it was. Why is that so difficult to believe? Fearing something is not at all the same as making an accusation of same. It was absolutely not an accusation.
I didn't say I don't follow the sport. I said I don't follow it the way I have for most of my life, which is to say 'fanatically'.
As for the rest, what you're describing is their efforts to figure out how cars work in packs rather than just getting rid of the pack racing. Everything they do points to a reticence to move away from pack racing. As I said above, that's fine, but if that's the way they want to go, then they need to do some work in other areas to accommodate it.
I don't think NASCAR doesn't care about its drivers or its fans. I believe they do. Hopefully they'll get on top of all of it and there'll be no need for conversations like these in the future.
Edited by AustinF1, 08 July 2015 - 02:07.