World of Outlaws Late Model Series Director Steve Francis was upfront about the difficulty in removing the skew from the current bodies on the cars.
In an in-depth conversation on The Dirt Parlor Podcast hosted by Gordy Gundaker and Don Martin, Francis noted that the advance in technology for the division has gotten out of hand.
He said, “We’re out of hand. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle when race teams know that a skewed body is side force and you can driver harder. The problem is the car behind you makes it harder for that car to get air. So, our race tracks naturally get narrower. Okay, sounds great. Let’s just straighten the bodies up and make them narrow. Sounds like an easy fix, right? Fastest thing we can do.”
“The instance you do that, you make the engineers in the sport way smarter because they still know how to make that car run crooked on the race track. Go back to the Montoya broken trailing rod at Daytona. The body was skewed straight when it went through the tech, but all it did was it went around the race track and ran crooked. So now you make an engineer even more valuable. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.”
“So what you have to do is try to tweak what we’ve got to allow the second car to get more air without making the engineer become that much more valuable to the race team,” Francis elaborated. “You’re never going to take engineering out of it. You’re never going to back that out. … You can never put that genie back in the bottle.”
He then shared some suggestions of how to reduce the problem, “Do I think you can maybe square the bodies up and do some stuff like that to help, but, yeah, you’re going to have some other things that go along with that. Does the car have to drive through something at post-race where the position of the shocks don’t become the norm just to get you to roll through there straight to pass? All those things come in to play.
However, Francis concluded noted, “Every time you make one rule, you better be thinking about four rules ahead or four steps the smart guy is going to get ahead of you on that. Who wants to go down the NASCAR road? … From what they went through in the Dale Earnhardt days to where they’re at now, is that the road we want dirt track racing to go? There’s no question, I’m against that road.”
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