With the game changed so radically, more than ever, the pressure falls on three parties: 1) The driver, to save as much fuel as possible; 2) the pit crew, to nail stops perfectly, especially the last one; and, 3) the crew chief to be spot on in terms of strategy – gas only? Two-tire change? Four tires?
There are only a couple of ways to change fuel mileage significantly: adjust the carburetor setting to run a leaner mixture is one. For the driver, it's letting off the gas early and coasting through corners, sometimes even shutting the engine off entirely, though that can be risky business. And the simple expedient of slowing down a little saves fuel, although obviously it carries with it the risk of getting passed.
“There are tricks that the drivers do to save fuel,” says Carl Edwards of Roush Fenway Racing. “Everybody has their own tricks, I'm sure, and I'm not gonna tell you any of mine! But I think they work.”
“I don't care how hard you try, what your technique is,” says four-time Sprint Cup champion Jeff Gordon. “You can only save so much. You've got to have pretty decent fuel mileage to begin with to push the limits. It is a number of factors – it's getting the fuel cell full on the stop, not having any error and then it's being smooth as a driver and then whether it is declutching, shutting off the engine, or just backing the corner up and slowing the pace down. There are a lot of different ways that you can go about it. One of the things we are doing now is when we go test, we try out all those things to see which one works best.”
Even the drivers who get good fuel mileage hate racing that way.
“I've lost a lot more races like that than I've won,” says Stewart, who ran out of gas near the end of the fall 2010 New Hampshire race and lost it, yet won it a year later when Bowyer ran out. “To be in a situation where your speed is dictated by the guy behind you and not by what you can do…it's a different style of racing. It's just as tough, if not tougher, than trying to run 100 percent.”
And it can also strain relationships between a team's principal players, the driver and crew chief.
“It's a battle,” admits Stewart. “The crew chief is yelling at you every lap to save fuel, but you're not slowing down enough and he knows it because he's looking at the stopwatch.”
“It's frustrating because it's totally out of your control,” says Roush Fenway Racing's Greg Biffle. “To a driver, it feels like all of your effort, all of your hard work, all of your experience, all of your knowledge, all of your precision on the racetrack, all of your pit stops – everything that you've worked at forever – means nothing, technically. If you don't have that one piece, excellent fuel mileage, it doesn't matter because it's all in vain.”
For better or worse, the game of NASCAR Sprint Cup racing is very different this year. Paul Wolfe, crew chief of the red-hot Brad Keselowski observes, “It's not always about having fast racecars now.” So can anything be done to end the fuel-mileage parade? Maybe, maybe not.
“In the future, I would like to see tires that we run fast for a lap or two, but then drop off tremendously,” says Hamlin. “It forces us to come in and take tires and then these races are not going to be won on some sort of fuel strategy or some kind of gamble in the pits. I like that part of it. It's all part of racing and I understand that, but you like to see fast cars win races.”
“Here's the thing,” says Gordon. “It all just comes down to cautions. It's just when the caution falls. It doesn't matter if you have a five-gallon fuel cell or a 55-gallon fuel cell, if the caution doesn't come out, it's a fuel-mileage race. That's what we need to go back and look at.”
• For the full version of this feature article, plus much more, check out the December 2011 issue of RACER magazine, which is NOT available on newsstands. CLICK HERE to subscribe.