NASCAR To Experiment With Composite Body

By ESPN

NASCAR will experiment with a composite body for a national series race Friday when the Xfinity Series cars take to the track at Richmond International Raceway.

Teams will have the option to run the composite bodies for races at Richmond, Dover and Phoenix this year and at all except for restrictor-plate races in 2018 with NASCAR having an eye on the bodies being mandatory for all races in 2019.

The idea is to cut costs. The bodies, which come in pieces from vendor Five Star Race Car Bodies, are attached to flanges on the chassis. The panels are made of a strong composite laminate blend. The cars will look exactly as the steel-bodied cars and the templates don't change.

A honeycomb pattern on the panels will break and show additional lines if they are manipulated outside of NASCAR parameters.

If one of the 13 panels is damaged in practice, a team can just replace that panel. The system is easy enough to use, NASCAR says, that smaller teams won't have to ask a vendor to hang the body on the car. NASCAR already uses a composite body in its regional stock-car series.

"We're getting a car in a box," Xfinity Series director Wayne Auton said. "That's a good way to look at it. So they'll have extra parts on their hauler just in case they have the incident ... in practice."

NASCAR has tried to set it up so the composite body and those who opt for the current car by making the composite body cars 90 pounds lighter -- 45 pounds lighter on each side.

"The steel body probably has a competitive advantage over the flange fit because the teams hand-manufacture those bodies, and they take full advantage of the tolerances that are allowed through the template inspection system," said NASCAR's Brett Bodine, who oversees cost-containment projects for the organization.

"This body was built to the gold surface of the Xfinity body styling, and without being able to manipulate the shape of these panels, it would be less competitive against the steel body. But as the entire field will be running exactly the same panels, so that in turn should make the entire field more competitive against each other."

That being said, NASCAR has not done a wind tunnel parity test, so the race Friday at Richmond will expose any issues plus any potential rule changes for the next race.

"We did a wind tunnel test, and our concerns at that wind tunnel test were the durability and deflection of panels," Bodine said. "We did not do a comparison to a current car. The race teams have done that themselves."

NASCAR has handled the distribution of the body pieces, and even a powerhouse such as Joe Gibbs Racing is unsure how many backup cars it will have for its three teams this weekend.

"It's a big project obviously to do a body conversion partway through a year when you're trying to compete every week in a point series," JGR executive vice president Steve DeSouza said. "The guys have done an awesome job and we're learning. ... It looks like it is going to be very similar to what we have, aero-wise.

"I don't think that's going to be a huge detriment. As we get into it, we're going to have a long day next week where NASCAR planned it to give everybody an opportunity to work through it."

JR Motorsports co-owner Kelley Earnhardt Miller said the biggest challenge has been trying to implement a car building schedule to coincide with NASCAR's distribution of parts.

"That's probably the biggest thing that inhibits us," Earnhardt Miller said. "The guys in our fab shop ... are working a lot of overtime."

She will know more about the impact after Richmond.

"The thing that remains to be seen is if these first round of cars that we do run and is there going to be any changes to that body or improvements they want to make or anything they find on the race track when it gets out there that maybe didn't work like they thought it would," Earnhardt Miller said.

The big question: Would this ever be used in Cup? Teams are expecting if it works, that NASCAR will heavily consider doing it in its biggest series.

"Right now, we're 100 percent focused on the success of this body in Xfinity," Bodine said. "We'll certainly learn about the performance of the body and the durability, and certainly always look at potentially moving things into other series, but currently we are just worried about Xfinity."