The Teardown<\/a> podcast, Gluck explored some options. Fellow insider Jordan Bianchi wasn\u2019t quite as convinced that anything could be done.<\/p>\n\u201cThere\u2019s not much you can do,\u201d Bianchi said. \u201cMaybe if you give them a little bit more horsepower or increase in the engine, because then it would theoretically burn more fuel and that would create the emphasis on having to make more pit stops, that nature. I don\u2019t know what you can do. It\u2019s a byproduct.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so much like in this sport, though, that is often over-engineered. No offense to the crew chiefs and the engineers out there, they sometimes take the fun out of things because they figure out, \u2018Oh, we can do this or we can do that.\u2019 That\u2019s just part of the sport.\u201d<\/p>\n
One suggestion that has been made \u2014 outside of altering the cars themselves \u2014 is to change the stage breaks. Is there a way to space them out such that fuel saving becomes a non-factor?<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can never really fully put the genie back in that bottle,\u201d Bianchi said. \u201cHow do you change this? I don\u2019t know how you do that. Could you change the stage breaks? Is there a way you can change the stage breaks and maybe have the first or second stage to a point where you have a distance where you have to make one stop? I don\u2019t know. Then what does that do for that last stage and how that is parsed out? I don\u2019t know. But that would be the only thing I can think of.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is what it is. It\u2019s like so many other things where you have very, very smart people and they\u2019re looking for every little micro advantage they can. And once they figure out how to do something that gives them an advantage like Alan Gustafson did at Talladega, other crew chiefs are going to quickly jump on board. And it\u2019s just what do you do?\u201d<\/p>\n
For Bianchi, there are just too many moving parts to reliably know how things would play out if you alter one or the other. He explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand the idea of giving them a bigger engine and maybe increasing speeds and everything like that, but you have to be really mindful of the safety component as well, here,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a hard ceiling on how fast is too fast. It\u2019s a real delicate balancing act and I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a way to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gluck also fell pretty close to those lines when it comes to the fuel-saving issue. The bottom line is that now that crews know how beneficial it is to shave time off the last pit stop, they\u2019re going to try to do it.<\/p>\n
Fuel saving just happens to be the most optimal way to do that right now. So you see it fairly often.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe core problem is the same, and that is that everybody wants to take the least amount of fuel on the final stop,\u201d Gluck said. \u201cSo it doesn\u2019t matter if you don\u2019t stop for stage breaks because they\u2019re still setting up for the final pit stop. Doesn\u2019t matter if you add a stage. They\u2019re still setting up. No matter what they\u2019re like, \u2018When we get to the last pit stop, we\u2019re going to leapfrog people by taking as little fuel as we can.\u2019 That is the strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Bianchi, though, the fuel-saving issue isn\u2019t even necessarily a new phenomenon now. We talk about it after a race like the Daytona 500, where it comes into play, but it\u2019s hardly new.<\/p>\n
Still, that shouldn\u2019t keep NASCAR from pondering potential solutions. There\u2019s a reason why the issue has been so polarizing.<\/p>\n
\u201cSaving fuel is not like some wild thing that just came into being,\u201d Bianchi said. \u201cThere\u2019s been Daytona 500s that have been won on fuel mileage and strategy calls. This has always been a part of it to some degree.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe it\u2019s more prevalent now, but it\u2019s also more prevalent too because we have more access to data. We know everything. We know every lap time, we know everything to the enth degree of how these teams are saving fuel, how much they\u2019re on the throttle. We have access to that data, so this is not something that\u2019s like just new. This has happened for many years before this. It\u2019s just now it\u2019s, like many things, data has shined the light on this and now we\u2019re seeing it play out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the wake of the Daytona 500 and amid complaints about the fuel saving that went on in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-485236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}