NASCAR is being too secretive with engine data, teams complain

Whoa, dude....'teams not in teardown dont need to be there' ?
....bull. the whole thing about nascar is it's supposed to be out in the open. formula one hides stuff. now nascar does too. that's wrong. that's not just wrong, that's bad business, bad PR. when nascar tears down an engine post-race, it should be in front of everyone. not that i don't trust nascar....but i don't trust nascar. sorry, mon. show me the stuff, and let me talk to the losers, and then let me write the story. spec motors? when it comes to the death of the truck series or the nationwide series, we need to do something. what would you recommend? i'm here. tell me. i'll write whatever you want to say. i do not like the COT and common templates; both were bad ideas -- lazy inspectors, lazy detroit car makers, that's my take. the gear rule -- i dont know. intuitively i think it's a good idea, to keep RPM within limits; maybe it could be done with a chip, i don't know (more homework i'm behind in). and as far as motorhomes go, i'd eliminate the motorcoach lot entirely and make all these guys -- nascar officials and drivers and crew chiefs -- stay in local hotels and have to drive through traffic like the rest of us. and those helicopters -- i'd ground them. these guys are too pampered. IMHO.

hey, you might have a good point there -- why is nascar checking horsepower anyway? and if nascar is checking horsepower in order to ensure parity, then why does it keep its results secret? can't have it both ways. IMHO.

I agree that these race cars should more closely resemble the street models. with all the computer simulation programs nascar and its teams have, it should be fairly easy to match the various models up. common templates cars are a joke; maybe detroit wouldn't be cutting back on its nascar budgets if these cars had a stronger relationship to what detroit actually tries to sell, other than a decal and grill. common templates are around for only two reasons -- one, because they're easier to police; and two, because nascar at one time actually planned to sell the bodies to teams...until a Detroit executive threaten to withdraw from the series completely (or at least that's what my people tell me). sometimes i agree with ol' cliff stewart, the guy who gave rusty wallace his start: cliff liked to say nascar is the only circus where the clowns pay to perform.

Yes, the COT is a safer car....so why should nascar mandate 'safer' cars for Cup drivers and not for Truck and Nationwide drivers? that single point is so clear.
as one top team manager told me 'It's a good thing the COT is a safer car, because it doesn't drive worth a hoot.'
Many, if not most, of the safety aspects of the COT could have been incorporated in the other car, according to Jack Roush.
All that laser inspection stuff, RFI tags, yadayada.....has that opened up the sport to new team owners? has that made the racing on the track any better?
Kurt Busch may have let the cat out of the bag a few weeks ago when he said that his team has about as many different versions of the COT, tuned to specific tracks, as it did the other car....and at what price?
Explain what you mean by the body "can be obtained from NASCAR."
not sure i quite understand.
the soft wall is one of the biggest and most important safety advances ever made in this sport....nascar's study of walls, their layout and design, is to be commended. re: Jeff Gordon's Las Vegas crash, i wonder if drivers have checked out other tracks for similar potential issues. i for one don't like the pit road wall at some of these tracks.
a cap on truck teams is something i have recommended.
but nascar -- which has two hats, one as track owner/promoter, and the other as umpire -- is sometimes caught on the horns of a dilemma. what nascar really needs to start focusing on is getting more new team owners into the sport....and not absentee owners....i like the 'rule' that bill france jr. once had -- if you owned a team, you had to be at the track for the race.

Certainly: Right here --
After each race, NASCAR loads up the winner's car, with the engine still in it, and a random-pick car, with engine, and hauls them both back to the North Carolina R&D shop for thorough teardown Tuesday morning. Not only are the engines checked but the cars themselves are thoroughly examined
Of the engines, John Darby, NASCAR's Sprint Cup series director, says "It's pretty much the same post-race inspection that we used to do Sunday night at the race track. But now we have a climate-controlled environment, versus being out in Mother Nature; and that gives you more consistency and accuracy.
"And it gives us the opportunity to expand the areas of our inspection.
It's worked very, very, very well. And it's got some residual benefits too, like teams can get out of the track more quickly.
"Anybody can come and watch the entire inspection: manufacturers, competitors, media, anybody can come watch the entire thing."
And NASCAR's engine dyno tests: "We do it once a year, typically. Unless we see a problem or a concern on the track.
"Fortunately the performance of the Cup power plants over the last few years has been so close that we don't feel we need to do it more than once a year….versus, say in the Nationwide garage last year, where it was obvious that Toyota had a pretty big advantage. So there was a lot more testing in Nationwide and Truck last year, until we got the balance back.
"We usually pick a mid-summer date for the Cup series, which I'm sure we'll do again. We'll load up a bunch and take 'em back and see where we're at."
And the results sheets from those engine tests?
"Every team gets its own individual results," Darby said.
But NASCAR doesn't hand out the full results sheet to everyone. "Because there is a lot of information in those test sheets, and it's NASCAR's job to make sure everyone is competitive – not NASCAR's job to tell everyone everything," Darby says.
"But we do share the peak horsepower and average horsepower numbers, so teams can understand where they are and where the balance is."