Joe Gibbs Racing NASCAR violations

[Hornin Hong Kong]

The Link

Can someone explain what they did? Obviouly it was heinous.

 

[The Bandit]

Toyota has been taking a lot of heat for the high horsepower their cars are making in the Nationwide Series. This extra HP has helped them earn most of the wins in the series.

Although NASCAR previously approved this engine, they now want to reduce the HP the Toyotas are making. In order for NASCAR to determine what changes they need to make to the engine, they put the cars on a chassis dyno after some races. A chassis dyno measures the HP the car is making to the wheels. Essentially the rear wheels are put on rollers and a computer measures how much power they are making at a particular RPM.

What Gibbs did was classic nascar cheating. They put a magnet on the backside of the gas peddle. This meant that when the car was on the dyno, the peddle never went completely to the floor. This meant the throttle on the card never completely opened, whcih means the dyno reads a lower peak HP.

There's no denying Gibbs broke the rules. My problem is that Nascar, continues to change the rules throughout the year. What they're doing to toyota is penalizing them for the hard work they put into this engine. There are other Toyota teams that don't make as much HP as gibbs, but they get hurt even more since their engines dont make as much HP as the gibbs-built engines. They're the teams that are really getting screwed with the rule changes.

 

[BadgerinATX]

Thanks for the information. I'm not all that well versed in NASCAR, so I have a few (probably naive) questions:

Why is the accelerator even a part of the test? Can't you just adjust the throttle valve on the engine? I'm asking this because, as we are now seeing, there's a lot of stuff in between the accelerator and the dynamometer that can be tampered with. I'd like to cut out all the unnecessary stuff in between.

I've read that the Toyota engine that was approved by NASCAR is not as similar to the GM/Ford/Dodge approved engines as some critics would like. The description I read was very nebulous. Do you have any idea what differences they are talking about? Are those differences significant?

How likely is it that they will be keeping a much closer eye on the Gibbs Sprint Cup teams given the Nationwide affair? Is there enough cross over between the series to warrant that suspicion? My guess is that there will be no more 'tinkering' from them or any other teams for a while.

 

[The Bandit]

When the car is on the chassis dyno, they test it by pressing the gas pedal from inside the car. IMO, it's too dangerous to test at full throttle from under the hood. Since the magnet was on the backside of the pedal, the pedal never reached full throttle during the dyno test.

I'm not sure I can answer all the questions, but I do know Gibbs builds their own engines for the cup/nationwide. I believe the toyota truck, nationwide and cup engines are very similar, except for the carb. The other toyota engine build is Triad Racing. This is basically Bill Davis racing. Although Bill Davis' cup team (Blaney) is't very good, he does build great engines for his team and the other toyota teams in cup. He also builds the engines for the truck series, that toyota happens to dominate.

I'd love to see chevrolet win every week, but if Toyota can find a way to make more power within the rules, then they deserve to win. They deserve to be rewarded for their hardwork in the engine room.

 

[The Bandit]

forgot something. Nascar had already changed the engine rules for the toyota engines in July. This dyno test was done 2 weeks after the rule change. Nascar was essentially doing a followup dyno test, to see how much hp the toyotas were making after then engine change. The engine change nascar mandated in july was a bore change to the engine block. I believe Toyota had about a 15-20 hp advantage prior to the rule change