CONCORD, N.C. – It takes months of preparation before the drivers hit the track every weekend, and part of that preparation is perfecting the engine inside each race car.
This week’s event at Talladega Superspeedway brought with it a special circumstance for engine builders with new rules and modifications for the 500-mile race.
The Talladega race will be run without restrictor plates for the first time since 1987. That raised some new challenges for the engine shop as they prepared for Sunday's race.
One of the new implementations was a smaller tapered spacer, which is meant to reduce airflow to the engine. The change by NASCAR had the engine shop preparing as soon as possible.
“The minute they made the rules change was the minute we started working on it,” engine assembly manager Danny Emerick said.
From a durability standpoint, engines are put to the test before they reach the Alabama venue. The 2.66-mile track holds 500 miles of racing on Sunday, which means a long run for the car’s engine. Mark Isler, who has been with Hendrick Motorsports for 21 years building and inspecting engines, explained that the durability of the engine is imperative to have perfected before it is placed inside the car.
“From a durability aspect, there were things we had to test further and understand,” Isler said. “Now, instead of doing one durability (test), for one race engine, we will do two. We disassemble them so we can see what’s going on with the engines. There are things we had to do to make a part a bit more robust or design it differently so that we would have the life expectancy we need out of it.”
Isler expressed he couldn’t begin to count the amount of time the engine shop spends on each individual engine. With so many people touching the engine to offer their expertise, the machines are constantly worked on.
“Hours, hours, hours and hours,” Isler laughed. “It takes time. As you restrict air to the engine, it really affects the power level. Places where we used to be able to make bigger gains, we're unrestricted, we don’t see that as much anymore. So, between trying to make the parts happy and trying to improve engine performance, it’s a lot of hours and a lot amount of time.”
Despite the challenges Talladega brings, the team members in the engine shop along with the rest of campus are looking forward to the race to see how it all plays out.
“Talladega is going to be interesting,” engine assembler Shane Parsnow said. “We’ve never gone there with that much horsepower. It’s a big unknown. We don’t know what kind of RPMs we're going to be turning until we get there and get the draft. It’s going to be interesting and it’s going to be exciting.”
To see how the restrictor plate-less engines perform, be sure to tune into the race Sunday at 2 p.m. ET on FOX.