It’s a familiar refrain but NASCAR Cup Series drivers will probably be air blocking on Sunday at Darlington Raceway because … well … it happens everywhere under this generation of car.
The Goodyear 400 will likely be a track position affair but The Track Too Tough to Tame wasn’t always that way for reasons articulated by defending champion Ryan Blaney.
“The air blocking thing is just, you know, you didn’t have it back when we were running way faster into the corner and you were hanging on more,” Blaney said on Saturday morning prior to practice. “Like you just couldn’t do it.
“You just couldn’t change the direction of your car as easily as you can now. Heck nowadays, I mean, it’s harder here because it’s a slicker track but I can just look in the mirror going into the corner just follow what that guy does.
“Before, when we were going 205-210 (mph) into the corner, you just couldn’t do all that.”
Think back to the Southern 500 in September 2022 when a faster Denny Hamlin just could not find a lane around Erik Jones as the final laps clicked off. Joey Logano found a solution for that earlier that season when he just refused to lift and ran into a leading William Byron on the final lap, but that’s ethically dubious.
Recognizing this, Goodyear has brought right side tire code D-5222 to Darlington this weekend, which is actually the compound used on intermediates to generally high praise but this is also a radically different track than those it has raced on this season.
This tire generates a great deal of falloff, teetering on the edge of failures if teams push the limits too hard, but that is generally where the best racing occurs according to Brad Keselowski.
“Really, the fall off is the most important thing here,” Keselowski said. “This tire tends to falloff as much, if not more than the others in my opinion and that could be the story this weekend more than anything else.”
That’s important, because as Blaney points out, the racing at Darlington is the best when drivers are sliding their tires and having to focus on hanging onto the car more so than mirror driving. And William Byron thinks this tire combination can get them marginally closer.
“I think you’ll see similar stuff this weekend,” Byron said. “This tire has a lot more feel to it. You can slide it around (and) you can manipulate the car a little bit but it’s not a huge difference.”
Christopher Bell said he wasn’t even aware that there were new right-side tires and that crew chief Adam Stevens didn’t tell him because they concluded it wouldn’t feel different enough.
Michael McDowell said he didn’t feel a difference at all in practice and that it largely felt like a track session at Darlington. Denny Hamlin agreed with that and said ‘it probably isn’t going to be a total game changer.’
Holistically, hopefully it’s enough to offset the air blocking because Blaney says he hates that it is part of the conversation everywhere, but especially here.
“The air blocking thing stinks,” Blaney said. “I hate talking about it. I hate fans talking about it online, and it just doesn’t look good, right? It just doesn’t look good for our sport. It takes away from the racing side. When Kyle (Busch) said it’s a defensive racing car more than an offensive car, that’s not good.”
So, obviously, this weekend remains an open question in terms of the results but could an aerodynamic change eliminate some of the dirty air at the abrasive South Carolina speedway?
Keep in mind that Darlington uses the intermediate track rules package, which uses a 4-inch spoiler and the standard underbody as opposed to the 3-incg and simplified diffuser used on short tracks.
Remember that NASCAR reverted to the shorter spoiler at Darlington under the sixth-generation car in 2021 after two years of subpar racing in which drivers drove overly gripped up cars in races dictated by dirty air and track position.
Sound familiar?
“There is a little bit of validity to that thinking,” said Keselowski. “We would need some testing to work through what that looks like but I couldn’t see it being a bad thing.”
Bell doesn’t understand why the previous generation of car used the short track package at Darlington but this one doesn’t.
“I’m perplexed by that,” he said. “I don’t think the short track package would make this car race that much differently but I agree that this fits the mold of a short track package than an intermediate.”
Hamlin said he would advocate for the short track package if it had any positive merit on actual short tracks, but since the past two years’ worth of changes haven’t helped those tracks, it probably wouldn’t help this one.
“I don’t think the smaller spoiler has enough merit,” Hamlin said. “I understand why they did it, trying to get the cars to have more rear downforce on the top side than the bottom side, but I haven’t see anything to suggest that it makes a difference.
“So, I’m indifferent for which package they run here. We’re running speeds in this car where the intermediate package probably makes sense for this track.”
Ultimately, if this tire combination does what it has done for the intermediate tracks this season, it makes all this talk about which package to bolt on a moot point.
“Our intermediate tire has raced well everywhere,” said Chase Briscoe. “Even at a place like Kansas, it fell off a ton and gave us a lot of feel. But really, Darlington puts on great races, relative to everywhere else, no matter what we race on.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.