There’s a lot of change that’s happening inside of the NASCAR world right now. But, one of the things that’s getting a ton of positive feedback from the teams and drivers is the lack of practice and qualifying for their races. While it creates a lot of sleepless nights for the teams and drivers heading into each race, as well as keeping them on their toes for the races themselves, it’s been a huge hit in their eyes.

I mean, think about it. One, you’re saving pointless laps on a race track which helps the organizations pocketbooks. Plus, you don’t need to be at race tracks for more than a day which means more family time.

Then, it’s making this tricky, which the best of the best live for challenges like this. You’re basically taking a blind guess on a setup entering every race right now. You don’t know how the car is going to react once the green flag drops and 40 cars are barreling into Turn 1. These cars are being prepared from past notes and in house simulations.

That’s why the racing has been vastly improved because these big teams, albeit they’re still winning on a regular basis, don’t have such a large advantage of figuring out correct setups by virtue of practice time.

You give a good team and a good driver just one practice session and they’ll find the right direction to go in for the race itself. If all the good drivers and all the good teams are up front with their cars dialed in from the start, you get difficult racing up front too in terms of passing.

Hence, what we saw last Wednesday night in Martinsville. Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, Brad Keselowski and Ryan Blaney’s teams all guessed wrong. They had to tinker with their cars as the night went on. Some things, you just can’t fix in pit lane during a race.

“I’m a big fan of this no practice thing,” Hendrick Motorsports driver Alex Bowman said last Friday. “I’m really enjoying it. I feel like we run about the same and it gives me less time to kind of dial us out for the race.

Points leader Kevin Harvick agreed.

“I think when we get done with all of this and we look at our schedules and we look at our on-track time and we look at the way we qualify and the things we do, you’re going to have to look at it,” Harvick said. “You’re going to have to look at how you function and how you do everything because it’s been a success. It’s very different than anything anybody would have ever thought about, and now you’re forced to try it, and it really hasn’t affected the way the race looks, it hasn’t affected who runs up front.”

The JGR drivers even admitted that the lack of practice time has certainly cost them in terms of the speed department in comparison to last year.

“I think it’s been a little bit tough not having practice and things like that to hit it right,” said Martin Truex Jr. “I think our cars are close. I don’t think we’re dominant. I think there’s some really fast cars out there that we’re trying to catch up to. We really have to do all the little things right to be able to put ourselves in position to win races, and we’ve done that. We’ve been in position a few times this season, and things didn’t go the way we needed them to, and when you’re not a dominant car, you’re not just going to blow by through the field when you have issues. We definitely know we need to get better.”

Truex, says that it’s hard on them to prepare for the races even because in the Coca-Cola 600, they dominated then came back a few days later and struggled to stay in the top 25.

“That’s just where the practice thing comes in,” Truex continued. “You go back to the racetrack with your best guess of what you think is going to work, and it’s not always what you think it’s going to be. You give a great driver and crew chief and engineer and team an hour to work on a race car, they’re going to get it better.”

So, with saying that, all these unknowns, NASCAR isn’t electing to have practice before Sunday’s GEICO 500 (3 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN) at the Talladega Superspeedway either. Initially, they were going to, but this past Saturday, they announced that they no longer were going to have it based off of feedback from the teams.

But, I question that it may be needed, even if it is for one session on Saturday. Here’s why.

This is an entirely new package coming to Talladega again. When they show up on Sunday afternoon, the cars will have between 35-40 less horsepower than they did last year. Also, the cars are going to run differently in the pack too and that’s due to a new rules bulletin enforced in hopes of not allowing another Ryan Newman crash to occur in Sunday’s race.

Those changes include:

• Elimination of aero ducts at superspeedway tracks.
• Reduction in size of throttle body from 59/64” to 57/64” (superspeedways only).
• Slip tape must be applied along the entire length of the lower rearward facing surfaces of the rear bumper cover and extension (superspeedways only).

The teams don’t get any practice time before now, so it’s a guess on how these cars will race on Sunday afternoon.

The biggest thing in this is with the lack or horsepower and changes to the air flow, these cars are certainly going to run differently in the draft. They hope that the changes made will decrease the closing rate to the car in front.

“That was something that we talked about with NASCAR,” Blaney said of the runs drivers were getting with the old package. “The runs were gigantic. We get hooked up, that made your runs even bigger. There’s a fine line. You need the draft to work to where you get runs on cars, but not monstrous drafts where it’s dangerous to kind of block them and things like that. Hopefully we can find a fair in-between.”

The issue with that is, who’s to say this is going to work? NASCAR made some changes last year and they showed up to Talladega for this Spring race and going in speeds well in excess of 200 mph. They needed to slow them down quickly, so a wicker bill was put on the spoiler because the speeds were greater than originally anticipated.

Without any seat time before the race, what if the speeds even with the lower horsepower still creep in the 200 mph range, or even higher? What if the closing rate isn’t affected? What if this goes the other way?

Denny Hamlin, the two-time defending Daytona 500 champion says that they’ll find out quickly in Sunday’s race to how this will work or not.

“I’ll know in the first couple laps how big the runs are, what kind of gap I need to have to the person behind me to give me the run forward,” said Hamlin. “I’ll know pretty quick what to do with the package.

“We have probably a pretty good idea of it anyway. These drivers are so good, they’re going to figure it out pretty quick.”

NASCAR, says that they did a lot of work on this package and have high hopes to accomplish four “bucketlist” items.

“The first of which is slowing the cars down,” said John Probst. “The second bucket would be to reduce the likelihood of tandem drafting. The third bucket I have listed is sort of the car 6 investigation findings. That’s as much meant to cover things that were seen on the actual investigation as we looked at the 6 car itself.  Some of those topics, if they’re on there, don’t necessarily mean there was an issue but may have drawn our attention to the importance of that particular part piece system working in the manner intended.

“Then also just cleaning up some of the emerging trends of development that may or may not affect some of the findings we found of systems we deem critical for safety but now also may have through just the course of development having other potential applications.

“When you look at the goal of slowing the cars down, obviously the restriction from 59 64ths to 57 64th is an expected horsepower loss of somewhere between 35 and 40 horsepower, which general rule of thumb the teams use is 30 horsepower per second.  With the 40 horsepower, we’d expect the cars to slow down by over a second compared to what they would have run.

“As far as reducing the likelihood of tandem drafting, the elimination of the aero ducts at the superspeedway tracks were removed to try to mitigate the likelihood that cars could tandem draft.  Then also the reduction of the power would likely reduce the likelihood of tandem as well.

“With respect to the 6 car investigation findings going into Talladega, mandatory for superspeedways, optional everywhere else, with the addition of a number 20 bar and a number 21 bar.  These bars, located on the driver’s side, connecting the main roll hoop to either the rear down bars, which are the 13 bars, and also to the rear subframe.  The rear subframe bar also has a plate that was added, 85 thousandths of an inch thick.

“We also updated the roll bar padding applications.  That went into effect when we got back to racing.  It will go into effect in truck — well, already did June 1st for Xfinity and truck.

“The key there is we didn’t really do anything but ensure that the existing roll bar padding as it can be purchased from all of the vendors is used in the form it is purchased and not modified in any way.

“We also added language for the oil reservoir tank and overflow expansion tank to have a check valve.  One of the items seen post incident was the fluid coming out of the trunk which was confirmed to be oil.  Those fixes are intended to mitigate the loss of oil in that situation when the car is upside down.

“We also from a slip tape standpoint require slip tape to be added to the rearward facing bumper surfaces from corner to corner.  The idea there would be if they are tandem drafting or bump-drafting to minimize the ability of one car to upset the balance of another.  It won’t eliminate it, but should be a mitigating part.

“Then in the final bucket of cleaning up emerging trends of development, we’ve updated the window net and window net mounting.  One of the things that’s pretty key in the outcome of the 6 car’s wreck was the function of the window net.  We do see some early signs of the window net being used for aero, so the idea out of the bulletin is starting at Talladega to have a more uniform specification for the window net and the window net mounting.”

If these changes were on the cars in Daytona, would Newman’s crash have even happened?

“Keep it from happening?  I think obviously when we go to superspeedways, as we said, any of our races, what we do is inherently dangerous.  Stopping a wreck from happening, that would be pretty difficult.

“I would say that slowing the cars down surely should and would help from an aero liftoff standpoint,” John Patalak said. “I would say our findings from the Ryan Newman crash, his liftoff was not due to an aero event but from him getting into the wall.  The idea there is reducing the speeds of the car, slowing them down.  We would expect speeds under the 200 mile-an-hour barrier here.  So from that standpoint slowing the cars down, keep from having as violent wrecks.

“Like I said, I mean, when the checkered flag is out for the Daytona 500, any of our races for that matter, the opportunity for accidents is high.  I think the changes you see here that we’ve put forward, it’s to ensure that once a chain of events like that are set into motion, we have all the safety mechanisms in place to mitigate the outcome, negative outcomes, I should say.

“In general, when we can slow the speeds down, it’s going to be of benefit for the crash itself, for the driver in the car.  It will also affect the loads on the vehicle and how the SAFER barrier responds.  Directionally it’s the right way to go.

“There were some other things happening with the 6 car as it approached the SAFER barrier.  It wasn’t in the banking, but there’s still banking present at that portion of the racetrack.

“As the car moved into the SAFER barrier, there was significant loading to the left side of the vehicle, which was due to the friction as the car was sliding.  That started that overturning moment you see in the video as the car leaves the wall.

“Those things put together – speed that it approached the wall, the angle, the friction between the left side of the vehicle, tires, jack post – all those things stack up leading to the series of events we saw occur.”