Superspeedway racing has been vastly improved over the last couple of years. While dangerous on one side of the coin, it’s been thrilling on the other. Most of the races ran in the traditional pack, with the end of them seeing guys move towards tandem drafting.  We saw how well it worked during Speedweeks back in February at Daytona.

At the end of the Busch Clash, a wrecked race car of Denny Hamlin, who was a lap down by the way, pushed his teammate, Erik Jones, who had another badly damaged race car to the win on the final lap. Two crashed race cars faster than a couple of other clean cars.

Tandem drafting worked. It was shaping up that way at the end of the Daytona 500 too. Prior to the last restart, Hamlin and Ryan Newman worked well in tandem, and if not for a caution, they would have ran that way until the end.

At one point earlier last decade, tandem drafting was the quick way around Daytona and Talladega. It was dangerous, but you’d see cars separate from big packs and pair up to make runs on everyone. It was two cars working as one. It almost looked borderline ridiculous.

So, NASCAR came in and made changes to the cars that wouldn’t allow for tandem drafts anymore which set up a move back to the traditional packs.

Now, tandem drafting isn’t outlawed in the Cup Series as drivers can pair up if they so choose, but the way that these cars are designed, they can’t tandem for too long or they’ll overheat.

But, in wake of Ryan Newman’s incident at the last lap of February’s Daytona 500, NASCAR is hoping that a recent change in the aero package on superspeedways, won’t allow for any tandem racing on Sunday.

“Right here, right now, sitting here today, I would say that this should eliminate it,” said John Patalak, senior director, safety engineering at NASCAR before the June Talladega race. “I also know they will all be working to try and get back to some form of it.  I’ve done this long enough to know that I will not make any bold, blanket statements that would challenge them to prove me wrong.

“I think with the reduction in power, the aero ducts going away, that will make sort of a smaller hole, if you will, that should make it much more difficult to get into that configuration.”

Tandem drafting was one of four “bucket list” items NASCAR hoped to alter in this new package. With adjustments made, it could make life difficult to those who try. That’s what they’re getting at.

“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.”

So, without any practice on Saturday, there’s a large unknown on whether these rules will actually work. It worked back in June but this is an entirely different race. Will anyone dare to try a tandem draft at the end? With this being the quickest way around the track, wouldn’t it be used for a last lap pass for the win?

Well, it certainly could, but think about the damage that it could cause too. To tandem draft, it’s an art. The second car is blind to the front. All he can see if the bumper and spoiler of the car in front of him. If the car in front of him moves, he has to move with it. A slight bobble or mistake and not staying locked on a move would cause the car in front to spin.

So, tandem drafting can cause a big crash if the car leading the charge moves to the high or low lane and the car behind doesn’t move quick enough to stay locked. It can also cause carnage if the group or groups of cars in front move to block. The lead car has to counter the block and if the guy behind doesn’t follow suit, the lead car gets spun. If he does follow suit and the cars in front keep blocking, then they’ll get run over and cause a big crash too.

Tandem drafting and blocking is what causes 95-percent of the crashes at Daytona these days. That’s why we see so many cars wadded up.

That’s why NASCAR is trying to eliminate the need and use for it. They don’t want to see another Newman like crash on Sunday at Talladega. Tandem drafting and the speed of the cars are two very large areas that NASCAR felt that they needed to address and they did just that.

In order to do this, NASCAR did a thorough investigation of the wrecked race cars from the last lap melee in Daytona and adjusted as follows.

“This begins at the track.  As we’ve talked about before, any time there’s an incident, whether the vehicle is driven or towed back to the garage, the NASCAR officials begin a crash investigation, which includes taking pictures outside of the vehicle as well as the driver area, looking at the driver’s restraint system and removing some of the equipment we have in the cars, like the incident data recorder, and our high-speed video camera.  All of that information goes back and is uploaded to the NASCAR crash database.

“This process was followed for the 6 and the 32 cars at Daytona as well as the other vehicles involved in the crashes during that event.

“In this case both the 6 and the 32 were transported back to the R&D center where full inspections on both vehicles were complete.  The inspections included documenting, disassembling, examining all the pertinent parts of the vehicle systems, including the driver’s restraint systems.  All of this information that was found from those inspections was compared to the available data and video sources in order to create a step-by-step understanding of the crash sequence.

“During this process, we met several times with Ryan and Roush here at the R&D center, worked with them and the industry to identify these updates that John has talked about.”

If these updates were in place for Daytona, would we have seen a wreck like Newman’s?

“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.  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.”

So, will these changes work? NASCAR is betting on it.