Motor Sports Weekly News

Story and photo by: Drew Hierwarter

The much reviled wing is gone from NASCAR Sprint Cup cars and most folks couldn’t be happier. From its first inception on what was then called the “Car of Tomorrow” fans have been bemoaning the inclusion of (gasp) “The Wing”!

For my part, while I wasn’t thrilled about it, I couldn’t think of another major racing series that DIDN’T have wings on the cars. From Indy cars, to sprint cars, almost all forms of sports cars, Top Fuel dragsters, and just about everybody but NASCAR used wings to generate down force on their cars.

“Quite frankly, the wing wasn’t accepted as widely as we had hoped it would have been by competitors and fans,” said NASCAR’s vice president of competition Robin Pemberton. “After much effort, we started looking and decided to go back to the spoiler.”

And so, beginning this weekend at Martinsville, the wing is gone and a flat blade spoiler is back. NASCAR conducted tests a couple of weeks ago at Talladega and again this week at Charlotte and North Wilkesboro. NASCAR sent out more than 80 copies of the new spoilers to its Cup teams. They all used near-identical spoilers in the Talladega test, but then switched to the “official” version during the Charlotte test.

The drivers are saying the spoiler makes the race car feel more stable. The fans say that with the blade the car looks more like a stock car. So I guess it’s a good thing for everybody.

If the spoiler makes the racing better and the car safer, then I’m all for it.