Stock car racing, NASCAR-style, is more like NFL football than it is open-wheel racing. Fenders mean there’s a little bit of “wiggle” room when you’re three-wide and faster than the other two, and the chrome horn is not a trophy, but an attitude.

At Daytona, however, it’s a little different. NASCAR teams are dialing up the engineering in an effort to make their “stock” cars lighter, more slippery and, at the end of the day, faster than anyone else’s. That’s because restrictor plates are in use, and that robs horsepower and speed.

Where to start?

How about the body? The bodies on the Chevys, Dodges, Fords and Toyotas used in NASCAR competition are all pretty standard, but as is often said, the devil is in the details. NASCAR allows a certain amount of arranging when the body is hung on the chassis, but not enough to make a huge difference.

The devil-detail connection happens when you start to add color to the primer.

Whether it’s a wrapped car—full-body decals—or a painted one, the idea is to make it slice through the air. There are many ways to do that, starting with the finish.

Depending on which team is doing the prep, the processes are specific. Some teams paint the car one color, add the decals and put on a clear-coat finish to get the edges of the decals out of the air.

You might think that is wretched excess, but it isn’t. Studies have been done on this very thing, in the wind tunnel, and you’re talking fractions of grams of drag. The teams will take as much drag out of the equation as possible, and some even hand-paint the decals onto the car to get it done.

Another way to do that is, after the decals are applied and the clear-coat sets, taking a wet sander to the finish to scrape every last blemish and bubble out of the body. Back to the wind tunnel for a final swipe with the Lionel train-smoke wand, and they’re off to Daytona.

Some teams even apply a slippery substance (Teflon®-based) to the suspension pieces and the undersides of the cars to make them go through the air a little cleaner, though not much air gets through the new nose and under the car these days.

Air won’t turn a corner, but it will follow a curve, and the smoother the curve, the faster the air flows over it. That’s downforce, not drag, and it is sought out like the map to the City of Gold.

Remember, we’re talking miniscule amounts of drag here, and teams will change normal hex bolts to smooth-topped buttons to reduce it. And that’s UNDER the car, too. While five bolts so changed might not make a difference, 45 or 50 will, and teams have the numbers to back it up.

Anything that can possibly add drag is pored over and reduced, if possible. Fender braces, body brackets, NACA-duct openings…you name it, it goes under the microscope and through the wind tunnel. Fender openings get special attention too, tucked as tight around the wheels as possible to reduce the possibility of air getting underneath and into the body work.

Inside the car, innocuous things like wiring harnesses, shifter boots and the like are optimized to be air-tight or slippery, depending on where they are. The air flow to the driver is arranged so that whatever drag it produces is minimized (NACA ducts are the funny-shaped inserts in the windows, and they blow air on the driver, the oil cooler, dry sump and transmission housings.

Even the brakes are gone over with a fine-toothed comb. At Daytona, the teams use the smallest pads and calipers they can and still stop the car on pit road, and the brake fans are located out of the slipstream as much as possible. If you’re using the brakes at Daytona, you’re either avoiding a wreck or dragging to stay in the draft and not start The Big One on your own hook.

This year, with the new pavement at Daytona, the tire temps should not be high enough to melt the bead of the tire, but you can never be sure, so bead blowers will likely still be in use, according to one Toyota crew member.

Everything that can be lightened, smoothed or otherwise polished is, all in the search for one less ounce of drag and one more ounce of downforce.

Wasn’t that week off after Atlanta a nice break? It gave us time to sit around and debate the merits of The Crash, who was at fault and why, and just kibbutz on the sport in general.

Well, hold onto the wheel, cinch your belts up tight and get ready for old-fashioned mountain thunder this weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway!

Rooting and gouging and beating and banging are par for the course, and it will be interesting to see how the boys react to less race track to work in…as if there was a whole lot of it to begin with on a .533-mile high-banked oval!

The addition of new SAFER barriers has cut down the available room for such beating and banging, and you just might have a driver or two who will forget that what was there once is no longer. At least when they forget, they’ll remember right quick when the right front bangs off the barrier!

Speaking of banging, listening to some of the drivers talk about who was at fault in the Carl-Brad deal was educational. As was the case last week, there’s not a whole lot of old-fashioned dirt slinging to go around. Nobody really knows exactly where the rope limit is with NASCAR, though they slapped Carl Edwards with a nasty three-race probation. That’ll learn ‘em!

Considering the hue and cry that rose up from the aftermath, it was quite tame when you think about it. In days of yore, Edwards would have been in the stock in front of the speedway for race fans to see…and knowing race fans, they’d take pictures with him to send to their buddies!

When the great unwashed (non-NASCAR fans) get hold of a story like this, exacerbated by video in slow-mo and endless commentary, they weigh in. Usually, it’s one of those head-shakers where you just say to yourself, “Wow, they really know nothing about the sport. Good thing nobody listens to them.”

Case in point is Slate.com, which posited that drivers who intentionally wreck other drivers with injury as a result could be liable in the courts. There is some validity to the premise: hockey is a sport that has visited the court system in recent years. It’s more about if a fan or fans are injured that is at issue, I would guess.

A North Carolina attorney who has worked with Richard Childress Racing says that an indictment of a driver for intentionally crashing an opponent would depend on where it occurred and what the results were.

“District attorneys are elected officials,” attorney John Morrow said. “Politics are part of the game. Let’s say you did something like what happened at Atlanta and even admitted, ‘Hell yeah I did it’ and it was Dale Earnhardt [injured]. Do you think a district attorney might indict you to get votes and publicity?”

You think? Civil litigation is America’s new national pastime, and deep pockets are always in danger of pilferage. Tracks must carry at least $50 million in insurance coverage for stuff like spectator injury, property damage, product and participant liability, according to Scene Daily.com, and that’s not a big enough piggy bank for the litigious among us.

Oh, and Morrow is the guy that got Dale Earnhardt’s life insurance policy paid out following his death, so he knows that of which he speaks.

News during the break reveals that Jeff Gordon and wife Ingrid are expecting again, this time a little Gordo to go along with little Ella Sofia. Betcha his wardrobe for race day will be far more plush than the other NASCAR tot’s is even now, dontcha think?

Also, we should all hail the return of that piece of metal that might make a big difference in the performance of the “new car” that NASCAR has been pushing the last three seasons: the blade spoiler.

Earlier this week, 24 cars got together at Talladega to test the new/old piece, and in drafting among a gaggle of them, speeds were in the mid-to-high 190s. Hoo-rah! A couple years ago, when the place was repaved and the asphalt was coal-black, speeds were well over 200 mph—a big no-no in NASCAR’s book (see above, insurance, etc.). NASCAR actually ordered that the timing and scoring monitors could not show speeds over 200 mph, if you can believe that (I can, I can!). Lotta 199.99’s on that board, too.

Let’s hope it puts the racing back in National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, huh? As A.J. Foyt once put it, “Let me go as fast as I want on the straightaway and let me worry about getting it turned.” It’ll never happen, not in a million years, but it’s a nice thought anyway!

As the NASCAR world gets out of Daytona mode and into “regular” race mode, let’s see what Juan Montoya has to say about what he expects.

“Been up for a while now…should be interesting to see who is fast this year,” he wrote via Twitter (@jpmontoya). That’s very accurate, because they really are different animals.

Daytona is about getting out of the chute without killing your point standings. It’s about seeing how all the new bells and whistles work in a competitive setting and avoiding major mistakes. It’s about how well your car “sucks up” and how it drives in the pack, not about raw speed.

Auto Club Speedway is more about horsepower and how your car handles without the jet stream that is the draft at Daytona. California is so wide that you can pick a line and stick with it, or change lines from one of the track to the other and see what works best.

One thing we learned from Daytona is that the high line, which was so important last year in terms of momentum, is no longer the place to be when it comes time to race for the big dollars. At least it wasn’t at Daytona.

Last year, when NASCAR implemented the leader’s choice of restart lines, the top was the place to be because you could keep the car wound up and get a good push when the cars below you had to lift.

Both Gatorade Duels were won on the bottom, despite the perceived momentum loss from having to turn the car down and keep it there.

ACS racing is more about downforce that your car generates, not about how much air you can duck inside the draft tunnel.

That’s where horsepower comes in as well. Fords are chomping at the bit to see how the new F9 engine works on a “downforce” track, and Greg Biffle says he thinks that a lot of Fords will be at the front of the pack on Sunday.

We’ll see. In the opening salvo of practice at ACS, Mark Martin was at 181-plus just three laps in. First Ford was 10th (David Ragan). The first seven cars early on were over 180 mph.

Another aspect to ACS that you don’t usually have at Daytona is fuel mileage. The 500-mile race on Sunday often turns into an exercise in managing fuel and being in shape to run hard at the end.

It’s a classic case of hitting the pit window and telling the driver, ‘you got what you got, now go get us a trophy.’ That means it becomes less a team effort and more of a SMOD (Small Matter of Driving).

Less than a week removed from his Daytona 500 triumph, Jamie McMurray is most likely bleary from all the attention he received. The 500 winner goes on a media tour that rivals a presidential campaign, beginning with the Champion’s Breakfast on Monday at Daytona and ending when he’s finally dropped off in the motorhome lot on Thursday night.

Speaking of McMurray, the Earnhardt Ganassi Racing engine that powered him to victory showed up pretty well at Daytona, didn’t it? Everybody talks about the prodicious horsepower generated by Roush Yates and Hendrick and TRD (Mark Cronquist too) but EGR proved its bullet was of at least equal caliber at DIS.

All the preseason hubbub about the fact that Dodge only has three cars full-time in the Sprint Cup Series doesn’t seem to faze Kurt Busch. He’s second early in the first practice run to Martin, just four-hundredths of a second slower. Of course, his Dodge mates Sam Hornish Jr. (16th) and Brad Keselowski (31st) aren’t faring quite as well, but neither of them is Kurt, now are they?

It will be interesting to see, indeed, who can tame the “flat” ACS banking on Sunday. Biffle is correct in that ACS has been a good track for Ford the past few seasons, but it’s also been good for the Chevy camp as well. Toyota has a couple of drivers in the top 10, too.

Random ThoughtsIn the wake of “Pothole-gate” last week at Daytona, it seems that NASCAR had already thought of using Bondo as a track patch. Given California’s temperate climate, there’s likely no need for the stuff this week, but man, what a PR bonanza that was for 3M!

If Boris Said could get decent backing and room to just drive, he’d be the next Dick Trickle. Personality-wise, he’s a breath of fresh air and just wants to race, a la Kyle Busch, and he’s great for quotes. Danica who?

Picks for the weekend: Biffle wins the race, Jimmie Johnson will have a second straight race of less-than-stellar results and there will be at least one time during the race that Junior Nation will be up and full of throat…most likely during a green-flag pit sequence. ACS is Junior’s worst track, statistically.