DeTomaso Mailing List: July 2001, Message #213

At 11:01 PM -0400 7/8/01, H.P. Brelsford wrote:
>SNIP



>  To anybody who knew anything about NASCAR
>racing it was obvious that the car of Dale Earnhardt Jr. had a HUGE
>horsepower advantage over every other car in the field. The kind of
>horsepower advantage that a car would have if, for example, NASCAR had given
>the engine builder a restrictor plate with holes one sixteenth of an inch
>larger than everybody else's restrictor plate.
>


I must admit to having exactly the same opinion about the race as 
you, even down to the amount of extra hole in the restrictor.

A plate is presented by the NASCAR tech inspector to the engine guy 
of each team and then checked periodically to make sure they are 
running that plate and have made no mods, so to provide a larger 
plate would have been relatively easy.

The other thing that didn't make sense was how the commentators had 
heard that Earnhardt Jr was running at 3/4 all evening. At a plate 
race you always run WOT otherwise you will be in the back since the 
plate chokes off engine response pretty dramatically... unless, of 
course, you are trying not to look too fast and draw attention.

Regards

Geoffrey