NASCAR Cup Series

Bumps in the road are to be expected

Published Mar. 6, 2012 12:00 a.m. ET

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Jeff Hammond

Obviously we saw Sunday in Phoenix that we are still dealing with some unknowns when it comes to the new electronic fuel injection (EFI) in these 2012 race cars. Now the way the current configuration is set up, it does have the potential for overloading the circuit and blowing it.

I had the opportunity to listen to the conversations with the folks from Stewart-Haas Racing back and forth with Tony Stewart. I also had an opportunity to talk to NASCAR's Vice President of Competition Robin Pemberton. What Stewart did in Daytona to try to save fuel worked. When he tried the same procedures in Phoenix, it overloaded the system and basically it kicked the circuit-breaker. They had to reset everything to get it to refire.

So have we found a weakness in the new system already? Sure we have, but no one is naïve to think there wouldn’t be bumps in the road along the way. Unfortunately for Tony and other teams, they have learned a painful lesson that there are certain things you have to be careful with.

It had been speculated that as the races get hotter something like this might occur. Sunday in Phoenix was a relatively hot day — something like 85 to 86 degrees. There were a lot of green flag runs. Like Daytona, we got into a situation with folks trying to save fuel, but this time it was different from a cool Monday night in Daytona.

According to the experts, the best way under this new system to save fuel is to keep your foot off the throttle. What is different from the past is with the way the EFI is programmed; excess fuel will not be allowed down into the runners, which is different from how it used to be with a carburetor. So folks are going to have to relearn how they handle situations like this.

I heard one of the guys on a race frequency say, “Pump the throttle.” Well, guess what — it doesn’t work like that anymore. This EFI is totally different from a carburetor setup. So pumping the throttle will not do you any good.

Now thinking like a racer, a racer is going to say the system failed. So folks have learned there is even more on the learning curve to be discovered. I promise you, these teams, after what happened Sunday, are rapidly trying to learn quicker and, if at all possible, eliminate miscues like this in the future.

A lot of fans have been asking about the three engine failures on the No. 1, the No. 31 and the No. 9 cars. I am still doing some digging on those answers. The first two seemed to almost be like injector failures. It might also be a valve-train failure.

When you see one smoke like that, normally we are quick to say he broke a valve-spring and dropped a valve. That said, I also think you can get that kind of smoke from not having the proper injector head pressure, and that makes it not run right. I will be heading to the NASCAR Research and Development Center later this week and will let you know what answers I get.

I also hope to find the time to talk to the Earnhardt-Ganassi folks since two of those engine failures were theirs; plus I want to talk to Doug Yates since Marco Ambrose’s No. 9 car motor failure came from a Roush-Yates engine.

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