There’s a lot of chatter heading into Sunday’s Cup Series race in Darlington, with a new short-track package with more horsepower and a simplified diffuser set to shake things up. It was a hit in Phoenix earlier this season, but will the outcome be same in South Carolina? Chase Briscoe doesn’t know.
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The Joe Gibbs Racing driver had previously predicted that the race could turn into chaos, making it one of the toughest tests on the calendar. Power, in his view, was only part of the equation. The bigger shift would come from stripping back the diffuser and changing how the car sits on the track.
Briscoe reached that conclusion after spending a week and a half in the simulator, where, by his own account, he was fighting the car in every corner, lap after lap. When asked how a 750-horsepower setup might play out on tracks that stretch to a mile and a half, Briscoe did not lean one way or the other.
“I don’t know. I could see it going either way,” he said in an interview pre-race. “If you start going faster, it probably makes the field even more spread out. I feel like, just the difference in the top teams and the bottom teams are going to be even more extreme.”
“So maybe it just is one of those things where the rich kind of get richer, where right now, like we are not underpowered, but like we’re all relatively the same speed for the most part.” Further continuing, Briscoe added. “At least from 1st to 30th, and in qualifying is only a couple tenths, where I think as you add more power, like the setups, everything is just going to become more and more important.”
“So, I could see it going either way. I think it could make it maybe a little bit better. Maybe it makes it worse. So, yeah, I’m obviously not against it. I mean, it’s way more fun for any of us to go drive a 900-horsepower car versus a 200-horsepower car.”
Drivers and insiders often call for more power, but Briscoe stated that the outcome is not set in stone. On some tracks, the shift could play into a team’s hands. On others, it may not move the needle at all. There are places where the current product may already be as far as it can go.
The new short-track package brings a 3-inch spoiler and a simpler diffuser to cut underbody grip. At a place like Darlington, that change might reduce time on the throttle and trim overall downforce by around 25%. Add more horsepower—750 Hp as per the short-track package—to the mix, and the margin for error narrows. Cars become harder to keep in line, tires take a hit, lap times swing, and the odds of a race that gets out of hand go up.
A bump of around 12% in power paired with a drop in downforce means drivers will have their hands full. The track surface already chews through tires, and runs could see a four- to five-second falloff. Teams will have to dig deep, and drivers will have to wrestle the wheel from start to finish.
The 750-horsepower setup might boost speed on the straights while placing more strain on the tires and brakes during braking and acceleration. With less downforce to lean on, cars may respond differently in traffic, and drivers will have to adapt on the fly.
