CUP: Good To The Last Drop

Sprint Cup

CUP: Good To The Last Drop

Last year’s gas mileage champion was Carl Edwards of Roush Fenway Racing, who won a couple of Cup races by stretching his fuel mileage at the end...

Tom Jensen | Posted March 11, 2009 Harrisburg, NC

Carl Edwards gets fueled up during the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Auto Club 500. (Photo: Todd Warshaw/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Once or twice each NASCAR Sprint Cup season, a race is decided on the basis of fuel economy — the winning driver somehow manages to go further on the final tank of gas than his competitors, who either end up pitting or running out of fuel.

Last year’s mileage champion was Carl Edwards of Roush Fenway Racing, who won a couple of Cup races by stretching his fuel mileage at the end. That did not occur by sheer random luck, said Doug Yates and Jack Roush, principals of Roush Yates Engines, which builds the powerplants for every Ford Cup car.

“In this sport, as an engine-builder, the No. 1 job that we have for our teams is to give them the reliability to get to the end of the race, and then, obviously, they want the most power they can get for an advantage,” says Yates, who is also the co-owner of Yates Racing. “But it seems lately with these cars and the conditions, that we have a lot of really long green runs, so the focus has been pushed to fuel economy and it’s something we’ve gone to work on and done a pretty good job at so far.”

According to Yates, the problem of optimizing the power-economy balance is magnified because NASCAR uses old-fashioned carburetors, and not the much more precise modern fuel injection system.

“Carburetors are tough to work with and to get the even distribution between eight cylinders is a huge challenge and as our engine company works on different projects with fuel injected and single stacks, you really realize what the challenge is,” Yates said. “A lot of Formula 1 guys can tune each cylinder individually just by a tweak on the computer, but for us, working with a four-barrel Holley carburetor and trying to get good fuel economy is really an interesting engineering challenge.”

Nevertheless, it’s something that the engine builders have aggressively worked on. “I think our guys have really dug into that and understand it, and with the help of Jack Roush, who has had a history of winning races on fuel mileage, and the guys that we have now, we’ve been working on it and it seems like we’ve hit on some things that work really well for us,” said Yates.

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Tom Jensen

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