CUP: Roush Says Fuel Injection Still Work In Progress

Sprint Cup

CUP: Roush Says Fuel Injection Still Work In Progress

With Daytona opener looming, teams continue to play with parameters of new fuel injection system…

Mike Hembree | Posted February 08, 2012 Charlotte, NC

It’s almost possible to see the gears clicking inside Jack Roush’s head as he ponders the arrival of fuel injection in the Sprint Cup Series.

“We have thousands of miles of dyno and race-track [testing] time on the system, and that gives me some assurance that there’s not a glaring problem,” Roush said in addressing the season’s biggest new wrinkle in an exclusive interview with SPEED.com. “But I don’t know how long these parts are going to last. It’s untenable to be replacing them in a very short period of time.

“The other thing is figuring out what aspects, from a tuning point of view, are going to help the car turning into the corner, in the middle of the corner and coming off the corner. Those things are all programmable, but it’s going to take a lot of evaluation and testing on the track.”

NASCAR dumped the venerable carburetor at the end of last season and will debut electronic fuel injection when the schedule opens at Daytona International Speedway next week. Team and manufacturer engineers have been busy for many months toying with the new system and building a foundation of knowledge for what will be a new frontier of sorts.

“The challenge so far has been to get the systems to function so that you have reasonable assurance that you’re not going to drop out of a race because of some oversight in engineering,” Roush said.

The information base will grow as the season progresses, Roush said.

“The challenge you always have is with these cars you have to make them not too tight or too loose getting in the corner and make them not spin out in the middle of the corner and have enough traction coming off the corner that you can hook the rear tires up without losing grip in the front end so that you hit the wall,” he said. “When you shut the fuel off (to the delivery system) earlier going into a corner, it makes it loose.

“I suspect all that will change from track to track. You can’t take what you’re doing at Phoenix and carry it to Las Vegas and be right. But we’ll have 100 percent more knowledge going into the second half of the season than the first.”

Over the course of the year, Roush and his engineers, crew chiefs and drivers will be searching for one more point – the one point that would have given Carl Edwards the Cup championship last season. Edwards tied with Tony Stewart in seasonal points but lost the title in the tiebreaker – victories.

“I didn’t have a glaring problem with engineering,” Roush said. “I didn’t have a glaring problem with pit stops. I didn’t have a crew chief that was making calls that were flawed. It was just that close.

“I just hope we’re able to repeat the performance we had last year and that (crew chief) Bob (Osborne) and Carl can find a way to take a little more risk. We will take more risks and have an accumulation of more points, I believe, without having a misstep or a problem.”

And Roush said that extra push can come without overstepping.

“I think with the amount of experience that Carl and Bob have, nobody is going to make a lunge for life and make a low-percentage grab for something they weren’t going to be able to reach,” he said. “We’ve just got to tune it up a little bit. I have the confidence that my guys can do that.”

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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Mike Hembree

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