Alongside the right-side door bars and extending towards the rear clip, teams will now be mandated to run a steel plate in addition to the chassis adjustments made for the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The right-side door bar gussets and the removal of the front clip V-brace are changes that remain, in addition to the removal of other front-clip components to create a softer and larger crush zone for frontal impacts.
Also included in the updates are front bumper strut softening (modifications to existing parts), the requirement of an empty front ballast box and a modified cross brace. NASCAR will incur the cost of all these updates.
“We‘ve taken a lot of the steel structural members and removed material from key elements to make this structure less stiff,” said Dr. John Patalak, vice president of safety engineering at NASCAR. “We have slots on both sides, we have deleted some cross members between the upright mounts and we‘ve treated some of the areas down low that are some of the first to contact the wall on the front clip. We‘ve also added slots to this ballast container as well as some holes, and it‘s all an effort to increase the amount of displacement we‘re getting out of the car and to reduce the accelerations that the driver is experiencing.”
— NASCAR.com —
