The most noticeable thing about the course changes to the Charlotte Roval wasn’t how to attack the corners. It was the turtles.
“It feels like you get a concussion every lap, basically, if you hit them,” Martin Truex Jr. said. “It’s not much fun.”
Kyle Busch was “glad somebody said it. It hurts.”
Busch said Truex, his former teammate at Joe Gibbs Racing, wasn’t exaggerating by using the concussion word. While he didn’t anticipate seeing the data from the impact of hitting the turtles until after race weekend, Busch admitted his head was already hurting.
“Turtles”is the nickname given to the hard plastic elevated curbing used in the chicanes. On the frontstretch of the Charlotte Roval, which was reconfigured to be a sharper angle, the turtles were launching Cup Series cars during practice and qualifying. It was a hard impact for the drivers when the car bottomed out upon landing.
“The frontstretch chicane reminds me of Watkins Glen before they redid it,” RFK Racing’s Brad Keselowski said. “You just really crush the curb but that’s where the speed is at, so you kind of have to.
“It doesn’t feel good, no. But I don’t know if it’s supposed to.”
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Busch, however, was confused about why the chicane was altered to begin with. Charlotte Motor Speedway wanted to create another potential passing area, and the change was made ahead of its seventh annual race (as well as the new infield portion where a longer straightaway was created).
“I don’t understand the reasoning behind making it tighter; just to make us slower through there so we don’t get into Turn 1 as fast?” the Richard Childress Racing driver said. “I don’t really know. But the turtles over there, the sharper corner, if you don’t ramp them, you miss the exit, you miss the second set of them. You have to ramp them to give yourself a shot to be able to miss the exit ones.”
The changes at Watkins Glen came after NASCAR examined the data from driver mouthpieces that showed the impact of going over the curbing. A smoother curb transition was put in place over the elevated curbing that is at the bus stop. There were no longer concerns or complaints about the impacts after the change was made for this season’s event.
Time will tell if the Charlotte Roval gets the same treatment. Busch, however, doesn’t expect changes before Sunday’s event.
Chris Buescher wasn’t fazed by the changes to the course. He felt the frontstretch chicane wasn’t different from what has been there in the past.
“You have to use the maximum amount of curb where I felt like before you could get away with dodging it a little bit more,” he said. “But it’s really narrow now, so we have to get all we can get on that one.”