NASCAR says tunnel test isn’t Dodge knee-jerk

Bill Elliott headed up an all-Intrepid R/T front row in qualifying for next Sunday's Daytona 500, despite Winston Cup returnee Dodge setting woeful times in testing at the 2.5-mile tri-oval last month. Ford and GM teams have accused the ChryslerDaimler brand of deliberate sand-bagging, but NASCAR says the tests were planned several weeks ago and are unlikely to result in Dodge being penalised aerodynamically.

Elliott's Intrepid, Dale Earnhardt's Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Tony Stewart's Pontiac Grand Prix and Rusty Wallace's Ford Taurus were sent to Lockheed's Atlanta, Georgia full-size windtunnel immediately after yesterday's (Sunday's) Bud Shootout and NASCAR expects preliminary findings on Tuesday.

NASCAR president Mike Helton said: "This test has been scheduled for some time because it gave us a better opportunity to take race-trim, race-ready vehicles that are proven on the race track.

"Nothing this weekend or nothing during the month of January has given us a reason to do this. It is simply a fact-finding mission. It would be highly unlikely for us to find anything in the windtunnel that would cause us to change anything throughout Speedweeks, and it is not an effort to go find something to adjust. I won't rule it out, it's just very unlikely."

When asked why the teams knew nothing of the test in advance, Helton added: "We like to keep these things under our hat. If we didn't, I think we'd find interesting things happening to the cars on the slow down lap at the end of the race."

Elliott gave the Intrepid, which uses many of the Taurus's templates in NASCAR's ongoing quest for perfect parity, its first taste of drafting in Sunday's Shootout. As the sole Dodge, Elliott was hampered by a lack of drafting partners, but gave the car's behaviour a thumbs-up.

"The car seemed to perform pretty well," said 'Awesome Bill'. "The biggest thing we needed to do was run this thing and run the whole race, and I think we learned a lot. We just need to work on our handling package over the next few days, and I know that my '500' car is a lot better anyways. The Shootout car was just a guesstimate."

Dodges will draft together en masse for the first time in Thursday's pair of 125-mile qualifying races.