Masters of Ancient Technology; NASCAR keeps the clock turned back.(News)

Byline: BILL McGUIRE

One can call NASCAR Winston Cup many things-exciting, wildly popular, carefully managed, perhaps even contrived at times. But one thing no one will ever call it is motorsports' technology leader. And despite a subtle nudge here and there, NASCAR has no intention of changing that.

Nowhere is NASCAR's proud and obstinate backwardness more obvious than under the hood, where time is frozen: Suddenly, it's 1960. Cup cars are still powered by cast-iron, pushrod V8 engines with four-barrel carburetors, based on powerplants that, except in a few trucks, are no longer offered to the public. The industry has long since moved on, to alloy engines with overhead cams and fuel injection. Winston Cup director of competition John Darby makes no attempt to gloss over the fact. ``We fully realize that our engines are fairly prehistoric. If you look at the engines in production cars, they are far more advanced. But we have a simple and reliable piece, and in the grand scheme of things we're pretty comfortable with what we have,'' Darby said.

Darby proudly details each bit of NASCAR's brass-age equipment: ``It carries far beyond engines. Look at our suspensions. We're still using an old solid rear axle, no independent rear suspensions. We're still basic on our braking systems. We're even still using the old sector-shaft steering box, where production cars all use rack-and-pinion.''

It's all quite deliberate on NASCAR's part. While many racing series have positioned themselves as technology showcases, only to see entertainment value suffer, here it's all about the show. In NASCAR, the entertainment value is focused on driver personalities and close on-track action. And no one can dispute it's the biggest show in town.

But lately, the technology in Winston Cup racing is no longer merely antique; now it is verging on the archaic. Some parts of the NASCAR technical repertoire are in danger of becoming lost arts. Reportedly, when Toyota recently began its Craftsman Truck engine program, it had to scour its supplier networks for a foundry that could still make blocks in cast iron (rumor has it Toyota turned to Yamaha for help with its truck engine). Even engine tuning has entered the realm of the arcane. Since the automakers completed the switch to fuel injection in the late 1980s, there's now an entire generation of engineers with no direct experience with carburetors, as noted by John Fernandez, director of DaimlerChrysler's ...