Jimmie Johnson makes a pit stop in the final laps as he won the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship at the Ford 400 race in Homestead, Florida November 21, 2010. (Reuters)
NASCAR is making the move to fuel injection in 2012, and officials insist the new system will be completely cheat-proof.
NASCAR vice president of competition Robin Pemberton said the new fuel injection system will have safeguards to make sure teams can't tamper with them in an attempt to improve engine performance.
"They will be bulletproof," Pemberton said. "They will be cheat-proof."
NASCAR announced Friday that McLaren Electronic Systems and Freescale Semiconductor will develop and provide the fuel injection systems to Sprint Cup series teams.
McLaren is a part of the McLaren group, which includes the famed McLaren Formula One team. It already builds fuel injection systems for other racing series.
And despite NASCAR's time-honored tradition of teams bending the rules to gain an edge, officials are confident the new systems can't be compromised without somebody noticing.
"The units just won't run unless they have an authorized NASCAR code," said Peter van Manen, managing director of McLaren Electronic Systems. "They will just sit there. So it is impossible to tamper with these units without opening them up, and as soon as you open them up, it is completely visible."
NASCAR's decision to ditch carburetors — something the passenger car industry did decades ago — and switch to fuel injection could offer teams some gains in performance and fuel economy.
Pemberton said fans won't really notice much of a difference.
"It'll sound the same, it'll run the same, it'll make the same horsepower — if not more," Pemberton said. "It'll be the same great racing that we've been having."
Still, those pesky restrictor plates used to reduce horsepower and control speeds at Daytona and Talladega aren't going away anytime soon.
"The plates are the easiest and most economical way, because you govern the airflow," Pemberton said. "Right now, we've got several hundred horsepower knocked out of these engines here at Daytona and Talladega. Right now, that's the easiest way to regulate it. There are some things that we will be working on over the next few years to potentially change that."