EXCLUSIVE: NASCAR responds as teams play shadow games in attempt to ‘confuse’ laser inspection system

By Jerry Jordan, Editor

SPARTA, Ky. – NASCAR has had to stay ahead of teams and continues to update its software algorithm for the Optical Scanning Station (OSS) after teams claim they found a way to “confuse” it with contrasting dark and light colors along the wheel wells and edges of the right rear of the racecar, multiple sources confirmed to Kickin’ the Tires.

This is the first season for NASCAR’s at-track OSS, where cars are rolled into a dark tented room and then illuminated with thousands of laser lights that take measurements of all angles of the car. According to NASCAR there are more than 130,000 points of measurement from eight laser projectors that are captured by 17 cameras – 16 around the car and one that is placed underneath the car. At the end of the scan, NASCAR is given a virtual 3D rendering of the surface of the car. There are two types of scans – a high-resolution and a low-resolution.

Teams with all black or extremely dark-colored racecars are given a high-res scan. Teams with light colored racecars usually get low resolution scans because they do not take as long as the high-res scans. Now, it appears that over the past couple of weeks, some teams have figured out that changing the paint scheme and incorporating a dark color – most-commonly black – around the rear fender wells, along the bottom edge of the car and/or up the rear bumper cover tricks the OSS into thinking the car is narrower than its actual measurements.

According to NASCAR, there is no difference in hardware for the measurements taken with a low-resolution scan versus a high-resolution scan. The high-resolution scan is just run longer and illuminates more data points, in layman’s terms. It can have up to 1.2 million data points, according to NASCAR.

One crew chief, who spoke with Kickin’ the Tires strictly on a confidential basis, said teams are not cheating but they learned that contrasting colors affect the average measurements used to determine if the bodies of the racecars are within the NASCAR’s specifications. The goal, he said, is to get more of the rear of the car into the air to help with downforce at tracks like Kentucky Speedway, which coincidentally is where some teams used the altered paint schemes for the first time.

Cole Pearn, crew chief of the No. 78 Toyota driven by Martin Truex Jr., agreed to speak on the record about what he knows regarding the areas teams have darkened or made black on their cars.

“Oh yeah, it’s for the Hawkeye,” Pearn said, mater-of-factly. “I think the scanner struggles around the wheel openings there picking them up. They have a high-resolution scan they run when you have a black car and it picks them up but some of the guys with colored paint schemes are able to black out those areas and they (NASCAR) will still run the low-res scan and they will probably not have those areas pick up as well on the scanner.”

Pearn pointed out that because the No. 78 car is completely blacked-out for a majority of the race schedule, they can’t take advantage of any perceived benefit achieved by the blackened areas seen on other cars. He also said he believes the reason NASCAR doesn’t use the high-res scan on every car is because of time constraints.

“Like I said, 30 races a year, we’ve got black paint schemes, so it really doesn’t matter,” Pearn said. “I guess we could do it with the blue car but it kind of looks goofy at the same time.

“Those are areas you want to get wider and stuff, so I think if they would just run the high-res scan on any car that has black on it, it would probably be, it would be fine, you know. Like we’ve got a black car most weeks and they just run the (high res), it just takes longer is the problem. It takes twice as long because it is taking more points.”

Asked specifically if the darkened areas gave teams a competitive advantage, Pearn said he believed it did but he also applauded the teams for working outside the box.

“Well, they wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t helping them,” Pearn said, when asked if teams had found a loophole. “Yeah, that’s racing right? You know, I mean I think racing is built on that and, you know, credit to those guys that they can find an advantage with it and they can make the most of it.”

It was obvious the No. 43 Chevrolet team of Bubba Wallace wasn’t trying to conceal attempts to take advantage of the perceived benefit because they only had blacked-out areas on the right rear. The left rear remained in its traditional orange paint scheme. There were, at least, a dozen cars with blackened of differently shaded areas on the right rear of their cars, including cars in the Hendrick Motorsports stable. It is worth noting that some cars appeared to also use two different shades of the same color. For example, the No. 21 Ford of Paul Menard had two slightly different shades of green and the No. 24 Chevrolet of William Byron had two different shades of dark blue; but both were only on the right rear bumper cover.

Towards the end of the 2017 season, teams could voluntarily submit cars to the OSS at the track. Now, it is mandatory that all cars go through the OSS before being allowed to compete and for the winning car, the runner-up and NASCAR’s random pick following the race.

Some of the bigger teams, including Hendrick Motorsports, Richard Childress Racing and Stewart-Haas Racing were said to have spent more than $350,000 to install their own OSS systems. NASCAR allows all teams, which helps the lower budget organizations, to schedule appointments to use the OSS at the R&D Center in Concord, N.C., to ensure they are building their racecars to the correct tolerances. NASCAR and the teams actually worked very closely on establishing the OSS and still collaborate to this day on issues each finds in their data reviews.

“Of course, if you give these teams the system they are using at the track we are going to work 24/7 trying to find ways to exploit it,” the source said. “What we discovered is that the OSS reads black and white differently. It’s the nature of the game. It’s what we do to get an advantage. It’s not cheating. It is just like what teams have done for 50-years in this sport. We are using the tools we have to try and find the gray areas where we can work to gain speed on the track. Don’t put my name in your story but I am willing to bet NASCAR puts a stop to it after you write about it.”

Despite what Pearn and others said, some crew chiefs weren’t 100-percent sure if the trick worked and, if it did, by how much. Is it an advantage of six-thousandths or sixty-thousandths of an inch?

NASCAR was adamant there is no advantage and the system has enough checks and balances to catch any perceived weaknesses teams think they have exploited. A representative of the sanctioning body pointed to the performance of the No. 17 car and other mid-pack cars that didn’t have Earthshattering finishes in Kentucky to back up their beliefs. Stenhouse finished 26th after starting 14th. Likewise, the No. 37 Chevrolet of Chris Buescher began the race in 20th and finished in 23rd. His teammate, A.J. Allmendinger, started in 26th and finished 30th. On the flip side, Ross Chastain in the No. 15 Chevrolet bettered his finishing position by two spots from 30th to 28th. Kasey Kahne started 29th and finished 25th; Jimmie Johnson, who had dark and light blue around the fender wells and black on the right rear bumper cover started in 27th and finished 14th while Jamie McMurray started in 22nd and finished 17th. All of these cars had darkened or blacked-out areas on the right rear.

NASCAR’s official comment to Kickin’ the Tires was, “NASCAR is fully confident in the ability of the Optical Scanning Station to help provide a level playing field for the garage. We continually update the software to stay ahead of any possible challenges.”

In addition, John Probst, NASCAR’s Vice President, Innovation and Racing Development, went into great detail and explained that neither he, nor his team, believe the OSS has been exploited. He said he reviewed data from the OSS at Kentucky and compared cars with the darkened or blacked-out areas against the scans of those without and he could not tell a “appreciable” difference in the scanning points. As for the software upgrades, the most recent was done at Sonoma Raceway, he said.

Probst explained that even though the cameras being used are black and white, they do distinguish between shades of dark and light but not color and, roughly six software updates previously, “very, very early on, in the developing of the rig, we did have one or two iterations that we went through to make it less susceptible to colors. And, I would say, that as an engineer the first thing you would do is immediately think that, ‘ooh, I am going to mess with this because it’s going to be susceptible to colors and reflections and all of that.’ So, it is not completely like beyond a shadow of somebody’s thinking that, ‘oh, if I mess with the colors here and not there it’s going to mess up the rig.’ But the part that we take into account is that we know that is happening and we have taken measures in way-early releases of the software to address that.”

Asked why teams seem to just now be picking up on what they believe is giving them an advantage, Probst couldn’t give a definitive answer. He does believe there may be some copycat going on where one team sees another team do something and they think it is gaining them a competitive advantage when, according to him, it is not. He also added that if it becomes a significant issue in the garage someone will cry foul.

“There is no doubt that if they do find a way to game the system, I have very little doubt that in very short order, I would say that there are enough people working with us that won’t want to race against that, that we will know,” Probst said. “And, if there is something to it, and I don’t necessarily think there is, that we will react. We are not going to sit there and let some, you know, sleight of hand kind of allow for a non-level playing field for all of our competitors. It is just not fair to the ones who are not doing that.

“When I look at the scan data I don’t see any difference, and I looked at it today, again with some of the inspectors and we don’t see any appreciable differences in cars that have that and cars that don’t,” Probst said. “I would say that most of the cars that are doing it don’t have their own rig, anyway. So, I don’t know if that is a case of, I believe some of the cars you mentioned do have a rig now but were actually doing that before they had the rig, and it’s very possible there is a little bit of monkey see, monkey do going on there.”

Probst said to find out why some teams are doing it and some aren’t is something only the teams could answer. But attempts to ask the teams with the questionable paint schemes why, were met with silence. Probst said a lot of the teams collaborating with NASCAR on the OSS are not using the darkened paint schemes.

“I don’t see any difference in the coverage between those cars and the cars that are putting the black paint, if you will, on the front of their rear wheel openings and on the tail of their cars,” he said. “I would say that if this becomes a trend, then from our side, we still have and reserve the right to bring these cars back to the R&D Center and, we have done it, you know, to actually measure them physically with other technology. So, if we feel like this is something that is starting to become that’s anymore, right now, that what feels like to us, is people trying to copy their neighbor then we’ve got some tools in our tool bag to address it.”