This year’s facelifts for the Ford Mustang and Toyota Camry mean that the NASCAR fleet needs to be redesigned. Ford and Toyota have both used these changes to production cars to give their Cup Series competitors secret aerodynamic advantages. Ford went for a striking front-end design with the Mustang, with sharp, tall bumpers. Toyota, on the other hand, has taken a more systematic approach to making the most of every NASCAR-allowed part inside that aerodynamic efficiency box. The front end of the 2019 Toyota Camry XSE Cup car is flatter and more like the “hammerhead” shape of the new Camry production car than the jagged front end of the previous model. At first glance, the Camry Cup car seems less flashy than the last version. However, a closer look reveals a number of features that point to better overall aerodynamic performance and a better fit for drafting tracks like Talladega and Daytona. When looked at more closely, the hood has grown longer and is now a flatter rectangle shape. It also has new, small hood duct outlets that look like they have been moved inside. Toyota has had several chances to change these hood duct exits, which are an important part of the cooling system for the NASCAR Next Gen car. This is the third version of ducts that have been used to remove air from the radiator since the first Next Gen-era NASCAR Camry came out. The word “CAMRY” on the front can now be seen clearly as a flat spot on the hood as we walk down it toward the front bumper. That flat part makes it look like it’s meant to improve the Camry’s draft on superspeedways like Atlanta, Daytona, and Talladega, where cars have to be lined up back-to-back. Even though Denny Hamlin and Bubba Wallace are great superspeedway drivers, Toyota’s Next-Gen car has needed help on these kinds of tracks. By making changes to the car’s draft, the next year it should be more competitive. Having more Camrys on the field is also a good thing. The bumper’s bottom grille area shows that picking wasn’t the only goal. The body of a regular car has C-shaped corner vents that are meant to work really well on a race car. There are also steps at the bottom of the bumper that help airflow over the side of the car. The front bumper’s tilted look shows that the edge is K-shaped to improve airflow, which is the most obvious part of its complexity. The new step or ramp can be seen in the lower corners of the hood. This is a big change from Toyota’s previous design. It looks like a dive plane from a GT race car. It’s possible that the people who made these ramps were thinking about how to control front downforce, but nothing in a race car’s aerodynamics works by itself. With the ramps, teams should have more choices about how to set up their cars and connect them to other streamlined parts, like the flat underbody. As we walk around the side of the car, we see that the area above the rocker panels has become much flatter. The small bump in front of the hole for the back wheel is no longer there. Since the XSE is now the top trim level of the new Camry, the TRD badge has been taken off the door panels. The quarter-panel style runs into chamfered bumper corners and thinner fake tail lights to look like the production car. This gives the back of the car a lighter, more sculpted look, even though it hasn’t been changed as much as the front. Both the race car and the production car were made in the United States by Toyota’s Calty Design Research in California. The 2024 Toyota Camry XSE race car will show how much Toyota cares about details, just like the new Toyota Camry for everyday use. “We can’t wait to race this car, and we hope to have many years of success,” said Paul Doleshal, group manager of racing for TMNA (Toyota Motor North America). “The amount of work put into this car’s production cannot be overstated, and we thank everyone at TRD and Calty Design for their efforts in creating a premier vehicle for our team partners to compete for wins and championships.” Toyota has designed the Camry Cup car with a wider view in mind, while Ford’s most recent Mustang racer seems to have been more focused on performance on the intermediate track. The different aerodynamic parts seen in these launch shots suggest that improvements have been made to make the most of the values allowed within the NASCAR-set aerodynamic efficiency box without going too far in any one way. Since the Camry has done better on intermediate-sized tracks than the Mustang, it seems possible that they are trying a different strategy to see if it helps them do better on other types of tracks. A few teams will start pre-season testing next week at Phoenix Raceway with the new, better cars. The real test of whether all the work in the wind lab and on computer graphics paid off will be at the Daytona 500 in February when the cars compete for the first time in a points race.
