Why Force's new car is important

When he moved his affiliation to Chevrolet at the close of the 2014 season, anyone familiar with the 16-time NHRA Funny Car champion knew that the BowTie Brand would get plenty of promotion and intellectual property sharing from the Force clan. The question was: would they get Wally trophies for winning races?

With three Chevrolet Camaro Funny Car competitors flying the Chevy colors in 24 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series races for the 2016 season - John Force Racing’s (JFR) second year with Chevrolet - Force and his daughter Courtney, son-in-law Robert Hight have been formidable.

Now, with Courtney Force leading Funny Car competition after seven races (thanks to her single victory and strong results in the other six events), Hight lying fifth (1 victory) and John Force in seventh place, some of the programs the team has been working on are coming to fruition. The first is a new Camaro body that debuts at race No. 8 this weekend in Topeka, KS.

In fact, the work to design and construct a new Chevrolet Camaro Funny Car body has been on-going for at least a year, John Force confirmed. The interim body used for the past season and the start of the current campaign was a very basic change from the previously used body. Using computer generated analysis and computational fluid dynamics to optimize air flow, members of the Force team and their counterparts at GM built what they hope will be a better mousetrap.

The new lighter-weight Chevrolet Camaro body hasn’t turned a wheel in competition; its debut comes this weekend. It’s had time in the wind tunnel and plenty of computer generated testing, but nothing compares to competition itself, which is where the new Chevrolet Camaro will find its way in the hands of drag racing’s most successful Funny Car pilot.

Features unique to the new body

Design features unique to this body include its cowl-induction hood, double-bubble roof, lower side-body lines, a body-side “bone” line and its new front splitter, which was intended to enhance downforce and certainly bear similarities to the production Chevrolet Camaro. Aero tweaks include what Chevrolet and JFR expect to be practically-optimized downforce and drag, together with improved stability - again, they won’t be able to prove those items until they get on-track this Friday.

Prime safety improvement is the dual burst panels on either side of the engine, where they normally lie in front of the engine, an area not nearly so susceptible to engine implosions as the sides. The change is one that many teams have talked about but that JFR is the first to implement with the new Camaro body. Better visibility is also an important factor of the new body.

Both Force and his counterparts at Chevrolet expect the new 2016 Camaro body to be formidable in competition, in part because the basis for this car is a two-door production coupe. The competition races Funny Car racecars that are based on four-door production vehicles: Dodge has a Charger R/T and Toyota uses a Camry.

The Peak Antifreeze 2016 Chevrolet Camaro Funny Car body makes its racing debut on Friday afternoon at the NHRA Kansas Nationals, with the sure hand of John Force guiding it. He’s looking forward to better visibility with the A pillars set farther back in the car’s body and better safety with the new burst panels. Will the car have better speed? Until Friday, it’s all promises rather than reality.