Bob Pierce: “This Docol, you can get it pretty darn thin. It flexes, it’s got memory, it comes back, it doesn’t break. It’s badass.”
It’s a never ending search to find an advantage in auto racing. The search is spent in every corner of the sport. Teams will spend the entire year seeking mechanical advantages, setup breakthroughs and race car design.
But it all starts with the frame. As a chassis designer, Bob Pierce found one of those advantages. Until… everyone else caught on.
It’s the cycle of race car engineering. At the same point, that sometimes goes hand in hand with the costs of the sport.
Would you like to see the costs come down? Mark Richards says, ‘the most rules you make, the more you spend.’ Do you mirror those thoughts?
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what happens. That makes us go back to work and spend more money to work around them rules,” Bob Pierce tells RacingNews.co.
What about in the long term?
“In the long term, it’s never going to happen. The costs are never going to come down in these things.”
“Tire companies are not going to bring their tire cost down. The motor builders ain’t going to get cheaper motors built.”
“Then all this new tubing that’s been popping up. I started with the Docol tubing, two years ago. We run 2nd in the World. Then, we followed it up with the same car and won last year. That just started another market. That stuff’s not cheap either.”
I’ve never heard of this tubing
“Yeah, the NHRA went Docol, probably 8-9 years ago with all the top-fuel cars. Because all the chromoly cars were breaking in half. In a top fuel car, the frame is the suspension. The frame is the suspension. There is no suspension on those cars. They were flexing so much to make traction, they were breaking in half.”
“They stopped it. Docol will not break. I mean, it will not break. But, it is expensive.”
It’s just stiffer?
“Well, to make something flex, you gotta thin it down. When you thin it down, then it flexes and it cracks and it breaks, then you wreck.”
“This Docol, you can get it pretty darn thin. It flexes, it’s got memory, it comes back, it doesn’t break. It’s badass.”
“Everybody’s using it right now. We had them for about a year or a year and a half,” Bob Pierce says with a laugh. “Then everybody caught on.”
This year, Bobby Pierce makes the transition to Dunn Benson Motorsports. The 21-year-old son of Bob Pierce will tour full-time with the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series.
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