JIMMY MAKAR, GENERAL MANAGER, JOE GIBBS RACING: “The air filter is extremely important part of keeping the engine reliable throughout a 500 mile race. There are two aspects to it: one is to keep them from robbing horsepower and the other is to make sure that the engine stays free of debris. WIX has done a very good job over the years of developing air filters that do that for us. The parts that they make for your street cars and the parts they make for our racecars are essentially the same thing. And we have found through our dyno testing and track testing that they can actually make more horsepower, if that makes sense, but the use of their filters because of what they do to air flow entering the carburetor and changing distribution inside the engine we can actually make our engines more efficient and make more horsepower. They certainly don’t deplete horsepower out of our engines. At the end of a race when we’re done taking engines apart when we come home, one of the things that we have struggled with in the past is grit and grime dust and dirt and debris getting down through the filters into the cylinder walls of an engine, scratching the walls and hurting the piston rings and we lose horsepower that way. That has been minimized tremendously since we’ve used the WIX products in our engines.” WITH ALL THE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT THAT IS INVOLVED WITH RESTRICTOR PLATE RACING AT DAYTONA AND TALLADEGA, DOES IT SURPRISE YOU A STOCK WIX FILTER IS RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL OF THAT? “We spend countless numbers of hours trying to develop specialized parts that aren’t available to the general public to go racing with in all aspects of our racecar. And certainly the ability to go and basically buy an over the counter filter that performs as well as anything you can design and buy yourself and race is pretty impressive. There aren’t very many areas of our racecar, if any, that I can think of that we can take parts like that and not have to improve them to improve performance for ourselves. This is a testament to WIX and they’re commitment to putting products out for the general public and not just racers that are superior.”

KIRK BUTTERFIELD, ENGINE TUNER, No. 18 INTERSTATE BATTERIES CHEVROLET: HOW IMPORTANT IS THE AIR FILTRATION SYSTEM AT DAYTONA? “It plays a big part because the air/fuel mixture on a plate engine is very critical, especially when you are in the draft and do a lot of cowl work, a lot of air box work to try to get the maximum amount of air into the engine. It’s very big. You’ll see a lot of guys that don’t do a whole lot of chassis stuff. It’s mainly all about engine there. You’re trying to get as much air into the engine to make more horsepower so you can put more fuel into the draft to make it more efficient.” HOW BIG OF A FACTOR IS THE HEAT AT DAYTONA? “The heat really isn’t that big of a part. It depends on a lot of humidity. The humidity really kills a normally aspirated engine. You have to play with your timing and your air/fuel mixture but the timing plays a bigger part to burn the water that’s in the air.” THE AIR FILTER IS A STOCK PIECE THAT YOU CAN ASK FOR WHEN HAVE YOUR CAR SERVICED. “Absolutely. It is odd but you have to do what NASCAR allows you to do and play by their rules. You work around it and find ways to maximize horsepower through that area and that’s where a lot of the cowl box area, to try to get the air to come off and go in to make it more efficient with the fuel.” IT IS ALSO VERY IMPORTANT TO KEEP THAT AREA CLEAN. “Clean is just a different thickness of the air filter to keep the dirt and debris out. There are some people that run a thin filter but it’s not really to any benefit. It depends on what they call the plate in the air filter, how thick it is, to keep the dirt filtration to a maximum.” IS THAT MORE OF A FACTOR IN DAYTONA BECAUSE OF THE SAND? “Talladega is a little bit more than Daytona is because it’s a more coarse track and more debris flying around.”