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This is significant when one recalls the incident of Warren Johnson covertly measuring Larry Morgan's new Stratus during testing at Las Vegas last February; nothing more was said because the car was legal.

"A Pro Stock car wants just enough down-force in the front to steer it, and just enough in the rear to keep the tires planted, so they won't spin on the gear changes," says DeKoninck.

Also, the rear tires need to be packaged into the back section of the car under specific guidelines; NHRA has over 20 reference points they use to verify a Pro Stock car against a production model.

Similar to the previous funny car effort, CATIA files were used to generate a 3/8-scale version of the Stratus design.

Here is a picture of the Stratus in CATIA. The program allows the car to be viewed from every possible angle.

Ready to go to work; you gotta love the '200-mph' duct tape, which is going to get a real torture test in the wind tunnel.

As the board says, this is Pro Stock Stratus development test #2, run #5, and the change is more clay added to the outer edges of the hood.

A Pro Stock Neon model was also CATIA-built, using laser scanning (surface-scanning an existing Pro Stocker) and then constructed to verify data. DeKoninck and the model builders and stylists were under a great deal of pressure to complete the effort for debut at the start of the 2003 season, but, when it was done, the aero numbers on the new body

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were even better than those of the smaller Neon, which had been designed primarily by hand. After four full days in the tunnel, these changes, which were verified as legal using a set of 3/8-scale NHRA-type body templates the designers created, were returned to the CATIA program using laser scanning.

Once finalized by NHRA, the CATIA design was printed out from 20 different full-size angles, and car builder Jerry Haas came to the Tech Center to advise on cutting paths for the separate panels (remember, the whole car was pictured), flanging for assembly, and other construction-related issues. Roush Composites again was called on to cut the full-scale buck, and Haas began building the first chassis using the drawings as a guide. Like the funny car, the bodies are all carbon-fiber or Kevlar, which requires vacuum-forming.

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