Juan Pablo Montoya’s pole run last Friday at Kansas was disqualified when his shock absorbers failed tech inspection. The shocks and springs are important components of the supension. A car without a suspension would bounce all over the track. When you hit a bump, the springs compress. When you go over the bump the springs extend back, which keeps the wheels in contact with the track.
The problem is that springs are, well, springy. When you compress a spring and let it go, it extends, then compresses, and just keeps bouncing up and down. Hence the need for shock absorbers.
The shock absorber (like the spring) connects the wheel to the chassis. When a spring compresses, it stores energy. That energy is what is dissipated by friction when the car bounces up and down. You’d like to damp out the spring’s oscillations more quickly than friction allows.
A monotube shock absorber (the type used in NASCAR) has a piston (a disc with holes in it, shown below) moving up and down in oil. The holes in the piston are very small, which means it requires quite a bit of force to move the piston. Punch tiny holes in a piece of plastic and then try moving it through pancake syrup. This movement of an object through oil introduces an interesting way to control force.
The force exerted by a spring is proportional to how far you compress or extend it. (That’s Hooke’s law). In a shock, the force exerted by the shock is proportional to the speed at which the piston moves through the oil. So the force depends on how fast you move, not how far you move. You pick the shock to match the spring and the two work together.
A spring can compress and extend. So can a shock. When the shaft is pushed into the shock, it’s called compression. When the shaft is pulled out of the shock, it’s called rebound. You’d like to be able to adjust the rebound and the compression independently. One way you do this is that the two sides of the piston have different hole geometries. A hole may be large on one side and small on the other, which affects how the oil flows through the piston.
Another way you can tailor the compression and rebound response is by changing the shims (very thin washers) that bend when the piston moves up and down. The shims bend more when the piston moves faster, uncovering more of the holes and allowing more oil to move from one side of the piston to the other. (At very low speeds, a valve in the shaft allows direct flow.)
The key to how a shock works is the resistance to the piston’s motion. The resistance is provided by the oil. Most shock oils are between 2-5 wt. More viscous oil provides more resistance to motion.
Look back to the first picture of the shock. There’s an area there marked ‘gas’. Ignore that for a moment and assume you just screwed the two pieces of the shock together without doing anything special. If you want to try this experiment at home, get some cooking oil and put it in your blender. Turn the blender on – that will mimic what happens when the piston moves up and down. (If you have a French press coffee maker, that would be a more accurate analogy, but a blender has the same effect and is less likely to engender spousal irritation.)
Whirl the oil in the blender for a few seconds and you’ll notice that you have foam. Foam is gas bubbles trapped in a liquid or solid. Stryfoam, for example, is air bubbles in a polymer. The foamy mess you have in your blender was created when the whirling motion incorporated air bubbles into the oil. (When you have bubbles of one liquid trapped in another, that’s called an emulsion, but it’s the same idea.)
There’s a problem when shock oil foams. The principle on which a shock works is that the oil provides resistance to the piston’s motion. Air trapped in the oil makes it much easier for the piston to move. You use oil in a shock because it is incompressible, which means that when you press on it, it doesn’t change volume. When the oil foams, you push on it and the air that’s dissolved in the oil doesn’t provide much resistance. A marshmallow (which is a foam) is a combination of sugar and air pockets. When you press on a marshmallow, the first thing that happens is you press all of the air out of the air pockets and it’s pretty easy to do that. Only after you’ve squished the air out do you start to compress the sugar that forms the rest of the marshmallow. A shock has to be filled with an incompressible fluid for it to work. Foam isn’t incompressible.
You have to pressurize a shock. One reason is because oil sloshing around the inside of the shock won’t provide much resistance for the piston. If we fill the top part of the shock with an overpressure of air, the pressure above the oil will prevent the oil from sloshing. Air is about 21% oxygen, with the rest primarily nitrogen. Oxygen is more soluble in oil than nitrogen, meaning that it is easier to dissove oxygen in the oil than it is nitrogen. Depending on the type of oil, the difference can be a factor of two. This is why nitrogen is used to pressurize shocks. Nitrogen gas is less likely to create foam than air. In fact, if you press down hard enough on the oil, you can actually decrease how much gas is dissolved in the oil. You literally press the dissolved gas out of the oil.
NASCAR allows the rear shocks to have nitrogen pressures between 25 psi and 75 psi. Apparently, the rear shocks on Montoya’s car had a pressure of 85 psi. There was an interesting discussion on NASCAR Now with John Darby in which he pointed out that after the initial overpressure was discovered, they allowed the shocks to cool to ambient temperature before re-measuring the pressure. Why? The ideal gas law in action. When gas gets warm, the gas molecules in the tires move more rapidly, and that increases the volume and the pressure. The same thing happens in your tires.
NASCAR wanted to give the team the benefit of the doubt: perhaps the shocks had gotten so warm that the pressure had increased beyond the allowed value. I made a quick calculation (remembering that the 75 psi/85 psi are gauge pressures, so you have to add 15 psi of atmosphere to those numbers, converting degrees Fahrenheit into kelvin, and making the assuming that the change in volume is negligible) and I estimate that the temperature of the shock would have to rise about 60 degrees Fahrenheit to create a 10 psi change in pressure. It’s not at all unreasonable for the shocks to reach that temperature during two laps of qualifying, which is why NASCAR waited until the temperature of the shocks had come down before making the measurement.
What difference would an overpressure make? When teams realized the importance of the car’s attitude in terms of aerodynamics, the primary job of the shocks became keeping the rear end of the car up in the air to get maximum downforce. Higher pressure in the rear shocks could be used to keep the tail end of the car in the air longer. The upper pressure limit used to be 175 psi. That was changed after the 2005 fall Dover race, where two Hendrick cars finished 1-2. The Hendrick cars were set up so that the rear of the car didn’t come back down very quickly after a bump. Both the cars failed the post-race max height inspection after half an hour of waiting. The language in the rule book now requires the shocks to return to their normal position after compression within “a reasonable time”, and a maximum value for the nitrogen pressure. A really high nitrogen pressure prevents the shaft from returning quickly.
There’s another reason for a maximum pressure limit. A closed container with a very high interior pressure is also commonly known as a bomb. If there were a failure in the threads or (more likely), the seals on the ends of the shocks, you could have shock parts flying out without warning.
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Diandra, the question in my mind is whether an “excessive” amount of gas pressure in the shock constitutes a “performance advantage”. Based on the way that NASCAR has chosen to deal with this (no punishment beyond loss of pole position/start at rear of field), there is indication that it was based solely on a perceived “safety” issue.
Is this an isolated situation—was Kurt Busch’s car also inspected in a similar manner, since it was noted during qualifying that the rear of the car was up in the air? I don’t recall whether the 42 car was noted to have a “tail up” attitude during qualifying, so I question just how much the gas pressure itself will keep the tail of the car elevated–I believe the valving of the shock has more to do with the way the rear end remains elevated, and that’s why NASCAR took control of rear shocks, at least for certain tracks. Gas pressure on the oil reduces or eliminates cavitation, but the viscosity remains the same save changes in temperature, it seems to me.
The pressure exerted on the oil by the gas chamber exerts it’s force on the relatively small area of the piston rod, which DOES put (upward) pressure on the mounting points of the damper, but unless pressure beyond 75# exerts far more force than I’ve noted on my passenger car, which is equipped with Bilstein high-pressure gas shocks (~360 PSI, I recall)–there is that upward pressure, but it does not “raise” the car–the car is heavy enough to force the piston in the shock to come back to it’s normal ride height/attitude.
What I mean to have understood is that IF the shocks are disconnected, it does not change (ie. lower) ride height as a result–that really ought to be the way the test is conducted and rule enforced by NASCAR–and maybe it is. What a shock does statically and dynamically can be significantly different, and for NASCAR to say that a car “looks” a certain way on-track and therefore has an advantage is rather discriminatory, in reality.
So, if the question is simply that of safety, for whatever reasons NASCAR deems it appropriate–does that mean my street Bilstein shocks are dangerous and that I should remove them from my car? Not gonna happen….and by the way, what do the shock suppliers to the race teams say about the issue of gas chamber pressure and relative “danger” involved? I seriously question the sanctioning body on this matter–just another rule that does nothing but give them a way to penalize, when they choose to impose it.
This blog is the best! The explanations are simple enough for “analog” brains like mine to absorb and understand.
That said – Why wasn’t this anomaly caught in tech prior to qualifying?
Hi Bill: If you figure that the shocks can rise in temperature by probably a hundred degrees during the race, raising the pressure from 75 psi to 85 psi isn’t much of a change. I don’t think there’s a safety issue at the pressures they are using. Now if you fill the shock to 200 psi and then heat it up, that’s a slightly different story.
From the 2005 Dover race, we’ve got evidence that the shocks can hold the car up in the air – the HMS cars were still way above legit ride height 30 minutes after tech inspection. That’s pretty impressive.
The origin of the rule is that NASCAR want people to use the shocks for shocks, not as part of the aerodynamics package. That was what instigated the max 75 psi rule. It may be that NASCAR deemed that there was no intent to circumvent the spirit of the rule, someone just wasn’t careful in their measurement. Of course, NASCAR also usually tells us that they don’t try to discern intent.
Ride height violations don’t seem to merit the kind of penalties that tweaking with the body (see Hendrick at Sonoma last year or the 1 car this year) produces.
John: The shock pressures aren’t checked in pre-qualifying tech inspection, which is why it wasn’t caught then. DLP
Funny I would stumble on to this so many years after the fact.
I worked in the shock room at Ganassi when this happened…
Monday morning after the race I personally took all the nitrogen gages from the build stations, including the car haulers, built a manifold to mount all of them and pressurized it to 75psi. I even took pictures of it and probably have them on an old hard drive somewhere. Every single gage from the shop and haulers showed something different and none of them matched up to the certified/calibrated gage we ordered to test them after this incident. Some were off by more than 20psi. This whole deal was a simple mechanical error and nothing intentional at all.
This is a great story and thanks so much for taking the time to put it up. I would love to know what types of standardization teams have in place now for things like that given how much more precise NASCAR’s measurements have become. I don’t think the average person understands how many places there are for something to go wrong in the process of building and setting up a race car to go to the track!