NASCAR and Electric Cars, Part II
It’s not quite January, but it’s close enough. The month is named for Greek God Janus, who has two faces: one looks to the past and one that looks to the future. The off-season is a natural time to look both ways. Let’s look forward, not at 2018, but even further….
Pocono Raceway Solar Farm: Sheep Power
People often point to NASCAR as being an environmentally unredeemable sport because it involves cars burning gasoline. For some reason, people looking for an easy answer like to suggest that NASCAR turn to electric cars and that would make everything better. But the cars on track are a very (very) small part…
How Can Changing Horsepower for Everyone Make Racing More Competitive?
I get this question a lot: If NASCAR decreases horsepower for everyone, how does that make it easier to pass? You’re basically taking everyone down by the same amount, right? To explain this, we have to touch on a couple concepts. Moody asked me this a couple weeks ago and I…
Cooling Fuel: Safety or Performance Issue?
Temperatures at the Dover race were unseasonably high. Kurt Busch’s Stewart-Haas 41 team was told by NASCAR officials to remove “heat shields” from their fuel cans. The cans (shown at right) have an 11-gallon capacity. Not shown in the pictures is a tube that connects the nozzle at the top with the…
Engine Rules Changes for 2015
There’s a lot of talk about all the rules changes for 2015. The limiting of the horsepower has been a hot topic of discussion, with people suggesting that NASCAR is basically mandating spec engines. Here’s a couple of things to think about in terms of engines as we get closer to…
2015 Rules: Track Records I – The Example of Charlotte
@NASCARRealTime, @TheOrangeCone and @CircleTrackNerd had an interesting dialog when the 2015 rules were announced. They were debating whether the track records that are now standing are going to be essentially locked into history. The debate ended with an appeal to me and Goody’s Headache Powder.
How Fast Would NASCAR Cars Go at Daytona without Restrictor Plates?
Doug Yates was guest on Dave Moody’s SiriusXM Speedway last week. He brought up a conversion you hear a lot in the week before Daytona and Talladega. Every 25 horsepower in the engine translates to about a 1 second decrease in lap times. Dave did the math: Removing the plates would increase the engine by 450 horsepower. Four hundred and fifty more horsepower equates to 18 seconds off the lap time, assuming all other things equal. That last part was a very important qualification. It will come back to haunt us in a moment.
Engine Blowups: A Consequence of the Testing Ban?
The stock car science blog has been a little behind due to a really big project I’ve been working on that has taken up every spare moment of writing time the last few months. The good news is that there (finally) will be an announcement at Texas Motor Speedway the…
Is the Tapered Spacer Rule Fair?
Combustion is the chemical reaction that converts gasoline into motion. If you remember back to balancing equations in high school chemistry, that often tedious exercise is entirely due to the fact that chemical reactions are just plain picky. The octane molecule – one of the common molecules in gasoline –…