Electronic Fuel Injection

Not Fine with Me!

C’mon NASCAR – I keep trying to defend you and you keep making it hard for me.

@jeff_gluck reports that @nateryan told Brian France that NASCAR seems like

“…an autocratic regime that doles out punishment in a capricious manner.”

While I agree with those sentiments entirely, a slightly different word comes to my mind: “chicken%$!#” […]

Edwards, Carl
Engines

The Math of Fuel Mileage

I guess when you have people feeding you all the numbers you need through your earpiece, you think they’re easy to come by. That’s the only explanation I can figure out for the snarky comments by television commentators about crews not being “smart enough” to figure out how much gas to put in the car so that it doesn’t run out before the end of the race. There have been a lot of fuel mileage races the last few weeks. Pocono is traditionally also highly likely to be a fuel mileage race, so let’s clarify how easy (or hard) it is to not run out of fuel. […]

Aerodynamics

turning left, shifting right: why drivers move to the right to get air to the engine

Jack asks: “I’m curious as to why the rear cars are offsetting to the right, when offsetting to the left would let the rear driver see what is happening ahead of them and keep the radiator in cooler air, since the exhaust on these cars is on the right. I know that all those drivers and crew chiefs are smarter than I am, so I must be missing something.” […]

Cooling

Popping Off: Breaking the Two-Car Draft by Heating up the Engines

In a NASCAR car, the pop-off valves open and route the escaping steam and/or water through a tube that passes up near the right-hand side of the car’s windshield. When you see a car “pushing water”, the maximum pressure has been exceeded and the pop-off valve opened. […]

Engines

NASCAR and E15: The Scientific Facts

The United States faces two problems when it comes to transportation:  getting fuel and the by-products of burning it. The United States imports over 2/3 of the petroleum we use for transportation, primarily because most […]

Engines

How Mobil1 Goes in a ‘Quaker State’ Engine

Got a number of questions today about how a team that uses Hendrick engines – Hendrick having Quaker State as a sponsor – can have sponsorship from another oil company. The questions were along the lines of “Will Stewart-Haas have to drain the oil pans when they get them from Hendrick?” Here’s a quick answer, since I’m in the middle of a cross-country move and just about everything I own is in boxes: […]

Aerodynamic Forces
Drayson Racing
Engines