Cars

Gen-6

Notes on Respect and Fines

2013-03-11 dr. diandra 7

A short note on Denny Hamlin’s comments on the Gen-6 car and subsequent fine.

I’ve talked to a lot of the people in the trenches involved in designing and creating the Gen-6 car. That includes people from manufacturers and teams. All of them have said that the development of the Gen-6 car is a major sea change for NASCAR. This is the most collaborative that NASCAR has been with introducing a new car in some time. Manufacturers and teams were consulted and they all feel that their opinions mattered and were taken into consideration. This was a very, very different process than the COT introduction, which was designed by NASCAR and plans delivered to teams. […]

Engines

Eliminating Restrictor Plates?

2012-10-05 dr. diandra 9

Every return to a restrictor plate track brings suggestions about how we might eliminate the restrictor plate. Restrictor plates serve the very necessary function of limiting car speeds at Daytona and Talladega so that the cars stay on the ground. The negative is that they remove throttle response. One suggestion from some readers that I hadn’t heard of before suggested that NASCAR could just change the rear-end gearing parameters to shift the power curve and reduce horsepower that way. Will that work? […]

Engines

Why is Michigan so Hard on Engines?

2012-08-23 dr. diandra 3

Four Hendrick Motorsports engines failed at Michigan International Speedway . But Michigan is hard on engines. Let’s see why. […]

Building Cars

Glass Cockpits

2012-07-06 dr. diandra 5

When I first saw on twitter that Brian France had said NASCAR was looking at “glass cockpits” for the future, I was a little mystified.  (You can see exactly what he said on @nateryan’s twitter […]

Engines

Pocono: The Shifty Triangle

2012-06-09 dr. diandra 0

NASCAR engines like to run at about 8000-9500 rpm (revolutions per minute); however, the tires on the car rotate around 2400 rpm at 200 mph. The gearing in the transmission and the rear end gear reduce the rotational engine speed, with different gears providing different reductions. When you talk about the size of a gear, you’re actually talking about the relative sizes of a pair of gears. The gear on the left in the diagram has 20 teeth, while the gear on the right has 10 teeth, so this gear would be a 2:1, meaning that the smaller gear rotates twice every time the larger gear rotates once. […]

Cooling

Engine Issues at Talladega: Vapor Lock, Gas Cans and Oil Coolers

2012-05-07 dr. diandra 7

An usual number of teams “ran out of gas” or had engine troubles during the Talladega race. The TV analysts had some ready answers for what might have caused these problems. Their extemporaneous theories tend to elicit sighs from engine builders, who know that problems can rarely be diagnosed at the track – and even more rarely by someone who hasn’t looked at the car.

A wonderful aspect of blogging is that we’re not called to have answers on the spot like the television broadcasters and we have the leisure of time. Let’s examine some of those theories. […]

Cooling

Plate Racing Rules: Getting Ready for Talladega

2012-05-03 dr. diandra 0

Most of the issues we were talking about at the start of the year regarding the measures NASCAR has taken to eliminate or reduce the two-car draft are still in play, so I thought I’d put the most important in one place as you start getting ready for Talladega this weekend. […]

Andy Randolph

Kansas Wrap Up: What Caused all the Engine Failures?

2012-04-26 dr. diandra 5

The defining characteristic of the Kansas race was the surprising number of engine problems. Many of those problems can be attributed to the change in rear gear from a 3.89 to a 4.00. At 190 mph at a track like Kansas, your wheels make 2270 revolutions per minute (rpm). If you watch the telemetry on the television broadcast, you know that the engine is rotating around 9500-9900 rpm. Since the engine is attached to the wheels, there has to be something to change the rotation rate between the engine and the gears. […]

Andy Randolph

Kansas: Temperature and Horsepower

2012-04-23 dr. diandra 8

There were a lot of engine problems at the Kansas race last Sunday. Also, a lot of theories as to why there were a lot of engine problems. Let’s start with the cooler-than-expected temperatures. […]

Aerodynamics

Can You Really Bring Back the Same Car? (Or the Same Track?)

2012-03-30 dr. diandra 0

Every week at least one driver says they are bringing back “the same car we raced at…”.  But unlike Indy or ALMS racing, each shop builds multiple cars, each specialized for a specific track. Let’s […]