People Archives : Page 2 of 3 : Building Speed

The Risks of Cooling Down

2014-03-14 dr. diandra 0

Engineering is a constant battle of risk versus reward. How much are you willing to challenge your equipment in order to gain speed? […]

Next-Gen Tires: Chewy on the Outside, Crunchy on the Inside

2013-05-24 dr. diandra 4

Listen to SiriusXM NASCAR radio, or peruse any of the racing websites and you will find a lot of theories about how races should be changed to make them ‘more exciting’. To try to amp up the All-Star Race, NASCAR went with four 20-lap segments, followed by a realignment (the cars were ordered in rank of average finish over the first four segments) and a 10-lap shootout. With no series points on the line, that should have made for an exciting evening of hard driving and competitive racing.

Or not. […]

Memories of Martinsville

2013-04-06 dr. diandra 2

Martinsville is my favorite track and it has absolutely nothing to do with the hot dogs. It’s a short, flat track out in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t have the high speeds and pack […]

Secrets of the Gen-6 Car: Super-strength Windshields

2013-02-15 dr. diandra 7

Don’t let its good looks fool you: NASCAR made the Gen-6 car even more safe than the CoT. […]

A vector drawing showing the forces that are exerted when the drivers is on the gas vs. off.

Hey Larry Mac! Cars Do Not Speed Up in the Grass!

2012-09-12 dr. diandra 4

Cars don’t speed up when they transition from asphalt to grass. They just slow down more slowly. […]

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. […]

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. […]

Is Tire Fall-Off the Way to Fix “Broken” Tracks?

2012-04-06 dr. diandra 7

There’s been an awful lot of talk recently about changing the layout at various track to make racing more exciting. Bristol is the most-talked-about track, with Bruton Smith planning a $1M revamp of the track to take it back to the way it was before he changed it in 2007. […]

Phoenix: Relay Race?

2012-03-06 dr. diandra 1

The race at Phoenix was the first non-restrictor-plate race. A number of drivers experienced engine-related problems, leading some media outlets to start blowing the “EFI problems” horns as loudly as possible. Mark Martin, the pole sitter, was an unfortunate casualties of a “flipped circuit breaker”. One of the most interesting exchanges to me was a series of tweets and a radio interview with Mark Martin’s Crew Chief Rodney Childers (@rchilders55) in which Childers repeatedly said it not “an EFI problem”, the radio commentators persisted in saying that it was. […]

Why the Sadler Pocono Crash Should Be the “Worst Ever”. Ever.

2010-08-08 dr. diandra 18

UPDATE: I talked to a number of people this week while trying to resolve this because it was really bugging me not having a consistent answer. They have some pretty convincing evidence that the angle […]