Asphalt
Thermography: A New Weapon in the NASCAR Arsenal
What’s Wrong With this Cow? Can you tell? If you said the cow is the wrong color, you’re close. But there’s more to the story. And What’s That Got to Do with NASCAR? Competition in […]
Physics
Energy
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 […]
Aerodynamic Forces
Drafting: Regular and Bump
I looked through the blog and realized that I haven’t really blogged about drafting. I’ve blogged about all the rules NASCAR’s enacted in the last couple of years to try to control drafting, but not drafting […]
Graphs and Charts
Are Posted Lap Speeds Really Accurate?
After every practice and qualifying session, NASCAR puts out one or more sheets of paper that look like this: This tells you who went how fast qualifying at Atlanta a couple weeks ago. I only included the […]
Bristol Motor Speedway
The Proposal to Muffle NASCAR Race Cars
Last week, Adam Stern broke a story that NASCAR is considering 15 to 20 potential changes that would help increase the fan base. They’ve already implemented race segments and we’ve heard talk about shortening race […]
Building Cars
Safety vs. Speed: 2017 Changes to the Chassis
The Evolution of the Stock Car ADDITION: If you are more comfortable with Portuguese, check out this translation by Artur Weber and Adelina Domingos – and thanks to them for being interested enough in my […]
Digital Dashboard
Is Stricter Enforcement of Pit Road Speed Limits Making Pit Road Less Safe?
The Purpose of Pit Road Speed Limits NASCAR implemented pit road speeding rules in 1991. The year before, Mike Rich, a tire changer for Bill Elliott, had been pinned between Elliott’s car and the car of Ricky Rudd when […]
Acceleration
How is a NASCAR Driver at Bristol like an Astronaut?
The Unique Challenges of Bristol Many drivers will tell you that, despite not having the highest speeds or a unique shape, or a long race time, Bristol is one of the most exhausting stops on […]
Energy
Conservation of Energy in a Crash
Last week on SiriusXM Speedway, we talked about how the kinetic energy of a race car (at 190 mph) is approximately equal to the caloric energy contained in two dark chocolate Easter bunny rabbits. The […]
Energy
Comparing the Kinetic Energy of a NASCAR Race Car to… Candy?
One of the challenges in explaining things is figuring out how to put something very unfamiliar in more familiar terms. You may not know what a Joule per second is, but you know what a […]