Racing
The Holy Grail of Racing: One Car for All Tracks
One car for all tracks means racing competitively on everything from superspeedways to road courses. NASCAR is still working on it. […]
Pocono Raceway
Race Reports
Pocono Leaders: A Tale of Two Races
Let’s look at our Pocono leaders. Pocono was going to be a doubleheader, even before the coronavirus hit. Did having two races in two days given anyone a big advantage when it comes to leading […]
Aerodynamics
Sciencing Out NASCAR Rules Changes
Rules changes in NASCAR are tricky. There’s really no way to test them before implementing them. You’re relying on the judgement and experience of the NASCAR team, with input from race teams, drivers, Goodyear and […]
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 […]
Graphs and Charts
Infographic: Fuel Mileage Races
Well, it finally happened. They made it so easy to made an infographic, even I can do it. It’s not perfect – the tool I used doesn’t like graphs with fractions, so I couldn’t get it to give me any lines between 0 and 1. But hopefully you can get a relative idea of how much fuel you need to complete a lap at different tracks. […]
Engines
Pocono: The Shifty Triangle
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. […]