The Building Speed Blog

Browne, Josh

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. […]

Aerodynamic Forces

Keeping Racecars on the Racetrack

2013-05-10 dr. diandra 3

Ryan Newman escaped NASCAR sanctions for his comments immediately after being discharged from the infield care center at Talladega.

“They can build safer racecars, they can build safer walls, but they can’t get their heads out of their asses far enough to keep them on the race track and that’s pretty disappointing, and I wanted to make sure I get that point across,” he said. “You all can figure out who ‘they’ is.” […]

Aerodynamic Forces

A Quick Post on Why Cars Go Airborne

2013-05-07 dr. diandra 1

A quick post for my friend, @TheOrangeCone that I’ll expand on later (I have theater tickets tonight!)

@TheOrangeCone asked why Kurt Busch went airborne in the Talladega crash. The answer is the same for all the cars that end up in the air: when a car rotates (so that its side or its back is leading instead of its front), it looks an awful lot like an airplane wing — a shape that is optimized to generate lift. […]

Air Titan

Air Titan: It Sucks and Blows

2013-05-04 dr. diandra 5

Water is critical to the existence of human life. Why do you think we spend so much time looking for it on other planets?

It is, however, less than desirable on a racetrack. Water gets between the tires and the track, which decreases friction. Decreased friction means lower speeds and higher probability of crashing. […]

Weather

Why Drying Tracks After Rain Takes So Long

2013-05-04 dr. diandra 2

Why does it takes so long for a track to dry? Why does humid weather make track drying take even longer?

Air is a mix of gas molecules: mostly (78%) nitrogen, about 21% oxygen, the rest misc. gases. The composition is pretty uniform with the exception of how much water is in the air. The absolute humidity is the amount of water in some chosen volume of air, for example, how much water vapor is in one cubic meter of air. Air can only hold so much water vapor and that amount depends on the temperature and pressure. Dry air would be no ounces of water in a cubic foot of air. If the vapor is saturated at 30 degrees centigrade (86 degrees Fahrenheit), then the amount of water could be up to three one-hundredths of an ounce of water per cubic foot. […]

Explosions

Why You Don’t Mess With Fuel Cell Foam

2013-04-26 dr. diandra 3

We’d been hearing rumors of penalties stemming from Kansas and everyone expected them to be announced Tuesday. Since penalties usually have some scientific component, I was sort of hoping for some new material. Tuesday came and went. Nothing. Wednesday, all heck broke loose as penalties were announced for the No 20 JGR car (engine issues) and the No 98 ThorSport truck.
The more interesting — and less discussed — penalty is the ThorSport/Johnny Sauter one. (It was a tough week for Wisconsin drivers). The team was docked 25 points, which is pretty huge for the Truck Series and the crew chief fined $10,000. (I realize that seems small when compared to the Sprint Cup Series penalties, but the Truck Series has correspondingly lower purses and salaries.) […]

Bristol Motor Speedway

Why Turning is Hard

2013-04-20 dr. diandra 4

Why Turning Fast is Hard If Isaac Newton had been a racing fan (which I’m sure Sir Isaac would have been if had cars been invented in the 1600’s), he might have stated one of […]

Auto Club Speedway of California

Making New Race Fans, One at a Time

2013-03-26 dr. diandra 3

I got a call out of the blue in the office yesterday. A biomedical physicist/radiation oncologist from UC-Irvine who had just gone to his first NASCAR race at Auto Club Speedway had a question about my book, The Physics of NASCAR (which, by the way, you don’t have to be a physicist to read. In fact, it’s probably better if you’re not.) […]