The Building Speed Blog

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. […]

Bristol Motor Speedway

Bristol: Banking

2012-04-25 dr. diandra 9

Bristol Motor Speedway made its name as a high-banked short track, but Bristol banking has changed over the years. Bristol Motor Speedway announced that they are grinding down the upper groove of the track to […]

Cautions

Cautions: A Historical Downward Trend Over the Last Six Years

2012-04-24 dr. diandra 4

Being the data geek that I am, I was really curious if the decreasing number of cautions was specific to this year. It’s not: Cautions have been decreasing since 2005,as the graph below shows. The squares are the cumulative number of cautions per 100 miles, obtained by adding up all the cautions in a season and dividing by the total number of miles in the races. (This is a more accurate number than total cautions, given rainouts, shortening races and different venues from year to year.) […]

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. […]

math

Why You Can’t Predict Anything Based on the First 10 Races

2012-04-20 dr. diandra 2

The plot below shows the cumulative number of cautions per mile since 2007.  I’m using number of cautions per100 miles to 1) make up for races that were not run to completion; 2) compensate for […]

Cautions

Are Cautions Really Going Down?

2012-04-18 dr. diandra 0

I honestly cannot help it – scientists are naturally skeptical. If you make an assertion, I will have to question you on what data you have that supports it. This is second nature to the people I work with, but I realize it is damned irritating to non-scientists (aka “normal”) people.

So when I started reading everywhere that “cautions were down 35%”, I had to go look into it. This is a preliminary post – more detailed analysis will follow as soon as I’ve read my students’ final projects and gotten comments back to them. […]

Asphalt

Cookie Cutter Tracks Aren’t All the Same

2012-04-13 dr. diandra 27

Fans tend to lump all 1.5-mile tracks into the ‘cookie cutter’ bin. Crew chiefs don’t — because each one has unique challenges. […]

Browne, Josh

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. […]

Fancy Gadgets and Short Attention Spans: Is Motorsports Doomed?

2012-04-04 dr. diandra 1

Straddling the fields of science and motorsports as I do, members of one community often email me articles about the other community. It’s interesting to see what ‘outsiders’ think is interesting about the other world. Last week, it was a series of articles about how NASCAR’s popularity is waning because kids are too busy playing video games. […]

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 […]