Sports News
The Science of NASCAR
Greasy-fingered mechanics replaced by college-educated technicians.
NASCAR legend Richard Petty once said that auto racing began the day they built the second car.
That is not too far from the truth. The first production of automobiles, by Karl Benz, took place in 1888. Five years later, the Paris news magazine Le Petit Journal announced that it was staging a 78-mile auto race from Paris to Rouen, France.
The gentlemen had started their engines, and there was no slowing them down.
Unlike most sports, auto racing has always been about advances in technology. The goals have been the same since day one: make the cars go faster and increase their durability.
Sure, drivers can help to a certain extent. But a significant amount of racing success can be found underneath the hood rather than inside the helmet.
Still, the roots of NASCAR have a more human element to them than the tech-fueled open-wheel circuits of IndyCar and Formula One.
Born in post-World War II America, the earliest NASCAR drivers worked on their cars in their backyards. Crew members usually were friends and family who were fellow gear-heads and simply wanted to help.
And things didn’t change much for the next 40 years. Back then, an advancement in technology meant upgrading a stopwatch from clock-faced to digital.
Then came the 1990s and computers and ways to gather seemingly limitless amounts of data. Testing went high tech with wind tunnels and such elaborate-sounding devices as the seven-post shaker rig.
Suddenly, guys with engineering degrees began showing up in the race shops. Greasy-fingered mechanics were replaced with college-educated technicians. Everybody had a specialty, and progress was measured in hundredths of a second.
“Everybody in the garage has gotten smarter over the last 10 years,” said Greg Steadman, the competition director for Petty Enterprises. “Technology is really used throughout our whole program now.”
There remain limits to what race teams can do with the cars on the track. That’s because NASCAR officials are determined to prevent technology from overwhelming the human side of the sport.
“We are not in a technology contest, although there’s a lot of technology that flows around our industry,” NASCAR chairman and CEO Brian France said. “We’re happy about that, but we want it in the drivers’ hands.
“We want the strategy of the crew chiefs and the driving ability of the drivers to be the focus, not who has the latest gizmo that NASCAR didn’t want to say no to that’s in their car that nobody else has.”
Away from the track, however, NASCAR has become a high-speed test tube where technology reigns supreme, and computerized data is as important as motor oil.
“One of the biggest changes over the years is our ability to acquire data while we test,” said Howard Comstock the engineering program manager for Dodge Motorsports, who has worked in NASCAR since the 1970s. “The data-acquisition equipment that we put on the cars for testing purposes will measure almost any parameter that there is. So once we run a car and come back and take a look at the data, we can analyze what we think it’s going to take more of and less of to gain speed.
“We have programs that use simulation technology, whereby we can take a look at the testing data and the measurements that we took, then go back and use the simulation programs. We’ll put all of the components that we’ve measured into the computer. So before we ever go back to the race track, we have a pretty good idea of what we need to adjust.”
An example of this type of testing technology is Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), a mathematical simulation of the airflow around a vehicle.
“The best way to describe CFD is a wind tunnel in a computer,” said Kevin Bayless, the oval track chassis/aero program manager for General Motors Racing. “CFD is a simulation that predicts the aerodynamic forces acting on a vehicle using computational methods rather than physical measurements. CFD allows engineers and racing teams to evaluate the effects of aerodynamic changes quickly on a computer screen rather than in a conventional wind tunnel.”
There also have been dramatic changes in the quality of the materials used in the race cars. Long gone are the days when cars and engines were pieced together out of junkyard parts.
“There are a lot of exotic materials in these race cars to make them stronger and lighter and more crash resilient,” Comstock said. “They’re more durable as far as rotating components, moving components within the engine, the transmission, the drive shaft, the rear-axle assembly, the bearings. Anything that moves in the car, we’ve been able to make advances in fluids, greases, coatings. A lot of pretty high-tech stuff.”
If all this sounds suspiciously close to rocket science, well, it’s definitely some sort of science. And it is advanced enough that a simple love of cars no longer is enough to qualify somebody to work for a NASCAR team.
On the track, the sports still is largely about driving ability. But in the garage, it’s all about knowledge, and the technology used to gain it.
“You might spend 10 weeks doing something and only pull out one little piece of information. But it’s worth it,” Steadman said. “The other guys over here doing CFD might have found a little bit, the guy over here doing straight-line testing might have found a little bit.
“You add all that together, and now you’ve picked up two-tenths (of a second) on the race track, and that’s the difference between first and 20th. It’s that close. Everybody is just using every resource available to do that.”
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