Robby Gordon running Baja 1000

The Southern California construction industry remains in the doldrums. And violence in Mexico is still a problem. Despite that double dose of bad news, officials of SCORE are looking forward to a strong Baja 1000 off-road race Nov. 19-22 to complete the 2009 season. More than 275 entries are expected for the 42nd edition of the desert classic, which will start and finish in Ensenada for the 20th time. The star of the show will be Sprint Cup driver Robby Gordon, who leads the overall and TrophyTruck points races going into the 673-mile season finale. For the past decade, Gordon has run SCORE events when his NASCAR schedule permitted. This year, breaks in the NASCAR schedule enabled Gordon to run in three of the first four SCORE events. H skipped the Sept. 12 Sprint Cup race in Richmond, Va., to compete in a SCORE event at Primm, Nev. Gordon won that race to widen his SCORE points lead going into the Baja 1000. Gordon will fly from Ensenada after finishing the 1000 to compete in the NASCAR season finale at Homestead, Fla. (San Diego Union Tribune)

Earnhardt Ganassi to Toyota?

So, what's the holdup in EGR's decision to remain with Chevy or move to Toyota? Perhaps it's the "E" in EGR. Can anyone really imagine the Earnhardt name associated with Toyota? Since Teresa Earnhardt is not at the racetrack on a weekly basis, that might be a tough answer to get. And with the current General Motors situation, Chevy is in no position to offer EGR a new and improved deal. Maybe Chip Ganassi believes delaying the decision will prevent the current engine builders from sabotaging the cars? But since Ganassi didn't want to answer the question of manufacturers on Sunday, what do we know? Richard Childress Racing's engine department, which supplies motors for EGR, was expecting a call on Friday from the Ganassi camp regarding their status for next season. It never came. Principals at EGR are expected to meet with Toyota again on Tuesday. EGR has had discussions with Joe Gibbs Racing about supplying engines for next season. Apparently Toyota Racing Development, which provides Michael Waltrip Racing and Red Bull Racing with engines, does not have the capacity at this time to be a supplier for EGR. (FoxSports)

New driver of #1 announced this week?

An announcement on the driver that will replace #1-Martin Truex Jr. could come this week, sources close to the situation said. Jamie McMurray, who is losing his ride at Roush Fenway Racing because the organization has to reach the four-car cap, is one candidate. Bobby Labonte, the 2000 Cup champion, is the other. EGR co-owner Chip Ganassi wants McMurray. Bass Pro Shops, which will sponsor the #1 for 20 races next season, isn't sure he fits the image. It's no secret that Bass Pro Shops has a contract to sponsor the #1 Earnhardt Ganassi Racing car that McMurray is slotted to drive next year. And it's no secret that Bass Pro Shops wants to move to the #39 car with Ryan Newman. Now, this is not a knock on BPS, which has offered tremendous support to many racing programs in and beyond NASCAR. But McMurray's contract with EGR has been prepared but lacking signatures for some time. No, McMurray is not going to apply for his NRA membership any time soon, but he will go above and beyond for his sponsors whether it's Bass Pro or anyone else. (FoxSports)

TRG would like Labonte to Return in 2010

Torrey Galida, a former Ford and Roush Fenway Racing executive who most recently was president of the motorsports division for sports marketing company Millsport, has taken a new job as executive vice president and chief marketing officer of #71-TRG Motorsports. One of his main priorities will be finding sponsorship so the team can race every race in 2010. Galida said the team plans to make its first partial-season sponsorship announcement in a few weeks. TRG Motorsports has run the full season, mostly with David Gilliland and Bobby Labonte in the driver's seat. Galida said the team would like for Labonte, the 2000 Cup champion, to drive next year. (SceneDaily)

The Science Behind Talladega Racing

The Science Says Talladega Needs More than Minor Rules Changes

From stockcarscience.com:

NASCAR had not one but two drivers on their roofs yesterday at Talladega. Ryan Newman’s wreck was by far the most spectacular, but I had to wince at Mark Martin looking a little shook up and disgusted during the post-infield-care-center interview. I don’t blame him – or Newman – for being angry. Yes, it’s really impressive to see three-wide around the turns ten rows back, but is that really great racing? Is it good enough racing to subject the drivers (and the fans) to the types of accidents that we keep seeing at Talladega and Daytona? Is it good racing when you can cruise around the back all afternoon and finish in the top ten with drivers that fought for the lead throughout the race? We learned (or were reminded of) a couple important things at Talladega.

1. Most people do not understand the fundamental difference between the physics of drafting and the physics of bump drafting. There is a big difference between prohibiting bump drafting in the corners and prohibiting drafting in the corners
2. It appears to be much easier for the new car to become airborne than the old car
3. When cars are traveling in a pack, any accident is highly likely to involve more than one car

Drafting vs. Bump Drafting

Air rushing around the back of the race car creates a high pressure region at the front of the car and a low-pressure wake at the rear of the car. The high pressure in the front of the car (the car ‘punching a hole in the air’) creates a force opposite the direction the car is moving. The pressure behind the car is lower, which also acts in the direction opposite the car’s motion. So the car is fighting against a force pushing it backward in the front and a force pulling it backward in the back. If there are two cars running some distance from each other, each is experiencing two forces slowing it down: one in the front and one in the back (as indicated by the large red arrows in the top figure). Between the two cars, there are four big red arrows.

When a second car gets very close behind the first car, the air rushes over the two cars as if they were one, which removes the force at the rear of the first car and at the front of the second car. In the lower picture, there are only two big red arrows, so there is less total force working against the cars and – voila – they go 3- 5 mph faster. This is the important part: the two cars don’t need to touch to make this happen. This is plain ole drafting. You can get some more information on drafting and bump drafting in the Science of Speed segment "Drag and Drafting".
Bump drafting is totally different physics. The leading car is running at full throttle. The trailing car is being pulled along, which means that at full throttle, it can actually go faster than the leading car. The trailing car bumps into the leading car, transferring some momentum from the trailing car to the leading car. The leading car goes faster and pulls the trailing car along with it. ‘Bump’ is probably a misnomer. Brian Vickers says in the Drag and Drafting video that he’s come away from plate tracks with headaches because he got bumped so hard - but adds that he was happy to be hit that hard because that’s the way you go fast at a plate track. In drafting, you’re essentially removing a force by driving within inches of each other. In bump drafting, you are applying a concentrated force from one car to another. Bump drafting takes significantly more skill. The black dot in the diagram below indicates the center of gravity of the leading car. Newton’s laws: If you apply a force, the car goes in the direction of the force. The two cars bump squarely in the top diagram. The force from the trailing car pushes the first car straight ahead.
The middle picture shows two cars in a turn. There’s no way to bump squarely because one car is rotated relative to the other. If you hit the car ahead of you, you create a torque, which is a force that makes things turn. Think of the leading car as a spinner, pinned by the dot in its center. If you hit it in a direction so that the force goes directly through the center, it won’t spin. If you hit it at an angle, the car will spin. This is why you don’t bump draft in the corners. It is very easy to hit someone on the side of the bumper, sending them into a spin and wiping out half the field. You can cause a car to spin by bump drafting in a straightaway if the two cars are not fully aligned. The bottom diagram shows that hitting a car off-center – even when both cars are going straight – is pretty much equivalent to hitting a car in the corner.

The two techniques have one thing in common: the person in the trailing car is in control and the leading driver is really just along for the ride. The trailing driver decides when to push, where to push and how hard to push. A number of drivers’ have expressed discomfort with ‘being pushed’ (drafting) too hard in the corners because an overaggressive – or an inexperienced – driver can make your car unstable fairly easily. But there is a pretty significant difference between bumping and pushing. Requiring drivers to leave space going into the turns just caused an accordion effect with cars having to back up down the line.

Aerodynamics

One of the big reasons for the aerodynamic changes in the new car was to decrease the amount of wake behind the car. The large wake with the old car made it very difficult for one car to get up close behind another one because the swirling air from the wake didn’t provide enough downforce on the front wheels and the car got tight. The big difference between the old car and the new car in the rear is the spoiler on the old car vs. the inverted wing on the new. All of the air must go up and over a spoiler, creating a huge amount of turbulence behind the car. The wing allows air to flow on top of and below the wing, so there is less turbulence behind the car.

Let’s briefly review the aerodynamics of wings. As shown in the diagram below, air moving over the top of the wing moves faster than the air moving over the bottom. Faster-moving air exerts less pressure than slower-moving air, so a wing experiences more pressure and more force below than it does above. That’s what gives an airplane lift. The wing on the rear of the car is upside down, so there’s more force on the top than the bottom and the inverted wing on a NASCAR car provides downforce.

The key for the computational fluid dynamics simulations of the old vs. new cars (shown below, from a GM publication) is that red are areas of high pressure, meaning lots of downforce. Orange, yellow, green and blue show decreasing levels of pressure, so those colors mean less downforce. Note in the old car (on the left), there was a significant amount of downforce generated by the rear decklid, while in the new car (right), the vast majority of the downforce comes from the wing.
NASCAR cars have an aerodynamic instability problem when they get going too fast. They are fine as long as they are pointed forward, but when the car spins, the aerodynamics change significantly. The air moves very quickly along the rear window and the roof, and remember that fast-moving air doesn’t generate much pressure. The ’shark fin’ on the side of the rear window and the roof flaps were designed to slow down the airflow because slower-moving air creates more pressure. The roof flaps and the sharksfin were designed (the story is in my book, The Physics of NASCAR) for the old car and I don’t know how much work was done to compare the effectiveness of the roof flaps on the new car versus on the old car.

A couple things I noted this morning watching the video of Newman’s crash in slow motion.

1. Both roof flaps deployed at the same time. In theory, one is supposed to deploy first and then the other if it is needed. But things were happening very quickly.
2. The roof flaps deployed when the car was at about 135-150 degrees from heading in the correct direction. (180 degrees would be facing backward.)
3. The right rear wheel was already off the ground as the roof flaps were opening
4. One the car got fully backward, it flipped over without any twisting. You would expect a car that was spinning and then got airborne to continue the rotational motion, but the 39 did a really clean black flip.
5. Once the car made about a 60 degree angle with the track, the roof flaps went down again. I wouldn’t think that gravity would pull them down, so that suggests that the pressure had increased to a point where the roof flaps didn’t think they needed to be deployed.

A backward spoiler is still pretty much a spoiler. If you think about the inverted wing running backward, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were generating a lot of lift. Put yourself in the place of the people designing the car. Would you have thought to simulate the car going straight backward to see what happens? We may not even know enough about the aerodynamics of the cars to do an appropriate simulation. But between this incident and Carl Edwards’ takeoff, NASCAR needs put some serious resources into re-evaluating the aerodynamic behavior of the car at different speeds. Decreasing the restrictor plate holes, especially by fifteen thousandths of an inch (about four times the diameter of a human hair) is not going to affect safety much. The reduction took ten to fifteen mph off the cars, but it didn’t address the primary problem of plate racing, which is that the drivers are on the throttle wide open most of the time, which makes them run in a pack. A number of drivers are suggesting that NASCAR needs to sit down with them and talk about how to make racing safer. It’s not the drivers NASCAR needs around the table. With all due respect to Ryan Newman’s engineering degree, it’s the top aerodynamics people at the race teams (some of whom actually have Ph.D.s), and people like Gary Nelson and Gary Eaker, who were largely responsible for designing the original roof flaps. NASCAR has many more times the number of people working marketing and licensing than they do on safety. The teams have some incredibly smart people in their aerodynamics departments who have spent the last three to four years trying to understand everything they can about the aerodynamics of this car. NASCAR needs to make use of those folks’ skill and talent because they simply don’t have the in-house resources necessary to do the job quickly and effectively. NASCAR has a history of being a reactive organization - as Carl Edwards noted last spring, when he said "I guess we’ll do this until someone gets killed, and then we’ll change it". For a few scary moments Sunday, I was afraid we’d reached that situation. Take the initiative and solve this problem before someone gets killed. Don’t tells us that your rules weren’t the cause of the problems. Slowing the cars down is not enough: It is time for a major change, whether that be repaving Talladega to decrease the banking (as the late David Poole suggested), a major re-design of the aerodynamic safety equipment on the car, and/or introducing a significantly less powerful engine that could be run without plates. (From stockcarscience.com)

NASCAR Happy with Talladega Race?!?!?

NASCAR's change in the rules to forbid bump-drafting in the turns worked as planned for the most part and should not be blamed for the single-file racing fans saw for much of the first half of the Sprint Cup Amp Energy 500 Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, NASCAR Vice President of Competition Robin Pemberton said. "A lot of 500-mile races, when you listen to the teams, they work on their cars, they get their cars to handle and then they log laps during a small portion or the middle third of the race in order to have their equipment ready for the end of the race," Pemberton said in the garage after the event. "It's not uncommon of any 500-mile race that you see that. & [The accidents that] happened today, we didn't have any major incidents in the corner. "The two wrecks that happened, they happened in the free zone where we weren't monitoring the bump-drafting or anything like that." NASCAR never issued a penalty in Sunday's race. There were times when Sprint Cup Series Director John Darby said something to a crew chief. "If it was something that was a warning that was like the final warning, we would have put it out on the main channel and we didn't do that," Pemberton said. "These guys are very good at what they do. It takes them a very short period of time to figure out the best way around these race tracks. (SceneDaily)

RCR to run Two Truck Teams in 2010?

It appears that the #3 RCR Chevy truck, driven by Austin Dillon [grandson of Richard Childress], will be returning to the series in 2010. Dunlap reported word in the garage has it that Richard Childress Racing has ordered six brand new trucks. Hearing from more than one source that Richard Childress Racing will run two trucks in 2010. Hearing that Tim George Jr. may be named as driver of the second truck team for RCR. [George's most recent experience as been in the ARCA RE/MAX Series where he drove for Eddie Sharp Racing. George finished 11th in the driver point standings.] (Jayski)

Nationwide New Car test on Monday

The first superspeedway test for the NASCAR Nationwide Series new car will be held Monday, November 2 from 11am-5pm at Talladega Superspeedway. The new car previously tested in 2008 at Richmond International Raceway and Lowe's Motor Speedway. Drivers scheduled to participate include: #12Justin Allgaier (Dodge); #16-Colin Braun (Ford); #17 Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (Ford); #29-Jeff Burton (Chevy); #33-Kevin Harvick (Chevy); #88-Kelly Bires (Chevy); #99-Trevor Bayne (Toyota). According to Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's vice president of competition, the purpose of today's six-hour test was to gather information relative to the size of the tapered spacer that the car will need in order to achieve its desired speed at tracks such as Talladega and Daytona International Speedway  where the new car will make its points-racing debut in July, 2010. Additionally, the test helped to better identify the proper gear ratio that the new car will need to generate the proper RPM. The first few hours of the test were spent in single runs, followed by drafting during the afternoon. Following its debut next summer at Daytona, the NASCAR Nationwide Series new car also will compete in points races at Michigan International Speedway in August, at Richmond in September and at Lowe's Motor Speedway in October. Full integration for the new car into the series is targeted for 2011. (NASCAR PR)

Busch heads to Texas truck race undefeated in previous four

Kyle Busch heads to the Texas Motor Speedway for the running of the WinStar World Casino 350k NASCAR Camping World Truck Series undefeated in the series since late August after being pushed to the win by his Billy Ballew Motorsports teammate last weekend in Talladega. In unprecedented style Busch has won in the last four consecutive races he was entered in the #51 Miccosukee Resort Billy Ballew Motorsports entry. (Bristol, Chicagoland Speedway, New Hampshire and Talladega). Busch has never posted a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series win at the 1.5-mile Fort Worth, Texas racetrack with a best finish of second-place in 2006 and 2008 for Ballew in six prior starts. (Billy Ballew Motorsports PR)

Keselowski in the #12 for the rest of 2009

Brad Keselowski will compete for Penske Racing in the final three NASCAR Cup Series races of the 2009 season. Keselowski will drive the #12 Penske Dodge in the upcoming races at Texas (Nov. 8), Phoenix (Nov. 15) and Homestead (Nov. 22). Over the final three Cup Series events of 2009, Keselowski will step in for David Stremme and work with the Penske Dodge team in the car that will become his full-time ride next season. "Penske Racing wants to give Brad an opportunity to work with the team and get to know the race car as we prepare for the 2010 season," said Roger Penske. "These three races will provide a good base for both Brad and the team as we head into next year. Penske Racing also thanks David Stremme for his contributions to the team this year. We wish David the very best moving forward." Keselowski will take over for David Stremme in the #12 Dodge. Keselowski, who finished eighth in Sunday's Amp Energy 500 and is currently third in Nationwide Series points, was announced as Roger Penske's latest addition on Sept. 1. (Penske Racing PR)

Tire Test at Daytona

More than a dozen NASCAR Sprint Cup Series teams are expected Monday morning for a two-day, Goodyear tire test at Daytona International Speedway. Goodyear engineers are working on a tire that will be used during Speed Weeks 2010. The tests will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday and Tuesday. Spectators are welcome to watch at no charge from the Oldfield Grandstands. (Daytona Beach News Journal)