Sing When Your Friends are Winning

So maybe I was wrong about Talladega being boring. Perhaps I just turned on the TV at the right time, but it was a fantastic result. There is no limit to the amount of times that I can watch Carl's wreck. On a personal note, the truck and nationwide races held more joy than the cup race, as two of my friends got their first wins. My friend Seth has been the race engineer on the #6 busch car for like 3 years, and finally got his first win at Talladega. Then, Mike Skinner closed the deal in Kansas in the truck race, and my friend Jay got his first win as race engineer too. I never got close to victory lane when I was working for Robby, so I have to live vicariously through their stories I guess.

Obviously one of the big buzz words after the Talladega race is "safety". There is a lot of chatter about how to make the cars and the catch fences safer for drivers and for fans, and there are always ways to make improvements. From the team engineers perspective, most of the safety stuff is out of your hands. The walls and fences are designed for the tracks, and NASCAR mandates all of the steel tubing thickness and the roll cage configuration of the car. So there is little to do to design any more safety into the cars. In F1, the engineers are tasked with designing the main car structures, and the burden of safety is taken on by the enginneering staff.

The installation of sensors for testing was really the only time the NASCAR team engineer is faced with decisions for safety. For example, if the data engineer installs the throttle sensor incorrectly, the throttle can stick open and cause a massive wreck. Also, things like tire temperature sensors that can rub and cut a tire need a good bit of care during installation so they don't cause any problems. It is not hard to get right with a little bit of common sense. The worst thing that I ever did was I had a ride height laser, which is the size of a candy bar and weighs 6oz., fall off of RG's car during Daytona testing and knocked a hole in Sterling Marlins nose. It did not cause any major damage, and no one was hurt, but it could have been big if it managed to cut a tire or something. Needless to say, we installed those better after that mishap.

Off to Richmond this week, and sadly, I will not be watching it as I have a wedding to go with. I like the layout of Richmond, and it's nice that they do a Saturday night show. This week will be an impound race, but that will not cause the teams any trouble. At Talladega you can throw the kitchen sink at the car to put down a good qualy lap and screw up the car for the race. Short track race and qualy setups are not too terribly different, so it will not trip anyone up.

I will go for a win for the 11 as he has been good on the shorter tracks this year. Hendrick seems to dominate this track, so I would expect the 24 and 48 to be in the mix. I will tip the 6 for a top 10. He ran good here last year, and he and the team will be bouyed by 2 good results last week.

No Fun in Alabama

While the NASCAR circus was out at Phoenix last week, I took the opportunity to take in a late model race at Hickory. Hickory is about 90 minues north west of Charlotte, and is a short track that used to host Busch series races, and maybe even a couple of truck races. Now it is a place for late model races and is a stepping stone track for Drive for Diversity and other young drivers. It is a pretty cool track actually. They do not let you bring beer into the track, but luckily the lot of us had just come from the Hickory beer festival, so that was about the last thing we needed. So, the main event was a 100 lap late model race. In the race there was a pretty good battle between the top two drivers until with 20 to go, one of the drivers cut a RR tire. The guy fell back to the end of the pack and finally just stopped in the middle of the track. The caution came out and he came in and changed the RR tire and bled air out of the RF tire. Yellow laps did not count, so he did not lose a lap and started at the tail end of the pack. Then he proceded to stomp through the entire field and win the race by a couple of seconds. The second place finisher was really pissed obviously and tried to park in the winner circle. He was kicked out by the officials and the result stood. Thus illustrated, in very clear terms, the importance of fresh tires. When I got home I caught the tail end of the Cup race and in a de ja vu moment, saw Newman try to be a hero by not taking any tires. I think he lost about 8 spots on the first green lap and was just a sitting duck. It is pretty funny that the teams spend so much time and money trying to make their cars good, and it can all be erased with poor tire management.

This week is Talladega and tires could not matter less here. I think we used to double stint the tires here a while back. The track is so smooth that you do not need the enhanced handling like you would at Daytona. I have to admit, I kind of hate Talladega. It is just so damn boring. It is boring to be there and it is boring to watch on TV.

I don't think alot of teams are spending alot of time on their Talladega cars. One of my other engineer friends who works for a team that will remain nameless commented to me last night, "I thought the next race was Richmond, because we haven't done any engineering work for Talladega". The teams expend so much effort for Daytona that they pretty much just dust off their Daytona primary or backup car, make it their Talladega primary, stick it in the box and send it down the road. If it is the chase race in October or if you have to qualify on time, then you will spend alot of time prepping the car, but not for this one. The race is so unpredictable that it is not good value for money to tweek on the car that much for this race. Maybe that is pessimistic, but if I was the crew cheif, I would make sure it fit the templates, and that all the bolts were tight and call it good.

It is so difficult to pick plate race winners. The cars are so evenly matched that you have to pick the drafting wizards to be at the front at the end. Kyle had a tough end to the Daytona 500 and I like the way that he tries to lead every lap of the plate races instead of laying back. So I will pick the 18 for the win. The 16 has aweful luck here, but I think their bad plate run is over, and I will pick him for a top 10. RG has had a rough run of form. I anticipate that he will stay in the back for the entire day and try to avoid wrecks and push for a top 20 in the last 50 laps. I think they will come out with a good result and kick away from the 35th owners points position.

The Queen of Beers

Normally I start with a little bit of food talk, but this week is all about beer. Charlotte (Queen City) born beer that is. In the past couple of days I was able to visit two of the local breweries, both of which I would recomend as a side trip for anyone coming in town for the May (or October races). The first one I went to was the Carolina brewery http://www.carolinabeer.com/. It is in Mooreville across the street from the Penske shop. Their flagship beer is Carolina Blonde, but they have a nice selection of artisan and seasonal brews for the more adventurous. It is only open from 12-2 on Saturday afternoons, but for $5 you get a tour of the brewery and 5 six ounce sample glasses, which I can assure you is plenty if you are going to drive afterwards. The other brewery, Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, I visited just last night http://oldemeckbrew.com/. OMB is only about a month old and last night was thier opening night for thier tap room. They only make one beer right now called Copper, and it is a German style beer that is a medium amber color. It is not too bitter, but I fear the militant Bud Light drinker will find it to be too heavy. Nonetheless it was a fun little brewery and I recommend giving it a visit.



On to the racing. After a nice long off weekend, the circus is back out to Phoenix. PIR is for sure one of my favorite oval circuits. It is short and flat with corners of differing radius. All of these elements reward the drivers who are smooth and the teams that can get the big heavy Cup cars to corner well with out help from big banking. The location is superb as well, with the cactus dotted desert mountains providing a picturesque backdrop.



So if a car needs to turn well at Phoenix, what can you do to the setup to help that. One of the biggest items on the minds of the crew chiefs is RF camber. The tire that Goodyear brings to Phoenix likes to have alot of it. NASCAR mandates that you can only run 8 degrees of camber when the car rolls through the tech line, and at Phoenix, some of the teams will get close to maxing this out. More camber means that the car will turn better, but it also means the tires will wear out faster. This will make the cars slower late in a run, and could lead to tire failures. The drivers will be using alot of brakes here too, so expect to see openings in the nose of the car to duct cool air to the brakes and to the bead of the tire.


Another tool in the crew chiefs pocket to get the car to turn better is at the rear of the car. The rear suspension is a solid axle and there are two truck arms that mount it to the chassis. Below is a picture of the bottom of a Cup car showing the truck arms and where they mount. Instead of having both truck arms mounts at the same height, one of the truck arms will be low, and the other one will be high. Doing this will get the rear axle to steer when the car gets into the corner, and it will help the car turn better.

As far as predictions, you just get the feeling that the big teams will dominate again. Hendrick has historically had a really strong flat track program and I would expect them to be at the front again. Harvick used to dominate at this track though, so I will go for a win for the 29 with a Hendrick piece in tow. For some reason, the 9 can get a result at Phoenix, so I will tip Kasey for a top 5. RG has not been that good in a cup car here since 2005, and I fear that run will continue. A top 30 is about all that can be expected unless they have done alot of homework.

I Need a V8

The first stop at the two short tracks is behind us, and true to form, it has stirred the blood and fueled rivalries again. You get the sense that Gibbs vs. Hendrick will be the NASCAR version of Ferrari v. McLaren. Kyle dominates Bristol and rips on Dale Jr., and a week later later the 48 gives the 11 the dirty slide job to win the race. I know the 17 won the first two races, but Gibbs and Hendrick are the two best teams, and it will be fun to see the battle throughout the season.

I want to divulge in a more technical topic for a change, but not quite yet. I have to first say that I made a magnificent dinner last night. I got inspired and went to the grocery store and picked up some Cod fillets. I baked them in a bed of lemon juice, green peppers, and jumbo scallions. I served pine nut couscous on the side and I took the rest of my leftover cabbage from my St.Patricks day feast and made some homemade slaw. MMMMM...loved it.

I had been seeing cars come on the 7 post recently with rear anti-roll bars (ARBs) in them. I thought this was weird, because these were outlawed for all tracks 1 mile and over for the last bunch of years. So I thought the teams were doing some 007 stuff, but it turns out, the rule was changed. You can run them everywhere now (but maybe not the speedways), so I thought I would explain ARBs for a moment.

ARBs tie the right side of the suspension to the left side of the suspension, and they add stiffness that helps the car resist roll. Resisting roll helps in a couple of ways. It helps to keep the camber of the tires at a more desirable angle, and it allows the car body to stay flatter and in a better aerodynamic position. The normal 4 springs help to keep the car from rolling a little bit too, but to be able to do it as well as an ARB, you would have to run really big springs. Running big springs, especially at a track like Texas, will hurt your downforce and increase drag, which is the opposite of going fast. What the evolution (not intelligent design) of the cup car has led us to, is running soft springs at the front, with a big ARB. This lets the nose of the car travel to an aerodynamically advantageous position and still keeps the car from rolling over.

This picture shows one side of the ARB on a mini. Couldn't find a good picture of a cup car ARB, but it looks almost identical.

Rear ARBs do the same thing. Addind an ARB at the rear will make a car turn better, so running them at short tracks and flat tracks will be an advantage. The one big difference between the front and the rear ARBs is that the front ARBs will be anywhere from 1.25" in diameter, up to 3" in diameter, and are usually over 2" at 1.5 mile tracks. At the rear, they are much smaller, and are usually about 1/2" in diameter. So the effect is much smaller at the back. I do not know why NASCAR banned rear bars in the first place, as it did not save anyone any money.

Predictions for this week. Back to the big tracks again, so you have to bet on who was fast at Atlanta. Look for the Penske cars to be strong, as well as the Roush and Hendrick cars. I will go for a Mark Martin win, and I will pick the 6 to rebound from his crappy season for a top 10. I think RGM will fair better at the bigger track and a top 25 is in the cards I think.