The important stuff first:  Best wishes to Jack Roush (one of my personal heroes) for a speedy recovery from his accident, to Marcus Ambrose for finding a ride for next year, and condolences to the fans in St. Louis who won’t have the opportunity to see Nationwide or Truck racing in 2011.

Jenna Freyer of the AP reported that some NASCAR drivers have been fined recently for negative comments about the sport.  She wrote:

“The Associated Press has learned that NASCAR warned teams during the offseason that public criticism of the sport would no longer be tolerated, and at least two star drivers have been fined — one as much as $50,000 — for comments that were deemed destructive to the industry.”

When I first started in academia, I firmly denied the idea that we live in an ivory tower. Getting out of academia and working with companies and sanctioning bodies has been a real eye-opener for me. As a scientist, I have the right to make any assertion I want — as long as I can back it up with data. The whole point of scholarship is pursuit of the Truth (which we share with the field of capital-J Journalism). One of the most disappointing things I’ve learned as a result of my time with the ‘real world’ is that there are entirely to many people who believe they can dictate what people think by telling them what to say and do. In science, the determining factor is not who you are, but the veracity of what you say. I have the right – in fact, the responsibility – to correct something that is incorrect. It doesn’t matter if the speaker is a graduate student or a Nobel Prize winner.

Of course, when you start getting into the world of opinion (and yes, there is plenty of opinion in science because there are many things we still don’t know), the rules become fuzzier. We all know scientists who are so in love with their own theories that they are not as objective about their work as they should be. We have, unfortunately, had a number of recent cases of scientific misconduct, in which data were fabricated or even cherry-picked to make them look more convincing than they really were. When those cases are uncovered, the punishment is very clear – you lose the right to be a scientist at a reputable institution.  The funding agencies can go through due process and deny you the ability to compete for grants to support your research.  Papers in which incorrect data are  published must be retracted.  But unless I have evidence that someone has knowingly done something malicious, my accusing them of misconduct is libel, not opinion.

Imagine you are one of the people in the NASCAR hierarchy who makes decisions about debris cautions or determines whether a car meets NASCAR’s somewhat fuzzy technical specifications.  How would you feel if one of the drivers got up and told the world that he lost the race because the officials called a fake debris caution to make the race more exciting?  That’s not “destructive to the industry”, that’s making a value judgment of the integrity of the official and the officiating body.  I agree with NASCAR that they should have every right to discipline people they license to participate in the sport if those people make unfounded statements that question the integrity of the sport.

Ramsey Poston refused to get into specifics, saying only:

“It is the sanctioning body’s obligation on behalf of the industry and our fans to protect the sport’s brand.  Any action taken by NASCAR has nothing to do with the drivers expressing an opinion — it’s focused on actions or comments that materially damage the sport.”

That’s come across in very different ways in different stories, which range from “NASCAR fines drivers for making disparaging comments about the sport” to tweets that “NASCAR muzzles drivers”.  Drivers (crew chiefs, owners, mechanics and anyone else) should have the right to state substantiated opinions.  Denny Hamlin ought to be mad about losing a race due to a late-race debris caution, and he ought to be able to state facts. If no one on his team saw any debris, that’s a perfectly fair thing to say.  He can do that without suggesting that there is a conspiracy.  NASCAR, for their part, ought to be able to point out the debris when they call a caution and everyone involved in racing ought to understand that sometimes you can’t tell whether the unidentified debris is metal or rubber, and that it is better to call a caution than to find out what the thing in the middle of the best driving line is made of by having someone run over it at 200 mph.  The NASCAR media got on the TV broadcasters last year about not showing caution-causing debris.  The broadcasters responded by trying to make sure they showed the debris and, in at least one case, wondering out loud where the debris was because they couldn’t find it.

Tony Stewart lit into Goodyear for a bad tire choice at the first Atlanta race in 2008.  He wasn’t the only driver upset about tire problems – Jeff Gordon and Ryan Newman (among others) said similar things, although in more reasonable and measured ways.  Goodyear invited Stewart to visit their tire operation and explained the process of specifying and making tires to him and he appeared chastened.  He still felt it was a bad tire, but he was a little more constructive with his criticism.  The simple act of Goodyear taking the time to explain how they work and how they are really doing the best they can raised my opinion of them.  Stewart’s admission that he overreacted raised my opinion of him, as well.  Sometimes, you’re just wrong and the best way to deal with it is to admit that you were wrong.

@jim_utter asked whether anyone could show him one instance in which fans didn’t go to the track because of something someone said. (Bonus points to @spencerlueders, who replied “The weatherman”  Spencer is, if I remember right, a science-loving motorsports lawyer who sent me a neat email when I did Charlotte Talks.)

I think most fans have the same reaction I do when I hear a whiny driver making no sense:  “What a schmuck.”  It has absolutely no impact on my attending or watching race.  Far more important are ticket prices, where and when races are located, whether I have a job, and how my favorite drivers are doing.   NASCAR’s taken the other road and refuses to talk about it, which has only stretched out the discussion because people wonder who was fined and what exactly they said.  If NASCAR is (as I suspect) in the right (in this case) and it’s analogous to fining a pitcher for making remarks about the integrity of the umpire, they would have done themselves so much more credit by being open about it.  If they want to “protect the brand” by trying to make sure no one says anything negative about it — even when true and justified — then that’s a strong reason for me to stop watching.

Is there any reason why NASCAR can’t collect the debris that causes cautions and put it on display, like they do the shock absorbers they select for dismantling?  Yes, this could result in embarrassment because sometimes a caution is called and it turns out to be a hamburger wrapper or a piece of foam – but honestly, if you can’t appreciate the importance of being very careful when you’re talking about people’s lives, you really shouldn’t call yourself a racing fan anyway.

My friend The Rocket Scientist likes to engage me in the occasional debate of whether NASCAR is a sport.  (It’s a boring debate that doesn’t really interest me, but I sometimes play along just because it gets fun.  Like the time someone suggested that a sport was anything people paid to watch.  TRS noted that this would technically make stripping a sport.)  It’s become a running game with a group of friends:  what makes a sport a “real” sport?  During the World Cup, another friend, Owl, suggested that a true sport doesn’t allot points for style.

I’ve got a new one to run by them: A true sport doesn’t have secret rules.

Thanks to Woogaroo for the suggestion of doing something on race trim vs. qualifying trim – two words you hear thrown around a lot, but often without a lot of explanation.  I’ve embedded the video, but just in case, here’s the direct link to the YouTube version.

Something in racing you’re wondering about? Send questions to admin(at)buildingspeed.org.

Rain has more consequences than just delaying the race.  Track drying is really hard on the surface.  Most materials expand when they heat. (Water is a notable exception).  Asphalt is a mix of different types of rocks held together by an asphalt binder.  When you heat the asphalt with a track dryer, you are putting a lot of heat into the track.  Different materials expand at different rates, and the amount of heat that reaches the inner layers of track is different than the amount on the surface.  The rapid change in temperature creates a lot of stress in the asphalt.  Track surfaces, like people, tend to crack when under stress.

There are already a lot of cracks in the Daytona surface that are covered by sealer and other fixes (like epoxy).  Sealers also expand and contract at different rates, so thoses are high priority places to watch for new problems.  Given the age of the track, it is entirely possible that there are areas that are weak or cracked just under the surface that might be pushed to the brink with a little thermal cycling.  (Thermal cycling being repeated heating and warming.)  The Daytona track folks will walk the track, but all they can see is the surface.  Keep your fingers crossed not only that we don’t have rain delaying or canceling the race, but that we don’t have rain period!  I don’t envy the track personnel today – they are going to be really happy when the track reconstruction starts.

Take a look at my earlier post on the Daytona issue.

Questions:  email diandra(at)buildingspeed.org.  Will try to answer during the race, but there’s a possibility that I’m going to be at Best Buy asking them to “demonstrate” their 3D TV’s!

It was quite a surprise getting into the car Tuesday and turning the radio to my favorite Sirius NASCAR show. A very distraught Randy LaJoie was explaining that NASCAR was about to announce that they had suspended him for testing positive for marijuana. The details are widely available, so I won’t repeat them here and, frankly, that’s not the point of this blog. He smoked a joint while partying with a group of people at the racetrack. It was a one-time thing, not something he does regularly but — as Dave Moody pointed out — not a real bright thing to do given NASCAR’s zero tolerance drug policy. Plus, it’s illegal. Randy is jumping through the NASCAR hoops necessary to get reinstated.

I have to say, though, that the admission wasn’t as much of a surprise as the media and fan reaction. It ranged from sort of funny (“@JosephPaulillo: Knew something was up when LaJoie told Coleman during the race, “clear turn 5E, except for the minatour.”) to just plain stupid, the worst of which was a ‘respected’ NASCAR writer tearing apart LaJoie’s apology. How unfair of Randy to have taken all the fun out of kicking people when they’re down by beating everyone to the punch.

I finally reached my limite with the Sirius Speedway caller who actually said, “Don’t worry, Randy will get his life back together and he’ll be fine.”

Give me an effin’ break. Randy doesn’t have anything to “get back together”.

When you reach the point in your life when you really start thinking about what your purpose is on this Earth (which I have recently), you run into a lot of people whom you hope justify their existence by being loving parents, working at homeless shelters and donating to food banks because it is hard to see how what they do in their day jobs makes the world a better place. But my perspective may be skewed because just about everything I’ve seen about the incident focused on LaJoie as a ‘two-time Busch champion’.

I’m not sure where being a racecar driver comes in in terms of making the world a better place. There are some people who have made a point of doing things beyond the track. Over in the ALMS, driver David Brabham spends a lot of his own time and money trying to make the world a better place. Alcohol companies can’t sponsor cars is France, so the Highcroft Patron car at Le Mans instead featured an effort to eradicate malaria – a disease most of us in the U.S. and Europe don’t worry about since it doesn’t affect us. Jeff Gordon, Richard Childress and others have put their own money into medical facilities. This is in contrast to the ‘let me sign this and put it up on ebay and let other people donate money’ approach.

One of the things about being ‘on the inside’ is that you learn things about people that most fans don’t know. Sometimes it’s not a pleasent experience (you find that a driver you really liked is an inconsiderate sexist snob), but sometimes you learn things that you just feel compelled to pass along.

Randy LaJoie is a good racecar driver, but when St. Peter looks down a list of Randy’s accomplishments as he stands at the pearly gates, there’s going to be a long list of names. Those are the names of people whose lives Randy LaJoie has saved.

Randy doesn’t have formal engineering training, but he’s got all the skills of a scientist or engineer. When he was driving (which he refers to as “being my own crash-test dummy”), he realized that it was really important that the driver stopped when the car stopped. Randy’s company, The Joie of Seating, makes seats for race cars.

The Joie of Seating makes seats for NASCAR drivers. Remember Michael McDowell’s crash at Texas? One of Randy’s seats was part of the safety equipment that helped McDowell walk away with nothing more than a few bruises (ribs and ego).

But — and more importantly — Randy makes seats for the everyday racer. The Saturday night men and women who can’t afford carbon fiber, but need a safe, well-fitted seat. They also make seat for kids. The problem with kids is that they outgrow things. Quickly. An entry-level seat for a racecar can cost a couple of hundred to more than a thousand bucks. If you’re not one of those parents into mortgaging the house for your kid’s career, you’re faced with a dilema. Do you buy the seat big so that it will last for two years and try putting some extra padding on so your daughter can’t slide around if she’s hit in her quarter midget?

If you buy a seat from Randy, he’ll trade out seats as your kid grows because he knows a seat is safe only if it fits right. He could make more money by selling more seats, but that’s not really why he’s in business. Randy started a not-for-profit 501(3)c foundation to promote racing safety at short tracks so that all the safety innovations developed for NASCAR’s top series can start being used at the local tracks.

I got to interview Randy for The Science of Speed video series. We spent a whole morning in his shop asking the guys working at the shop if they could please hold off hammering for a just a few more moments and playing with the shop dog.

My favorite part of the interview with Randy was one we used to end of the video segment on safety. He says something like (and I’m paraphrasing – you should really look at the very end of the video if you want to appreciate his passion for safety):

When I was racing, I wanted to reach Victory Lane. Now, when one of my customers calls me on Monday and tells me that they caught on fire, rolled the car, wrecked their… butt^*… off, and they’re fine, well, that’s my Victory Lane.

Before anyone throws stones, maybe we should all think a little about what we contribute to the world. We’ve all done stupid things (and I’ve probably done more than my fair share). The difference is that most of us were lucky enough to not be caught. We were allowed to make our mistakes in private.

I’m not arguing that doing good things gives you the right to do bad things, but in the great karmic balance of things, this is not the incident for which Randy La Joie will be remembered. And as proud as I’m sure he is of his racing championships, that’s also not what he is going to be remembered for.

Along with the late Steve Peterson , Dean Sicking and his crew at the University of Nebraska, Gary Nelson, and Tom Gideon (formerly of GM Racing, now with the NASDAR R and D Center), Randy La Joie is one of the people who evangelizes for safety simply because it is the right thing to do, not because they are concerned that losing a popular driver might affect the popularity of a sport and its ability to make money. These are folks who don’t care if you are Jimmie Johnson or a no-name nine-year old in a go kart.

Randy, no one can question your passion and dedication to racing safety. You are one of the people who makes the world a better place – screw ups or no. You became one of my heroes the morning I spent with you in your shop, and you still are.

^{Footnote: *} My favorite part of the morning was when he gave us this great soundbite and we (the crew) were trying to figure out who should ask him if he could do it again exactly the same… without the cuss word!

In February, I had the privilege of attending the 12 Hours of Sebring, an American Le Mans Series (ALMS) race.  The ALMS series isn’t as familiar to people in the US as NASCAR, the series that originally got me interested in cars. Drivers in both series have accents; however, in NASCAR, you’re distinguishing the Virginians from the North Carolinians, while in ALMS, you have to be careful about confusing the Spanish, Mexicans and the Brazilians or the Australians and the Brits.  (And then there are the ‘citizens of the world‘, but that’s a story I will tell later).

In comparing the two types of racing (stock cars vs. sports cars), NASCAR is like hockey and ALMS is more like baseball.  At a NASCAR race, you constantly scan the track to see where the action is.  Except at superspeedways and road courses, you really can’t hold a conversation because of the noise.  You have to wait for cautions to communicate with your seat mates (or text them).

ALMS tracks are longer:  three to five miles compared to the typical half-mile to two-and-a-half mile NASCAR track.  When you go to an ALMS race, you position yourself near your favorite turn.  The cars run past, then you have a minute or so to talk before they come back around again.  Drinking while watching racing is common (if not mandatory); however, NASCAR’s official alcoholic beverage is Coors Lite, while ALMS’s is Patron Tequila.  I’m a sucker for good tequila and a British accent, so I had a lot of fun at Sebring.  Besides, where else are you going to see an Aston Martin sponsored by Lowes?

ALMS is a good platform for automotive industry companies pursuing greener products.  The Michelin Green X Challenge, which rewards the fastest and most energy efficient cars, considers only gasoline usage at the moment, but as the
series evolves, they will likely expand to include another major contributor to petroleum use in cars:  oil.  One of the series’ sponsors, G-Oil, is a motor oil with animal origins.  One of the principles of “green racing” is to minimize petroleum usage to lessen our dependence on foreign energy sources, so using a domestically available source for motor oil certainly addresses that point.

Oil plays many roles in the engine, including protecting metal parts from wear due to friction and carrying heat away from the engine.  A typical passenger car uses about 5 quarts of oil.  Changing the oil every 5,000 miles means you go through about 100 quarts of oil in 10 years.  That doesn’t sound like much, but multiply that by the number of cars in the country and the number of people who don’t recycle used oil.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that two hundred million gallons of used oil are improperly disposed of each year.  So not only are we increasing our dependence on petroleum, the used oil can contaminate groundwater and kill vegetation.

Gasoline and petroleum-based oil come from the same source: crude oil.  Crude oil contains a veritable zoo of hydrocarbons – chains (or rings) of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms attached to any free carbon bonds.  The number of carbon atoms in each molecule ranges from 1 to 80 or more. The chart below gives you an idea of how many carbons are in the molecules that make up various petroleum products.  Red lines represent gases, blue lines represent liquids and green lines represent solids.  The darker blue tells you where the majority of the molecules in the substance come from.

The same length carbon chain molecules can be used for different things, depending on how the atoms are attached within the molecule.  Isomers are molecules with the same atoms, but different arrangements of those atoms.  For example, there are 355 isomers of C₁₂H₂₆ (a molecule containing 12 carbon atoms and 26 hydrogen atoms).  So even though a narrow range of carbon number is present in gasoline, There may be as more than 500 different molecules involved.

A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, with a typical barrel providing about 19.5 gallons of gasoline, 9 gallons of fuel oil, and 4 gallons of jet fuel.  The remainder is used in a wide variety of products, including grease, kerosene, bitumen (the binder in asphalt), crayons and plastics.  Motor oils are about 90% base oil (the ‘motor oil’) you see in the chart above, and the other 10% are additives to decrease friction, increase viscosity, prevent corrosion and oxidation, etc.

Saturated and unsaturated fats are just as important for cars as they are for our bodies.  (The general agreement as far as nomenclature is that fats are solid and oils are liquids.)  Each carbon atom can make four bonds.  Hydrogen can make just one.  Saturated fats – like animal fats – have single bonds between carbon atoms, and single bonds between each carbon and hydrogen atom, as shown in the top part of the figure below.

Unsaturated fats (or oils) have a double bond between the carbon atoms and each double bond decreases by one the number of hydrogen atoms in the molecule.  Unsaturated fats have fewer hydrogen atoms than saturated fats.  If there’s one double bond, the fat is unsaturated, and if there is more than one double bond, the fat is poly-unsaturated.

Double bonds are more exposed than single bonds, making them more likely to react. A particular challenge is oxidation, which cleaves the carbon chain at double bonds.  The extra reactivity of unsaturated fats means that the human body can break them down faster and easier.  Unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats are used more quickly in the body’s metabolism, while saturated fats hang around and clog up your arteries.

In your car’s engine, hanging around is what you want.  Motor oils use saturated fats because they are more stable.  You’ve probably never had motor oil go rancid on you, have you?  Saturated fats stay in their fatty form far better than unsaturated fats.  Saturated oils are good for your car, even if they are not so good for you.  One of the problems with double bonds, though, is that they are much more likely
to oxidize, which cleaves the double bond and produces two shorter molecules, neither of which has as much protective ability as the original long-chain molecule.  The propensity for oxidation increases with temperature, and engines get very hot.

The desirable properties of the oil come from the particular molecules that are present.  Motor oils are usually somewhere around 16-20 carbons per molecule.  It doesn’t really matter where the oil comes from:  it can be separated out of crude oil or, in the case of G-Oil, it can come from animal fat. 

G-Oil is made from beef tallow – tallow was historically used for candles, as it was cheaper than wax. Oil obtained from refining crude oil is obtained by separating out different components from the crude oil.  Animal or plant fats offer some advantages in terms of processing because they contain high levels of triglycerides.

Triglyceride is a very large molecule composed of one glycerol molecule and three fatty acids.
The fatty acids are represented R1, R2 and R3 in the picture to the left.  The triglycerides go through a process called transesterification, which frees the fatty acids from the glycerol.  Remember learning about how the pilgrims made soap from animal fats and ash?  This is exactly what they were doing.  The glycerol is used in soap and the fatty acids that were left were used to make candles or other products.  This is also the first step you would use to make biodiesel from fat.

It turns out that the fatty acids in beef tallow have very high proportions of carbon chains in the C16-C18 range, which is the target range for motor oil.  Green Earth Technologies, the company making G-Oil, has a patent pending process that converts the fatty acids into the types of chains needed for motor oil applications.

You might wonder why they don’t use plant fats, and that’s just because the animal fats are closer to the right composition of molecules.  Plant oils have a much larger fraction of unsaturated hydrocarbons.  The G-Oil website points out that grape seed oil is rich (70-80%) in Omega-6, an 18-carbon chain with two double bonds.  These molecules degrade much faster than those in the animal fats.  The end message is that the plant fats are better for use by people and the animal fats are better for use by cars. Green Earth Technologies points out that the amount of beef tallow they use is a small percentage of what is already being produced as a by-product of meat processing.

The oil — and all of it’s additives that protect it from oxidation, ash production, etc. — are biodegradable, meaning that it breaks down within about a month when in contact with common environmental bacteria.  Which means that, no, the oil will not biodegrade in your engine.  I guess if you are a committed vegetarian, you might choose not to use this produce because it is animal-based, but other than that, this is pretty nifty idea.

Perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to sacrifice performance for being green.  The oil was tested against a couple leading synthetic and crude-oil-based motor oils and G-Oil compares very favorably. The ALMS series believes that motorsports is a good platform in which to test things that eventually could appear in passenger cars, as is noted on the hauler set up of Drayson Racing (shown below).  Lord Drayson, the co-owner of the team with his wife, is the UK’s Minister of Science and Innovation, a very cool guy who actually tries to explain what is going on in Science and Engineering to the public via twitter.  I wonder what U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu drives…?

I haven’t explained the role of nanotechnology in lubrication:  that will be coming in my next post because it turns out the solution is bigger than I originally thought!

Last week at Texas Motor Speedway was not fun because of the rain. There were short periods of downpour and then just moisture hanging in the air that would not go away.

But we didn’t have to deal with severe storms and tornadoes. Having spent 14 years in Nebraska and 16 in Wisconsin, I am more familiar with tornadoes than I would like to be. The words that are most worrisome in the forecast are “tornado outbreak”. If you have a short attention span, scroll down to the last section of the article, which tells you what you should be doing if you are out at the track or planning on coming out.

Tornadoes are a primarily North American phenomenon, with the U.S. having about four times as many tornadoes as all of Europe (excluding waterspouts and if you ever lived in Nebraska, you know why). North America stretches a long way North to South and there aren’t any major east-west mountain ranges that block the flow of air all the way from Canada to Mexico, so much larger fronts can form than in areas with more mountainous regions.

The Midwest has a lot of tornadoes — as you can see from the figure at right — because the Rockies block moisture and cause the atmospheric flow to buckle, forming low-pressure, dry areas to the east of the mountains. The Gulf of Mexico is a great provider of moisture, which makes for ideal conditions for tornado formation. The U.S. averages about 1,200 tornadoes per year. Most happen between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., but they can occur at any time of the day.

The worrisome thing this weekend is the prediction of a tornado outbreak, but let’s look at one tornado at a time.

Tornadoes form in boundary areas, like those between hot, dry air in the West and warm, moist air in the East. The Central Plains states, like Nebraska, frequently experience strong storms this time of year. Those storms move East and, depending on their North/South extent, can cause storms and tornadoes throughout a wide swatch of the country.

The worst tornadoes are spawned by thunderstorms called supercells, which contain mesocyclones. ‘Meso’ means ‘mid’, so a mesocyclone is a medium-sized rotating air mass and, in meteorological terms, that means from a mile to five miles across. Supercells also have very heavy rain, lots of lightening, strong winds and hail.

When it starts raining really hard, the rainfalll drags air down with it toward the back of the supercell. The downdraft accelerates as it nears the ground, and drags the supercell’s mesocyclone down with it. If you see a cloud that shows any sign of rotation, that’s time to start being concerned. The mesocyclone approachs the ground, and a condensation funnel forms. The condensation in the storm is the same thing as steam forming water droplets on the lid of a pot of boiling water. The coolness of the downdraft condenses water from the air, and that forms the condensation funnel. The rear downdraft keeps moving downward, which creates a very strong wind capable of causing damage well away from the funnel cloud. A funnel is a rotating structure descending from the clouds, while a tornado is a funnel that has reached the ground. The funnel cloud can become a full-fledged tornado within minutes of the rear wind gust hitting the ground.

Tornadoes are powered by warm, moist air. The more air, the more energy the tornado has, and the tornado will keep growing as long as it has access to warm, moist air. Tornadoes with diameters of more than a mile have been reported. At some point, the cool rear downdraft will wrap around the tornado and prevent more warm air from reaching it. The vortex, deprived of energy, begins to weaken, the size decreases and the tornado can be dispersed by the straight-line winds from the storm. Don’t let the size of a tornado fool you. Even what appears to be a small tornado is capable of causing a lot of destruction due to conservation of angular momentum. When an ice skater is spinning, she spins more slowly when her arms are out, creating a larger effective diameter. When she pulls her arms in, she spins faster. A thin tornado can still feature very strong winds.

Once the original tornado is gone, it’s entirely possible for the cycle to repeat again, with a new mesocyclone descending. Tornadoes are good in that they have a limited lifespan (you won’t see three-day tornadoes, like you would a hurricane), but unlike hurricanes, we still don’t have the technology to predict where and when a tornado will pop up.

“Tornado outbreak” doesn’t have a specific scientific meaning – it mostly means a lot of tornadoes are spawned from a single storm. The worst outbreak on record was the “Super Outbreak” in April 1974. There were 148 tornadoes in 18 hours, with six being classed as F5 (the most destructive) and 24 classed as F4. About 315 people were killed in the U.S. and Canada and over 5000 people were injured. This history is one of the reasons that people are so concerned about tomorrow’s weather. The storm that is headed to Alabama passed through Texas earlier in the week and produced the largest tornado outbreak of 2010 to date – 32 tornadoes.

Tornadoes must have two fundamental ingredients: wind shear and some instability, like the aforementioned hot/cold and dry/wet condition along a front. Most of the time, you have some combination, like a little of one and a lot of the other. Meteorologists start getting worried when there is a lot of both. NOAA predictions are interesting to read, but you need a little background. There are multiple weather models because weather is fundamenteally difficult to predict. (Very much like the results of a Talladega race.) Meteorologists run several scenarios with the different models and try to figure out which one is most accurate for the particular situation. Our local meteorologist talks about ‘one model shows this and others show that, but I think the first one is right’. The closer the weather system gets to actually spawning a tornado, the more confidence we have that one or more of the models are accurate. Here’s part of the NOAA forecast with my comments.

SEVERAL FACTORS APPEAR TO BE COMING TOGETHER FOR A TORNADO OUTBREAK ACROSS THE REGION SATURDAY WITH A WIDESPREAD SEVERE THREAT CONTINUING THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING. THE KEY TO A TORNADO OUTBREAK SHOULD BE THE POSITION OF THE LOW-LEVEL JET. THE GFS AND NAM SOLUTIONS (GFS and NAM are two different models) VARY, WITH THE GFS FOCUSING THE LOW-LEVEL JET ACROSS NE LA (Northeast Louisiana) AND NW MS (Northwest Mississippi)SATURDAY MORNING WITH THE NAM FOCUSING THE LOW-LEVEL JET FURTHER SOUTHEAST IN SCNTRL (South Central) MS. AT THIS POINT…HAVE TAKEN A COMPROMISE BETWEEN THE TWO SOLUTIONS BUT AM FAVORING THE GFS SOLUTION WHICH IS SUGGESTING THE POTENTIAL FOR TORNADOES WILL BE GREATEST ACROSS NRN (Northeastern) LA…SRN/ERN (Southern/Eastern) AR AND WRN/NRN MS SATURDAY MORNING THROUGH EARLY AFTERNOON. Here’s the important part for us:
A POTENTIAL FOR TORNADIC SUPERCELLS SHOULD ALSO EXIST EWD (Eastward) ALONG A WARM FRONT INTO NRN AL (Northern Alabama) AND SWD (Southward) ACROSS THE WARM SECTOR ACROSS MS AND AL SATURDAY AFTERNOON. ANY SUPERCELLS THAT DEVELOP ACROSS THE REGION SHOULD ALSO HAVE A THREAT FOR LARGE HAIL AND WIND DAMAGE.
THE SETUP COULD BE FAVORABLE FOR STRONG TO VIOLENT TORNADOES AND A LONG-TRACK TORNADO WILL BE POSSIBLE. AN OUTLOOK UPGRADE TO HIGH RISK MAY BE NEEDED ACROSS PARTS OF THE REGION AS CONFIDENCE INCREASES CONCERNING THE MODEL SOLUTIONS. ALTHOUGH THE BRUNT OF THE OUTBREAK IS EXPECTED DURING THE MORNING AND EARLY AFTERNOON…SUPERCELLS AND WELL-DEVELOPED LINE-SEGMENTS SHOULD BE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING TORNADOES…LARGE HAIL AND WIND DAMAGE THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING.

As the figure at left indicates, the area with the highest probability of severe weather includes the Talladega racetrack. This is a prediction from NOAA, which is about as good as it gets when it comes to weather

For every Jim Cantore you see standing out in the middle of a tornado or hurricane showing people how bad the conditions are and why no one should be outside, there are a hundred meterologists at federal agencies and TV stations poring over the output of their models, trying to figure out which model is most correct so that they can give the maximum amount of warning to the areas that are in danger. Even though we can’t pin down the location, if you are or are planning on being out at the track, take this seriously and be careful.

Some Myths Debunked

• Opening windows does nothing. Yes, the pressure may drop outside, but it is almost impossible for the pressure differential to be so great as to cause the house to “explode”. There is actually evidence that opening windows is worse in terms of damage to the house. If it’s a really serious tornado, it is going to do some damage and it is not going to care whether your windows are open. (A tornado also can’t lift up your house and deposit it in Oz, but it gave me an idea for a funny story that involves Kevin Harvick as Dorothy and the media as the Munchkins.)
• Highway overpasses are not safe places during a tornado. Steel-reinforced concrete is strong, but not stronger than a tornado. If the overpass is hit by a tornado, it can fall and anyone in the vicinity is in danger of being hit by debris. If you think about it, the area underneath an overpass basically funnels all the wind through that area, so you are in much more danger being under an overpass than you are in your house.
• No geographical feature protects you from a tornado. They go over the river and through the woods, through cities, over hills, and basically wherever they care to go. Lying in a ditch is the best thing to do if you’re outside, but it is much better not to be outside.
• Motorhomes and RVs do NOT cause tornadoes; however, you are much more likely to be injured by a tornado or high winds in a RV or motorhome than you are in a permanent structure.

What to Do

What you SHOULD DO, especially if you are out at the racetrack:

• If you’re at home and planning on heading for the track, listen to the radio to make sure activities haven’t been delayed or cancelled because of the weather.
• Have a weather radio with fresh batteries and spares. Listen to the weather, watch it on TV, and be aware that you may need to take action on short notice.
• If you’re camping or RV’ing, have a flashlight and emergency kit that includes the basics, like bandages, antiseptic, etc.
• Make an emergency plan for your group – identify two places to meet if something happens and you are separated. One place should be near your campsite or seats and another should be a little further away, to be used if there is damage to the first area. Cell phone lines often become overloaded during emergencies, so don’t count on being able to reach each other on the phone.
• Don’t get falling down stupid drunk. You may need to think quickly. Wait until after the storm warnings have expired to enjoy the special pleasures of Talladega.
• If you hear sirens or radio/television reports that a storm is coming, get into a permanent structure if at all capable. My guess is that the safest place at Talladega if you’re out camping is in a ground-floor bathroom in a concrete structure. Like being on an airplane, identify two such structure because there are likely to be a lot of people with the same idea you have. If you can get underneath something heavy, like a sturdy table, a workbench, or anything else that would protect your head from falling debris, that’s even better.
• Remember that NASCAR fans share a unique bond that makes us more like family than strangers, even if we’ve just met. If someone needs help, help them — even if they are wearing a xx t-shirt (where xx is your least favorite driver’s car number).

I do not envy the folks at Talladega trying to guess the best way to proceed. I was at Richmond two years ago when there was a hurricane. The race was cancelled the day before. It was beautiful in Richmond that Sunday, but there was a lot of damage on most of the routes leading to the racetrack. NASCAR will probably get criticized no matter what they do, but I liked Jim Hunter’s attitude. “There’s a chance of bad storms, but there’s also a chance of Sun.” Let’s hope for the Sun this weekend.

I’ve gotten a little behind in my blogging. My Mom was diagnosed with cancer in February and passed away last week, which threw me for a bit of a loop in terms of catching up. But here it is, Texas race weekend and seven races into the year. So #6 conveniently comes the same weekend NASCAR announces their expanded recycling program.

Recycling is not entirely new with NASCAR. They’ve recycled tires through Goodyear for a long time, and Safety Klean recycles lots and lots of fluids – oils, transmission fluids, etc. That’s inside the garage, though and that’s a small fraction of the activity at the track.

NASCAR has huge events – Texas Motor Speedway can attract 170,000 + fans and a significant fraction of those come for two or three days.

The weight of an empty 20-oz. water bottle is about 20 grams (0.7 oz). A plastic Budweiser bottle weighs more, but let’s take this as a minimum. If each fan drinks two drinks in plastic bottles, we’re talking about 6,800 kilograms – almost 15,000 lbs of plastic bottles. That’s equal to a little more than four Sprint Cup cars (plus their drivers). I know there are a LOT of people who drink much much more than two beverages during the course of a weekend. And then there are the people who drink more than two beverages during the course of a yellow flag.

I talked with NASCAR’s Managing Director of Green Innovation, Dr. Mike Lynch, near the beginning of the year (when I planned on getting all these written) and he told me about some of NASCAR’s plans. In partnership with Coca-Cola Recycling, NASCAR is trying to ensure that a lot more of the waste generated at races is recycled. In the 2009 season, they recycled 80 tons and 2.5 million containers, which is a great start.

Let’s start with Mike’s credentials. He started out as a saxophonist – that’s his B.S. degree, but he moved fields to get a Ph.D. from the University of Miami in Developmental Psychology. That, in my opinion, gives him some unique credentials to deal with drivers! He won tenure at Purdue, but decided the ivory tower was not for him. He earned an MBA at the University of Chicago and became an entrepreneur, mostly working on green medical products among others. He sold that business, started another one and so on. In other words, he’s done a lot of different things with all types of customers and all types of topics.

The amount of recycling in 2009, even given that the recycling program isn’t active at all tracks, is clearly not anywhere near the numbers that end up in landfills. I wondered why NASCAR doesn’t recycle more. You do have to realize that I’m the kind of person who will carry a soda bottle home if it looks like the flight attendants are going to toss it in the trash instead of recycling it. I’ve worked with enough plastics to know that Plastics are Forever. Good for keeping soda fresh. Bad for the land, the sea and the air.

Mike Lynch brought a number of challenges to my attention — the kinds of things you don’t appreciate unless you are first-hand working on something. First off: Getting people to recycle requires placing a recycling container next to every trash container. I started counting trash containers today at TMS. Mike tells me that a small track like Richmond might have 500 trash cans, but a place the size of Daytona or Talladega requires more than 1200 bins to cover the 200,000 to 250,000 people who attend. Texas, I estimate, needs about 1000, plus one for every hauler in the Cup and Nationwide garages. Then you have to have people to empty the bins and take the contents somewhere. At some tracks, there is a remote location that is set up – not too far from the track – where they stage the recycling. That’s one of those things you don’t think about. I can store a blue garbage bag of recycling in the garage until the Friday pickup, but think about the volume those 15,000 lbs of bottles take up.

You also have to have the personnel to empty the recycling bins and make sure that the recycling gets separated from the trash. (The custodial ranks at TMS have orange vests that read “housekeeping”. Shouldn’t they read “track keeping”?) Someone has to make runs to and from the remote site. Mike mentioned that collecting recycling from the fans pretty much has to be a ‘single stream’ process, meaning one bin for everything recyclable (cardboard, glass, bottles, cans). In some locations, the recycling needs sorting – in others it doesn’t. They also have track personnel pick up bottles and cans from the grandstands after the races and add them to the recycling. The track gets market price for the recyclables, which hopefully helps defray their costs in setting up the bins, emptying them and sending them to the off-track facility.

Whew. That’s without the problems. For example, Daytona has Pepsi as a track sponsor and, since the NASCAR recycling program is doing by Coca-Cola, there is a problem there. This is one of the things about NASCAR that makes me really irritated. When it comes to doing good, there is no such thing as exclusivity. What I really want to see is a program whose first priority is getting as much recycled as possible and secondarily concerned with who gets credit. We’ve had similar problems with the educational materials we’ve been trying to develop to get students more interested in math and science: we can’t post them on YouTube, for example, because NASCAR Media group owns the rights and there’s some issue with Turner having web rights, etc. etc. etc. Like our educational programs, I am highly doubtful that anyone is making money on the recycling program. It’s fine for Dale Jr. to be exclusively pitching AMP energy drink, Wrangler Jeans and whatever else he wants, and he and Kasey can arm wrestle about whether there is room for more than one beverage at Hendrick Motorsports: I don’t care. There is no such thing as exclusivity when it comes to our planet.

Tying everything to a sponsor raises some other problems. Office Depot is sponsoring…, well, I’m not totally sure. Here’s what the press release says:

“Office Depot, along with Coca-Cola Recycling, will have co-branding on all NASCAR recycling elements at the track in Texas, including special locations for ink cartridge recycling. The Office Depot show car program in the local area also will promote recycling to fans, including race ticket giveaways providing an incentive for fans to “grow greener.”

I don’t know about you, but the chances that I remember to bring my empty toner cartridges with me to the track is pretty slim. Staples gives me a $3 credit for every one I return to them, and given my office supply habit (awaiting a 12-step program), that’s a better deal for me. Now, if Office Depot gives me something NASCAR-related year round for bringing my cartridges to me, I would patronize them over Staples just because they support the sport and won’t continue to do so unless they are getting business out of it.

NASCAR is a little cautious about pushing green, as there are those uninformed people who think that motorsports are about as wasteful a sport as there is. Not true.

Do the math: Even on a weekend that includes a Cup race, a Nationwide race and a Truck race, the total amount of gasoline used for the races and practices is less than the amount the whole country uses in ten seconds. NASCAR wastes less gas than I do when I have to run back to the grocery store for something I forgot, or back to work because I can’t remember whether I turned off the diffusion pump or not.

NASCAR is in an important position because they can influence so many people. That means they have the potential for doing great good. It also means they have the potential for doing great damage.

The tree planting program is a great example. NASCAR is committed to planting ten trees for every green flag that appears in the Cup race. Great PR move, except the amount of carbon dioxide (which is what is meant to be remedied by the trees) is determined by how many gallons of gasoline are combusted. It is totally unrelated to the number of green flags. Here’s a great example of what we call in education a ‘teachable moment’ and they’ve blown it.

One gallon of gasoline produces about 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. You don’t need much to believe this, just the ability to balance a chemical equation and do some simple multiplication. No calculus, I promise.

The average NASCAR Sprint Cup car gets about 4 mpg under green and 8 mpg under yellow. Let’s just assume, again overestimating, that all 43 cars run 500 miles without any cautions. That would correspond to 43 x (500/4) = 5375 gallons of gasoline. At 19.4 pounds of CO₂ per gallon of gasoline, the average Cup race is responsible for about 105,000 pounds of CO2.

Remember that people breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide and plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. The perfect symbiotic relationship, which is why people plant trees to offset carbon emissions.

The question of how much CO₂ a tree can remove from the environment is an open (and complicated) question. It depends on what type of tree and how long you allow the tree to grow. Bigger trees take up more CO₂. To NASCAR’s credit, they are committed to planting larger trees, which removes more CO2 from the environment faster. A single large “mature” tree can take up anywhere from 25 to 70 lbs of CO₂ per year. In the best case (70 lbs/year), you’d need 1500 trees to absorb all of the CO₂ in one year. Of course, the trees should live for more than one year, so you could amitorize the carbon remediation over several years.

The whole question of how much carbon dioxide a tree can remove from the atmosphere is uncertain, so I’m a little skeptical of the whole idea of claiming that one can mitigate emissions by planting trees — especially if you’re planting trees without providing for their continued maintenance. There are a couple of studies that suggest that the majority of trees planted for carbon remediation never receive any attention after planting and thus never serve the purpose for which they were planted.

I suppose that there are people who will do something simply because a NASCAR driver or crew chief tells them it’s good. I really hope that this is a minority of people. I hope the majority of people want to understand why they are doing something rather than just doing it. But even if that’s not the case, it’s better for people to do the right thing without knowing why than to do the wrong thing. Kudos to NASCAR for doing what they’re doing – but there is more they could be doing.

I was frantically trying to finish this video blog this morning and still make my plane to Florida, where I’m looking forward to covering the 12 hours of Sebring American Le Mans Series (presented by Patron Tequila) race. You’ll have to excuse the glitches in the video editing while I am figuring out this new mode of communicating!

I wake up in the morning listening to our local NPR station. A couple weeks ago, they said that the George Bush Turnpike was closed due to “a buckle in the road”. My husband commented that he knew Texans had big belt buckles, but he didn’t think they were big enough to shut a whole side of the tollway.

Well, the buckle they were talking about was actually three feet high and spanned two lanes. Apparently, the heavy rains we had received created a lot of pressure in the adjoining retaining wall and that pressure pushed the pavement until it buckled and formed our own little miniature mountain range right there in Carrollton.

The problems at Daytona last Sunday weren’t quite of that magnitude (the pothole was about 9″ x 15″ and only 2″ high, but that tiny pothole impacted a lot more people. Including me, who had assured my husband that the race certainly would be over by five as he planned Valentine’s dinner. What happened and how could it have been prevented?

(photo Bill Friel)

Let’s start with thermal expansion. If you’ve ever had a lid stuck on a jar, or a ring stuck on your finger, you may have tried running the jar or the ring under hot water. The metal jar lid would expand faster than the glass jar, thus loosening the seal and allowing you to remove the stubborn lid. That’s because different materials expand at different rates. Metals expand faster than glass and fingers. (The water also provides some lubrication and in the case of jars, may dissolve anything sticky that might be inbetween the threads.)

Most things expand when heated and contract when cooled. Not water. This is good and bad. On the good side, ice is less dense than water, which means that ice can float on top of a pond while warmer, denser water goes to the bottom. The fish and anything else that wants to survive also goes to the bottom. On the bad side — as you know if you’ve ever left a bottle of soda or juice in your car overnight when it got really cold — water expanding at the wrong time can be a mess.

Water freezing and thawing can wreak havoc in other places. Putting in lawn edging in the North is an exercise in futility because the freeze/thaw cycles push the edging up so that, by April, it’s lying on the ground.

The word ‘cycles’ here is important. Most materials are designed to handle constant loads. A car rolling along a flat surface exerts about the same force everywhere along the surface. When you subject a material to repeated cycles of pulling and pushing on it, eventually, it breaks. You can bend a paper clip back and forth a couple of times, but it gets harder and harder to do, and then finally breaks. Each time you bend the paper clip, you make a little change in its microstructure. It’s like a game of pick-up sticks (or Kerplunk). Everything is fine up to a point, but when you push just a little too far, the whole thing comes down.

Normal temperature changes outside make most things expand and contact. There are joints in concrete sidewalks, for example, to allow for this expansion. Otherwise, two slabs of concrete would start pushing against each other and you’d have your own miniature version of plate tectonics.

Asphalt is made up of two components: aggregate (small pieces of rocks) and binder. Go get a bunch of rocks roughly 1/2 inch in diameter and put them in a jar. Try to pack them as closely as possible. It’s not easy to do, and if you don’t believe me, fill the jar up with water, then measure how much water you got in there.

The rocks are mixed with a liquid binder to hold it together, but in the end, asphalt looks like a sponge: rocks held together by binder, with a little bit of air space inbetween. A typical composition for asphalt might be 80% rock, 15% binder and 5% air voids. Here’s a picture from “The Idiot’s Guide to Highway Paving” showing some asphalt close up.

You want some porosity in the asphalt. Porosity helps asphalt absorb water. A completely smooth, impervious surface would take a very long time to dry and would be more prone to hydroplaning than a rough surface.

The pores, however, cause problems, too. When water gets between stones and freezes, it exerts stress on the asphalt. Not a lot of stress, but enough cycles of stress will eventually produce weak spots and finally cracks. Once a crack is started, it’s very hard to stop (just like runs in nylons) and everytime a car goes over it, the crack gets wet. The weather in Florida was abnormally wet and cold the last few months. Don’t forget that Daytona was literally underwater last summer.

“Well, why didn’t they take that possibility into account?”, some of you are asking. If there is one thing we ought to be teaching in school science, it is that science never has absolute solutions. You can only increase downforce if you’re willing to pay a price in terms of drag or engine heating.

Likewise, if you engineered a track that was totally impervious to freezing and thawing, it wouldn’t drain well and would take a long time to dry when wet. Florida is much more likely to have rain and a need for lots of track drying than it is to have freezing. No track design is perfect. Although asphalt has been in use for many years (the Sumerians used it way back in 3000 B.C. as an adhesive on statues), we don’t have a lot of data on how highly banked asphalt racetracks that see speeds of 200 mph behave. There are really only two superspeedways, both constructed 1959-1960 and you can tell from the racing that they have very different characteristics, despite their apparent similarities.

Asphalt is not an easy material to work with, either. You start with crude oil, remove everything that seems useful (gasoline, diesel, oil, paraffin, etc.) and the sticky, goopy mess left over is used to make binder. You’ve probably seen (and/or smelled) asphalt machines puffing smoke near highway construction sites. The binder softens when it is warm and hardens when cool. Asphalt is usually laid down around 275-300 degrees Fahrenheit and gradually cools to a solid.

Liquid asphalt patches often consists of asphalt binder in a solvent — the same way pigment molecules are suspended in a solvent to make paint. You apply the liquid and wait for the solvent to evaporate, leaving behind a solid. The problem is that evaporation usually takes a long time. A re-surfaced asphalt driveway usually needs a day or two before it’s ready to be used. Heating will quicken the process, which is why the track workers were using a blowtorch on the patched area. Of course, the area that had the problem was the one part of the track that wasn’t in the Sun and thus was colder than everywhere else!

Eventually, they literally turned to Bondo. (My first car was a ’69 Buick LeSabre, so I know all about Bondo!) Bondo is a two-part putty that cures via a chemical reaction that is significantly less sensitive to temperature than asphalt patches. Of course, Bondo won’t stick as well to asphalt as asphalt sticks to asphalt, so Bondo is not the ideal solution. There’s that tradeoff again: you can make a fast repair that doesn’t last very long, or a slow repair that lasts longer. With a race in progress and FOX rapidly reaching the point where they were ready to interview drivers’ dogs because everyone else had already been interviewed, any repair that would get us to the end of the race was the right one.

Repaving is estimated at about $20 million dollars, and there’s no guarantee that (if it had been done between February and July ’09), the torrential rains of summer ’09 and the cool weather wouldn’t have caused problems. The next repave is tentatively scheduled for February 2012. Repaving can totally change the character of a track and not always for the better. They have plenty of time to patch the track between now and July (although there are other events scheduled for the track). An in-depth evaluation by an engineering company is in process. Whether patching will be sufficient or a total re-paving is necessary will be determined by the results of that evaluation. And while the folks doing the evaluation are some of the best in the business, the nature of the world is that there are no guarantees. The only Law of Nature that is certain is Murphy’s Law.

The purpose of this post is not to make arguments for or against “diversity”. I will delete comments on that theme because we can have the ‘there is no problem/yes, there is/yes there is, but it will solve itself in time’ argument till we are all blue in the face and we’re not going agree. The point of this post is: If you are going to claim diversity is important, put up or shut up.

I know something about diversity, being in a field (physics) where only 12% of the Ph.D. degrees in 1991 (the year I earned mine) were awarded to women. I’ve benefitted from some diversity efforts and been hurt by others. I’ve organized and participated in diversity efforts. I’ve heard everything from “I don’t know why I should spend time teaching you — you’re just going to get married and you’ll never use anything I taught you” to “Well, I would have had twelve interviews for postdocs, too, if I had tits’. I’ve cringed watching a young physics grad student remark on how much interest there was in her talk when the real interest was in her way-too-short-for-a-professional-conference skirt.

NASCAR, like physics, is a predominantly male sport for reasons of history. Both are highly competitive and fast paced, which means there often isn’t time for the usual nicities of the workplace. “Pardon me, Fred, but I think you have a factor of 2 error in your calculation, but that’s OK, I’ve done the same thing” becomes “Who the hell &^$#ed up with the gear calculations?” when discovered during a race. In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics and the headline was “LaJolla Housewife Wins Nobel Prize”. NASCAR wouldn’t let women – even wives – in the garage area until 1972. Not only are there women in the garage now, there are pregnant women in the garage. There are also an increasing number of minorities in the garage and when you see someone there, you know they have earned their job. When every tenth and hundredth of a second (or an inch) counts, teams are not going to keep people for show.

Much to the surprise of many, there are people who study diversity (and the lack thereof) to collect data and develop strategies that might work. I haven’t found any studies on diversity in motorsports per se, there are some remarkable commonalities across fields.

• Critical mass: The group in question needs to comprise about 15% (the critical mass) of the people for stability. In many areas, the first women, for example, are singlets (Louise Smith, Shirley Muldowny, Lyn St. James, Janet Guthrie, Danica Patrick) and appear in ones and maybe twos. They are usually exceptional — exceptionally talented, exceptionally motivated, exceptionally connected. But they remain ones and twos until critical mass is reached.
• Community: One of the most important components for sticking with a field of study is feeling that you are part of the community. It is tough for a woman to do that when community pastimes include getting really drunk and strip clubs (yes, I’ve seen this in both physics and motorsports). When you put a woman in a group of guys, the guys tend to be self-conscious about their behavior. It isn’t deliberate or probably even conscious: We just tend to gravitate to people who are similar to ourselves.
• Intention: For diversity to really succeed, there have to be people who are wholly committed to it, including realizing that it’s going to cost money, it’s not always going to be popular, and there is always someone that is going to be unhappy with what you are doing. (See for example, the suit recently filed by a blond, blue-eyed Puerto Rican who claims to have been barred from the D4D in 2005. Full Throttle pretty much summed up my feelings on that.) Programs that are established because of external pressure rarely work. You need committed mentors at all levels.
• Follow through: Isolated interventions have limited effect. We have plenty of data that shows that doing anything once isn’t enough. Running one workshop or one event will have limited impact. Sustained intervention is required.
• Accountability: If you want people to change, there has to be either a carrot or a stick. At some point, there is a reckoning, whether it is the Wall Street Journal pointing out that you have no female board members.

So let’s look at how the NASCAR community is handling the issue. There are diversity programs in many areas we rarely hear about. Most auto manufacturers’ diversity programs extend to their racing programs (although I don’t know how the financial situation may have changed these). Some current crew members I know originally received scholarships from Dodge to earn a degree from a technical institute like NTI or UTI, and then matched them with a team that needed the awardee’s expertise.

Some teams have their own diversity programs. The one with which I am most familiar is at Joe Gibbs Racing, which produced Aric Almirola. That program was strongly influenced by NFL player Reggie White. Roush has a Chief Diversity Officer. Most teams have internships for business and technical areas. Some tracks have diversity internship programs as well.

NASCAR itself has a diversity internship program that provides 12 internships for minority and women in everything from business to engineering and technical positions. (Applications for these internships are due March 1, 2010, so if you’re interested, check out the link.) They also have a minority supplier program and a college tour to Historically Black Colleges and Universities. NASCAR has a Diversity Council and an Executive Steering Council for Diversity – I wasn’t able to find anything more recent than 2005 for a list of who is involved. I asked NASCAR about a list and they haven’t gotten back to me yet, but to be fair I asked only four weeks before Daytona and everyone in NASCAR is absolutely crazy this time of year.

NASCAR’s primary diversity program — the one that gets the most publicity — is the Drive for Diversity. D4D (as they call it), a program to develop women and/or minority drivers and crew members, started in 2004. The program was run for five years by Charlotte-based multicultural marketing company Access Marketing & Communications. In this earlier incarnation, D4D drivers were farmed out to short-track teams, with equipment and committment level varying significantly.

D4D recently got the opportunity to re-invent itself when Max Siegel found himself on the outside of the Ganassi/DEI merger. Siegel, a graduate of Notre Dame Law School with a previous career in the music business, had joined DEI in 2006. When DEI and Ganassi became EGR, Siegal’s loss was NASCAR’s gain. Seigel’s sports and entertainment agency The 909 Group is now managing the program. They inherit some of the baggage created by Access (but not the lawsuits), but they’ve acted quickly to make some significant changes.

D4D now requires its participants to relocate to Charlotte and will run its own teams under the ‘Revolution Racing’ banner. Four NASCAR Camping World Series teams will be overseen by Andy Santerre and six NASCAR Wheelen All-American Series teams will be run by Blair Addis. They also plan initiatives to identify aspiring drivers in late model series that might move into the D4D program and may run Bandeleros to attract even younger kids. These are all promising moves.

As far as intention goes, I have a lot of respect for Max Seigel. If anyone has sincere intentions (and a fighting chance) of making this program work, it would be Seigel. But I am really skeptical about diversity programs managed by marketing companies. For NASCAR, diversity is (like everything else) all about getting more fans, more sponsors, more eyes on the television. I know, sports is ultimately about money and I live in an ivory tower, but I maintain the hope that doing well by doing right actually works. Sometimes, the will of a single person can overcome all kinds of barriers, but I would feel much better about NASCAR’s committment if they had consultants who are actually in the trenches dealing with these issues. (And I don’t mean Presidents and CEOs, who make an impressive-looking group, but rarely get anything substantial accomplished.) I’d like to see that 909 has some people aboard (perhaps as consultants) who know about diversity research, but I haven’t seen anything on their website.

It may be that Siegel just has really good intuition. He has made a lot of changes that jibe well with what we know about improving diversity. The program centralizes the drivers in Charlotte and puts them all on a single team, giving them the chance to learn from and lean on each other. (Community/Critical Mass) With any luck, more than one D4D driver will be racing at each event, so they can support each other. The single team and the presence of well-respected racing veterans like Santerre and Addis ensures consist quality in equipment and training.

The problem of follow-through and accountability was discussed elegantly by Ed Hinton, who pointed out that the last known figure for the amount of money NASCAR spends on the diversity programs was $4M, which was about three years ago. Hinton — like many others — says that the program is over hyped and underfunded. (Although I have to note that there are a number of other sponsors involved like Sunoco and Sprint.) Hinton points out that NASCAR stops providing any support after the driver moves up into one of the top-three series. NASCAR says that doing so would be a conflict of interest – the sanctioning body can’t support some drivers and not others. I can see merit in both sides of the argument. The best solution, but one that won’t happen until/unless the economy picks up, would be for more sponsors to sign onto D4D and remove direct NASCAR sponsorship. Diversity in potential sponsors’ workforce is no doubt higher on the priority list than diversity in racing. Removing NASCAR from D4D would also leave NASCAR open to the charge that they don’t do anything to promote diversity.

As far as accountability, the criticism is leveled that no D4D drivers are currently running in the top three series. This is true, but let’s put it in context. Can you find a comparable group of white males and track their careers for comparison? What is the average time for a driver to move from a regional series to Trucks or Nationwide? I’m not talking about exceptions like Joey Logano, I’m talking about drivers like Ricky Stenhouse, Colin Braun, David Starr. What kind of evaluation of the program has been done? This would make a great study: I’d be writing a proposal to do it if I weren’t in such a hurry to escape academia.

As I said, diversity is in many ways a no-win situation, but it is complicated by a) NASCAR’s zero tolerance policy for releasing anything negative; and b) most people’s lack of understanding of how complicated solving diversity problems really is. D4D is an experiment. It’s not like we know what works in motorsports and NASCAR simply has to follow a recipe. But precisely because it is an experiment, NASCAR ought to be a little more open with the input and the output. In science, reporting a null result (i.e. something that didn’t work) is valuable. OK, not as valuable as reporting a positive result, but experiments turn out the way they turn out. You have to have some idea of whether what you are doing is working or not and if it’s not working, it ought to be OK for NASCAR to say, ‘look, we put x dollars into trying this model and we gave it a y-year try and these are the results’. NASCAR really should release numbers on how many of their interns (minority and other) are eventually hired into permanent positions at NASCAR or NASCAR-related teams. If the number of minorities hired is smaller than the number of non-minorities hired, someone needs to look into why that is happening and propose a fix.

My favorite quote regarding diversity is “Women will truly be equal to men when we are allowed to be as mediocre as they are”. Having one exceptional superstar doesn’t consistitue success at diversity. When there’s a woman allowed to run 25th or 30th every week without losing her ride (along with Jeannette Johnson or Toni Stewart running in the top ten), then we will be making some real strides.