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.

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!

OK, this is a minor one to start with, but one that I think could be pretty easily addressed.

The Issue

I’ve written two posts explaining how the drivers determine Pit Road speed (1 and 2), so I won’t repeat here why the cars have tachometers instead of speedometers, and how the gearing choices determine the engine rpm that corresponds too the appropriate pit road speed.

But once you understand how that works, you realize how easy it is for someone to change out the rear-end gear, but forget to put the change into the Excel file they use for figuring out pit road speed and you get Juan Pablo Montoya losing a race he really should have had a shot at winning.

Kudos

I’m trying to remind myself to give NASCAR credit for the things they have done right. It’s so much easier to criticize the wrong.

The pit road speed limit was instituted for the safety of the pit crews. Being within five feet of a car going 100 mph+ while changing tires is a recipe for disaster. The motivating incident for the pit road speed limit was the death of Mike Ritch in 1990 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. EPSN Classic has been running some old races and it makes me wince to see the pit crew running out there without firesuits or helmets as cars zip by.

NASCAR gives teams a 5 mph window on pit road speed, so if pit road speed is 55 mph, you can go up to 60 mph without getting a penalty. If you go 60.1 mph, you are sent to the tail end of the longest line. So of course, the pit road speed is really 5 mph higher than what is stated because all the teams are trying to go as fast as possible without getting penalized.

Ideas

Tachometer

I would never suggest doing away with the pit road speed limit; however, there seem to be way too many inadvertant violations of that rule that have radicaly changed the makeup of the front runners. Many drivers use a tachometer with color-coded lights set to come on at predefined rpm values (see an example patent, or the picture below). But if someone on the crew sets the tach to light up at the wrong rpm, the team is pretty much out of luck — even if the driver was going below the rpm limit he was told to stay below.

Idea 1: Pit Road Rev Limiters.

Rev limiters kick in if the engine is rotating at a higher rate than a certain predetermined rotational speed – they electronically prevent the spark plugs from firing if the rpm limit is exceeded. Let NASCAR issue the chips the same way they issue the wings and transponders. Coming down pit road, the driver switches to the pit-road chip. The transponders already being used to track speed can be used to double check.

Now, there’s a catch here, which is that the rpm limit is associated with being in a particular gear, which is why you hear the crew chief tell the driver something like ’3400, 2nd gear’. At some tracks, drivers may want to come down pit road in second or in first, depending on whether they are coming down under green or yellow. Since you have two ignition boxes, you can only have one pit road speed chip. And, of course, that eliminates the ability of the engine tuner to use two rev limiting chips to protect the engine. They sometimes will use one for most of the race, with a second slightly higher-rpm chip in place for use over limited durations or at the very end of the race.

Idea 2 – Cockpit Information Center

NASCAR has the speeds from the transponder data. Is there any reason they can’t put a piece of electronics in the car that signals when the driver is approaching the pit road speed limit? Yellow-to-red LEDs? Or (heaven forbid) a digital display that only reads at and below the pit road speed limit?

The race-safe system allows a series director to throw one switch in the control center when the decision is made to wave the yellow flag. That switch activates a yellow light in every driver’s cockpit. Instead of being dependent on the spotter seeing the yellow flag and telling the driver, the racing series can tell the driver directly. There is no reason cars should be hitting those cars caught up in an accident ten seconds after the first accident happens.

The technology you’d need for an automated system that would turn on a light or display the speed when the driver is at pit road speed is not that much more complicated than the race-safe system. Get rid of the 5 mph allowance, which is an artifice anyway. Give the drivers a yellow light when they are within three mph and a red when they are within 1 mph of the pit road speed. The team will still provide an rpm reading to the driver. The first time the driver is coming down pit road and the lights come on at a rpm reading he’s not expecting, he’s going to say something to the team and hopefuly someone is going to realize that there may have been a screw up.

At the very least, have NASCAR report measured speeds for each car to the teams during the parade laps when they are ostensibly at pit road speed so teams can compare their calculations with reality. If there is something systematically wrong on either side (as there seemed to be in at least one Nationwide race in 2009), before the race is the time to find that out.

I understand pit road is supposed to be part of the strategy and the speed & dexterity of the pit crews is part of the race. Maintaining safety on pit road is the most important thing, but the spirit of the law is significantly more important than the letter of the law in this case. Being a fraction of a mph over the pit road speed limit ought not to take a driver out of contention for a win.

Because NASCAR likes nothing better than unsolicited suggestions, right?

If I could change just one thing about NASCAR during the off season, it would be banning people from calling into Sirius radio talk shows and suggesting versions of The Chase that rival the BCS and string theory for complexity. If you want to know what NASCAR might ever consider changing, check out the patent NASCAR holds on The Chase (patent number 7,207,568 entitled “Method of Conducting a Racing Series”).

I’m especially tired of whining about The Chase format when there are much more significant things to be addressed. Let’s talk about the state of motorsports journalism, for example. A number of excellent newspaper sports writers have been laid off in the last two years. Newspapers can’t afford to have dedicated motorsports coverage, you say? Apparently neither can NASCAR Scene, which laid off a significant fraction of their writing and editorial staff just today. My sympathies are with the folks who lost their jobs today. Some have been with the magazine literally their entire careers and some very recently moved from good situations to take what they thought was the ‘job of a lifetime’. I guess NASCAR fans are going to have to start getting the majority of their news from the NASCAR Citizen Journalists Media Corps.

All aspects of racing are facing the prospect of change, including the concept of racing itself. At the World Motorsport Symposium in England last November, people from all varieties of racing talked with great concern about the economic situation and how racing fits into the 21^st Century. People repeatedly mentioned one phrase: ‘the need for racing to be relevant‘.

Old-time fans can scoff that racing ought to be loud and smelly and it’s just a bunch of Prius-driving tree huggers that are causing all the problems, but the fact of the matter is that the world is changing. Race tracks in Europe are facing closure due to noise issues and emissions issues. Either racing changes or natural selection does the same number on racing it did on the dodo bird.

Between highly customizable entertainment coming at us from all directions, the glaccially slow economic recovery, people’s microsecond-long attention spans, animated gophers, and the fact that we must deal with increasing global tempertures, racing is a very obvious (although not justifiable) target. Racing series need to think about long-term planning. Not just what they’ll do next year, but what they’ll do in the next five years. Racing has an unfortunate history of being reactive. It’s time to get proactive. Now.

I normally struggle with my own New Year’s resolutions, so I thought maybe this year I’d just make resolutions for other people and see if they do any better. My suggestions, of course, focus on science. I do have a suggestion for changing The Chase, but it requires non-linear differential equations, non-dairy coffee creamer and quantum field theory, so I’m keeping it to myself. I’ve tried to order my suggestions, but take each of the heading numbers with about a plus or minus 2. Starting from least to most important (insert drumroll here):

8. Take Pit Road speeding penalties out of the race.

7. Get serious about diversity or stop talking about it.

6. Get serious about being ‘green’.

5. Rethink ‘parity’.

4. Beef up the ‘research and development’ part of the NASCAR Research & Development Center and establish formal mechanisms for involving the teams.

3. Stop being fuelish.

2. Give the New Car the tires it deserves

1. Fix the aero problems with the New Car.

I’ll be blogging about each one of these issues in the coming weeks.

Incidentally, I’m going to be double posting for a few weeks while I consolidate the buildingspeed.org and stockcarscience.com websites. Believe it or not, some of my sports car racing friends took umbrage at being talked aboout on a ‘stock car’ site! Plus, keeping up with the two different sites was stretching me just a little too thin, since I’m now also blogging about everything from Christmas tree lights to climate change at Cocktail Party Physics.