Infographic: Does Kasey Kahne Get in the Chase?

 Kasey Kahne, Richmond, The Chase  3 Responses »
Sep 042012
 

I don’t know if they still make you do flowcharts in programming class, but I was trying to read through the Chase scenarios and I was getting really confused.  So I did this.  I think it’s much clearer now.  To me, at least.

OK – I’ve amused myself with this so much that I’ll put it up in progress.  I think it’s right, but I’ll check tonight.  I bet I can get the other scenarios on here… Watch this space!

9/5/12:  I’m pretty sure what I’ve got to this point is right.  It’s not pretty yet, but this is turning out to be harder than I expected!   If Tony Stewart would just stay in 10th place, all our lives would be much easier.

You will have to click on the image in order to be able to see it…

 

 

Malarkey, indeed.

 Clint Bowyer, New Hampshire, Rules, The Chase  1 Response »
Oct 042010
 

I provided an interpretation of the penalty upholding statement released last Wednesday.  The whole process raised more questions than it answered.  The RCR appeal is dead.  I put a couple last comments at the end of the post, but those are more for archival purposes than anything else.  I also have a significant (well, for me at least) personal development at the very end.

Here’s the issue now.  John Middlebrook, NASCAR’s chief appellate officer, will hear RCR’s (final) appeal tomorrow.  He has a major advantage in that he can pretty much run the appeal however he wants.  If I were in Mr. Middlebrook’s shoes, here’s what I’d do.

There are some major discrepancies that have not been resolved.  The appeals panel said that Dr. Manning contradicted RCR – Manning apparently only investigated the left-hand side of the car, and he said in numerous interviews that he told the panel he didn’t know if the right side could have been made higher because he didn’t measure it.  The panel claims he said the right-hand side couldn’t have been made higher by the tow truck.  This is a really serious discrepancy between what the testifying person says they said and what the panel heard.

Let’s get all the people involved in the same room and resolve the discrepancies.  What exactly was RCR told the violation was?  Were they notified in writing or orally?  Did both sides have the same understanding of how the process would work?  A new wrinkle appeared today as reported by Dave Moody.  RCR and Manning claimed that they were not allowed to see the car.  Saturday, NASCAR says that Manning never asked to look at the car, and that everyone at RCR was aware that there is an “open door policy”.  Did RCR ask to look at the car?  Did NASCAR offer to provide all the data they had?

Why didn’t Manning measure both rear sides?   Did RCR tell him that they were only being accused of being too high on the left?  RCR told everyone that the car was 0.060″ too high prior to the hearing.  Where did they get that number?  Manning learned that the number was 0.039″ only just before the hearing.

Mr. Middlebrook, the best thing you could do is to initiate reform of the process to make it more transparent.  Does the R&D Center have the responsibility to show the violation?  Does RCR have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, or do they just have to place reasonable doubt on NASCAR’s case?  Is there really any reason why fans shouldn’t know the exact nature of the violation if the team doesn’t object (prior to appeal)?

NASCAR does itself no favors being secretive.  I know, NASCAR’s corporate culture is highly focused on control, but the fact is that most people believe the only reason to keep things secret is if you have something to hide.  Why wasn’t NASCAR out there Wednesday night or Thursday morning refuting the assertions that RCR wasn’t allowed to view the car?

RCR’s case is a lost cause, but there’s an opportunity to make a more important difference in the culture of NASCAR.  Openness and transparency.  A rule book anyone can download from the web.  To do otherwise is, well, malarkey.

A couple of other clarifications:

1.  The 33 car from Richmond was not illegal.  NASCAR warned RCR that they were getting very close to the line, but that car was judged to be legal.  Nothing that has happened affects whether the 33 should be in The Chase or not.  RCR has suffered from Perry Mason syndrome — the minute someone says “I wish Fred were dead” and then, voila, when Fred dies, you know who the first suspect is going to be.  NASCAR warned RCR after the Richmond inspection that the 33 car from New Hampshire would be taken for detailed inspection regardless of whether it won or finished 43rd.

2.  The 33 car from New Hampshire was illegal.  RCR doesn’t contest this.  The body was correct, the chassis was correct, but the body was located incorrectly relative to the chassis by 0.039″ above the allowed tolerance.  I don’t believe anyone was trying to cheat, because you’d have to be pretty dense to be off by this much.

3.  The illegality of the New Hampshire car could not have been detected by measurements made at the track.  Measuring to that degree of specificity requires a surface plate – a special installation that is either metal, granite, or poured epoxy.  During a tour of Hendrick Motorsports, I was told that their surface plates, which are large enough for the entire car, have a height variation of less than 0.007″ over the entire plate.   A surface plate is installed and certified for a specific location: Its accuracy depends on the surface on which it is sitting.  Surface plates are not portable.  The metrology system (the thing they use to make the measurements with) is very precise and also not conducive to moving.  If these measurements are to be made as part of the post-race inspection, they have to be made at the NASCAR R&D Center, not at the track.

I’m working on my next invention, the portable x-ray/laser scanner, which I plan to house in a mobile system that looks like a drive-in car wash.  You’d push the car in, and lasers would come from the top, sides and bottom to take a ‘fingerprint’ (carprint) that can be compared before/after.  Anyone who has a few million dollars lying around to invest, please let me know.

I’ll be working on that project from a new home.  I’m happy to announce that, starting November 1, I’ll be taking on a new post, as Director of the West Virginia Nano Initiative.  I’ll be leading an incredibly talented group of researchers in physics, chemistry, medicine and engineering to address some of the most important problems we’re facing:  improving energy efficiency and moving to domestically available energy sources; learning to diagnose and treat disease at earlier stages and more cheaply, developing new sensors that will help us learn about how the environment around us is changing and how we need to respond to those changes, and national security.  I’m very excited about the new job – it’s going to be a major challenge, but it is an absolutely great group of people.  Morgantown is within six hours of Bristol, Martinsville, Charlotte, Indy, Kentucky, Pocono and Richmond.

Not that that had ANYTHING to do with my taking the job…

33 car penalties

 Aerodynamics, Clint Bowyer, New Hampshire, Racing, Richmond, Rules, The Chase  7 Responses »
Sep 222010
 

After being a non-event (The 33 car from Richmond was “just barely legal” and NASCAR was checking with RCR to make sure they didn’t have a mistake on their build sheet) for a couple of days, the situation changed today when a 150-point, $150,000, 6-week crew chief/car chief suspension was announced based on violations from the New Hampshire car.

The primary part of the penalty (meaning the part besides actions detrimental to stock car racing) was

33 car body location specifications in reference to certified chassis did not meet #NASCAR-approved specs

The chassis is the tube frame that makes up the skeleton of the car. NASCAR specifies the chassis down to the exact size tube, wall thicknesses of the tube, and precise location.  Prior to hanging the body, each chassis must be taken to the NASCAR R&D Center to be verified, which is done using a Romer arm.  The chassis is then tagged with RFID tags that are scanned at the racktrack to ensure that no changes have been made.

After the chassis is certified, the team can hang the body.  Instead of making measurements of the body directly, certain points are called out by their position relative to spots on the chassis.  The violation was in the position of the bodywork, which suggests that any advantage that may have been gained was aerodynamic.  A violation of the chassis might have been dealt with even more severely because the chassis is the primary protection mechanism for the driver.  RCR confirmed in their statement that the body was too high relative to the chassis – something that one could argue might have provided an aerodynamic advantage by putting the spoiler up further in the air.

If this is the same issue that their Richmond car received such intense scrutiny for, it makes sense.  Cars are built weeks ahead of time, as the hauler has to get them to the race track Thursday night, so it is likely that the body was already hung on the New Hampshire car by the time NASCAR told RCR that there was an issue with the Richmond car.

That moves Bowyer from first to last in the Chase, and leaves him without two very important members of his crew for the next six weeks.

UPDATE:  RCR reveals that the out-of-tolerance measurement was 60 thousandths (0.06) of an inch.  For reference, a sheet of paper is 0.004 inches, so 60 thousandths of an inch would be 15 sheets of paper.  They also will argue in their appeal that the problem was created by the tow truck driver who pushed the #33 to Victory Lane after it run out of gas.

@bobpockrass reports that the general tolerance on the measurement in question is 70 thou, which means that the car was 0.13 inches off – more than an eighth of an inch.  If you’re trying to be ‘just legal’, you don’t miss by 1/8″.

Check back:  More as it develops.

Great post from Dustin Long on the inspection process.

An earlier post from me (on the old stockcarscience.com site) about the tolerances and Hendrick Motorsports’ situation last year.

Eight Issues NASCAR Needs to Address in 2010

 Aerodynamics, Greenness, journalism, News, Non-Dairy Coffee Creamer, The Chase, Tires  No Responses »
Jan 042010
 

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 21st 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.