Why Drying Tracks Takes So Long

 Air Titan, Talladega, Temperature, Uncategorized, Weather  1 Response »
May 042013
 

This is a major revision of a post that originally appeared on the now-defunct stockcarscience.com on 4/18/10.

Why does it takes so long for a track to dry?  Why does humid weather make track drying take even longer?

Air is a mix of gas molecules:  mostly (78%) nitrogen, about 21% oxygen, the rest misc. gases.  The composition is pretty uniform with the exception of how much water is in the air.   The absolute humidity is the amount of water in some chosen volume of air, for example, how much water vapor is in one cubic meter of air.  Air can only hold so much water vapor and that amount depends on the temperature and pressure.  Dry air would be no ounces of water in a cubic foot of air.  If the vapor is saturated at 30 degrees centigrade (86 degrees Fahrenheit), then the amount of water could be up to three one-hundredths of an ounce of water per cubic foot.

The mechanisms we use to get rid of water on the track are evaporation and possibly boiling.  Evaporation is the same mechanism we use to dry dishes, or even ourselves when we get out a pool and just let the sun dry us.  Evaporation is a liquid changing into a gas.  Boiling is also changing a liquid from a vapor to a gas, but there’s a difference.  Evaporation happens at the surface of a water drop.  Only the outermost few water molecules change from liquid to gas.  Boiling affects the bulk of the water drop.

Regardless of whether we’re talking evaporation or boiling, the water on the track doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  There’s that water vapor in the air.

Nature likes equilibrium.  Equilibrium is when things are equal and concentration is one property that can be equal.  If you pour a glass of red dye into a fish tank full of clear water, the red dye molecules will spread out and uniformly distribute themselves throughout the fish tank.  (Don’t try this if there are fish in the tank, please…)

So we have water molecules in the water drop – a lot of water molecules – and water molecules in the air.  The concentration of water molecules in the air is smaller than the concentration of molecules in the water droplet, but it can vary depending on how humid it is.  The picture below schematically shows three situations in which there are increasing amounts of water vapor in the air surrounding the water drop. The darker the green, the higher the concentration of water molecules.

Nature likes equilibrium, so it would like to have the same concentration of water molecules everywhere.  The rate at which it can move water molecules from the water drop to the air is proportional to the difference in concentrations.

If you have really dry air, there is a big difference in concentrations, and the water from the droplet moves into the air faster.  Have you ever hung your swimsuit out to dry on the balcony of a Florida hotel in July?  It takes forever to dry because the air is so moist.  There isn’t a huge difference between the concentration of water in the air and the concentration of water in the water drop.  If it were relatively dry and we had a rainfall, the track would dry much more quickly than it would with the current conditions:  the humid air is already pretty saturated – relative humidity is how close we are to totally saturated and the numbers have been around 90%.  100% relative humidity means that you absolutely can’t put any more water vapor in the air, so it would take a very, very long time to dry the track.

Jet dryers are literally jet engines that speed up evaporation by just heating the crap out of the water sitting on the track.  The temperature of the combustion fuel is on the order of 1100 degrees F, but it cools pretty quickly as it leaves the dryer (that’s why the jets are so close to the track surface.)  If you have eight jet dryers, each operating for 50 minutes on 175 gallons of fuel and it takes 150 minutes to dry the track, we’re talking about 4200 gallons of jet fuel.

In my next post, I’ll explain how the Air Titan system works and why it should be a huge improvement over jet dryers.

Reader Questions: Gen-6 Windshields on Passenger Cars?

 Lexan, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Feb 182013
 
PittCaleb asks:

If we used Lexan in passenger cars, would there be any benefit such as reason repelling our ice buildup? Scratching or other potential downsides? What would the price diff be?

The implementation of superstrength laminated polycarbonate (Lexan) in NASCAR windshields raises the obvious question:   “If it’s so good for NASCAR, why isn’t it in my car?”

A couple considerations:

  • Weight:  The less a car weighs, the less fuel it takes to run, so decreasing weight is not just good for going fast:  it’s good for saving gas as well.  That said, the weight differential replacing a windshield with Lexan is pretty small compared to other places on a car.  the Department of Transportation (DOT) must approve all windshields for use in passenger cars and they require 1/4″ hard-coated Lexan.  Since the density of Lexan is roughly half the density of glass, assuming equal thickness, a Lexan windshield would weigh about half of a laminated glass windshield.   Comparing that to a 3500-lb overall car weight of, you’re not saving much in terms of fuel.
  • Cost:  You can buy a sheet of 1/4″ thick Lexan big enough for a windshield for about a hundred bucks.  BUT:  Lexan (polycarb in general) is extremely susceptible to scratches.  A cheap piece of basic polycarb will be scratched the first time a bit of sand or dirt gets under your windshield wiper.  Manufacturers get around this by putting hard coatings over the polycarb that make it more scratch resistant – but those coatings are expensive and ramp up the cost pretty rapidly.  You’re probably talking 2-3 times the cost of polycarb vs. glass, which is probably a couple hundred dollars for a windshield.  Does that offset the lighter weight?  Depends on the person buying the car.  Polycarb is becoming more common for things like headlight covers, but the only cars using a lot of Lexan are in the class of the Bugatti Veyron – which costs more than most of us make in a decade.
  • Maintenance:  Americans are not very good at taking care of their cars.  Most people don’t check their tire pressure, change the oil regularly, or even pay heed when the engine warning light comes on.  Manufacturers won’t implement  Lexan windshields until they require absolutely no additional TLC relative to glass.
  • Icing:  Interesting point.  The thermal conductivity (how well a material transmits heat) of Lexan is about a quarter that of glass.  That means Lexan is a much better insulator than glass – one attractive point for Lexan from the perspective of environmental aspects is that Lexan would enable you to use less heating and air conditioning.  The thermal conductivity of polycarb can be changed by using glass fillers – but that also changes the strength.  We argued a bit about  this one.  It would take a longer time for the inside of the car to get cold, but since Lexan is a bad thermal conductor, that might not impact the outside of the windshield very much.  If you were using the defroster, it would take a long time for heat on one side of the Lexan to get to the other side, and thus longer to defrost.

The thing might make Lexan a feature of road cars is (in my opinion), if electric vehicles really take off.  Saving ten or twenty pounds on a race car is huge; but it won’t make much of a difference on an internal combustion engine-driven vehicle.  For an electric vehicle, however, every pound counts in terms of extending the car’s range.  Since range limitations are one of the big barriers for EV acceptance, using Lexan to reduce the weight without compromising safety could make a real difference.

 

What’s a NACA Duct?

 Gridlock, NACA Ducts, Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Dec 212012
 

Once upon a time, during a period in which our country — and the rest of the world — was in turmoil, the President of the United States wanted to create a governmental body that would be charged with coordinating critical scientific work being done by government with similar work carried out in industry and at universities.  Congress repeatedly refused to authorize the legislation.  The body wasn’t approved until three years after it was originally proposed – and then, it passed only because its creation was tacked onto the Naval Appropriation Bill and no one really noticed.

Sounds like our current Congress, doesn’t it?

NACALogoThis actually happened during World War I and the governmental body that was finally approved was the the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.  Its task was coordinating war-related projects between the government, industry and universities.  President Taft started the process in 1912, but it wasn’t until 1915 that President Wilson finally signed the legislation directing  that NACA (which was pronounced with each letter spoken, not as a single word)  would “supervised and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution”.   One of the first appointees was Orville Wright.  (Yes, the logo — shown at left — is a little lame, but the government had a couple sort of important things going on at the time.)

NACA addressed their mission and much more – they were responsible for new, high-speed wind tunnels, engine test facilities, and lots of fundamental discoveries that facilitated commercial and military planes, including breaking the ‘sound barrier’.  Although the organization no longer exists (having morphed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1951), many of its discoveries and breakthroughs are still used today.

NACA Ducts

NACA Ducts

The words “NACA Duct” usually go by so fast that they sound like “Nackaduck”, but a NACA duct is really just a specialized type of duct.  Ducts are hoses or other devices used to move air from one place to another.  brings air into (in our case) a racecar in a very special way.   Clear NACA ducts can be seen in the rear windows of NASCAR cars – there are usually two or three in the window.  Carbon-fiber NACA ducts sit in the front of the car.

Aerodynamic forces — like drag — increase like the speed squared.  If you go twice as fast, you get four times as much drag.   If you think a race car going 200 mph experiences a lot of drag, think about an airplane at the speed of sound — which is 768 mph.  If a NASCAR race car could go the speed of sound, it would experience 15 times more drag than when it was going 200 mph.

The reason we don’t like drag, of course, is because drag always acts in the direction opposite the direction the car is moving.  No matter what direction you’re moving, drag is always trying to slow you down.  If you don’t care about being able to go faster, you still want to decrease drag because you need to use energy (gasoline) to overcome drag.  (I’m going to have an interesting article coming up on some nanotechnology being used to decrease drag in airplanes — that might be an option for NASCAR teams for Daytona and Talladega.)

Air must be brought into the car  to cool the brakes and to cool the driver. If you just pop out the rear window, you get a lot of air into the car — but you can’t direct where it’s going and you’ve just created a whole lot of drag.  The NACA duct was designed to bring air into a vehicle with minimal increase in drag.  (NASA has the original paper on the origin of the design on their website.)

How It Works

NACADuctCarbonFiber

Some current road cars have air scoops sticking up out of the hood of the car to bring air into the engine – the problem with something poking out of the car is that it increases drag.  NACA ducts are submerged ducts – they are installed flat.  The picture at left is a closeup of a carbon fiber NACA duct.  The air comes into the narrow end and a hose is attached to the round part so that you can direct the air to the brakes or the driver’s airbox.

Drag is literally friction between air molecules and the surface of the car.  The air molecules closest to the car move at about the same speed as the car, but the air molecules further from the car’s surface move faster.  The boundary layer is the thin layer of air nearest the car’s surface.  The boundary layer can be thick or thin and the flow can be laminar (meaning in straight, smooth lines) or turbulent.  NASCAR aerodynamicists want  a thin boundary layer with laminar flow.  The thicker and more turbulent the boundary layer, the more drag.  The length and shape of the NACA duct creates counter-rotating vortices that deflect the boundary layer away from the intake, but draw in the faster-moving air above it, thus allowing you to get air into the car without creating a lot of extra drag.

During qualifying, you may see teams taping over the NACA ducts – in a sport where hundredths of a second count, eliminating even the small amount of drag the NACA ducts create can make a difference in where you start the race.  Like the engine opening, you can run a couple of laps without brake cooling or driver cooling, but you can’t run an entire race.

Although NACA ducts were originally designed for high-speed aircraft, they can’t produce large airflow or high-pressure airflow, which means that they really aren’t used anymore in the jet engine applications for which they were originally designed.  They are, however, ideal for cutting down the drag on racecars.

 

Science Cafe – Cleveland Monday November 12th

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 092012
 

Hey all! I’m doing my very first science cafe — combining my three favorite things in the world:  NASCAR, science and beer.

The Market Garden Brewery (Located at 1947 West 25th Street next to the West Side Market) Cleveland OH  map

This event is sponsored by the Case Western Reserve Chapter of Sigma Xi and many thanks to them for asking me to be involved.

Drinks at 6:30 p.m

Discussion starting at 7:00 p.m.  (Emphasis on discussion – This isn’t a lecture, it’s going to be a back and forth!)  I’m bringing the tires.

 

More information

The Trouble with Pit Road Walls

 Collisions, Foam, Michigan International Speedway, Safety, Uncategorized  4 Responses »
Aug 192012
 

We saw a very scary incident during the Cup race Sunday when Mark Martin was T-boned by the edge of the pit road wall.  Luckily, the car hit the wall behind the driver’s seat — otherwise, that could have been very serious.  (The link has the video).

The ends of walls are probably the biggest safety problem NASCAR has right now.  The SAFER barriers have radically improved the ability of drivers to walk away from standard crashes, but there are still some vulnerable areas.

When a car comes to a stop by hitting a wall, it experiences some force.  The SAFER barriers spread that force out over a longer time, so the peak force is less.  The end of a wall poses a different types of problem.  Pressure is the force the car experiences divided by the area over which the force is applied. When a car hits a wall broadside, the force is spread out over the entire area of the car’s side.  The end of the wall presents a very small area.  Given the same force, the narrow end of the wall creates a very large pressure – which is why we saw the wall intrude a good foot into the car.

The doors on both sides of the car are heavily reinforced with horizontal bars.  The topmost bar sticks out further beyond the next bar down and so on, with the idea being that when the car hits the wall, the bars will successively give.  Again, the idea is to spread out the force over time.  There is also a sheet of Tegris (the material used in the splitter) in the door to protect against cockpit intrusions by something narrow enough to fit between the bars.  The material also gives you an additional layer of reinforcement.

There are a lot of edges on the racetrack.  The end of Pit Road is probably the most likely to create a hazard, but anywhere there is an opening in the wall, there is an edge.

If the edges of walls are known to be dangerous, why haven’t they been fixed?  A couple reasons:

1.  The chances of having a serious accident involving the end of a wall are small.  NASCAR has to balance the cost of developing, testing and installing new safety devices with the likelihood that they will be called upon during a race.  They’ve tried to anticipate the locations on the track where accidents happen the most and protect those first.  Drivers hit inside walls far less frequently than they hit outside walls, so outside walls were the first to be addressed.  Over the years, we’ve seen drivers hitting the inside walls at particular tracks and they’ve installed SAFER barriers there.  Even Mark Martin said (in an article by Bob Pockrass) that this was a ‘freak accident’ and he wasn’t sure whether it was possible to protect against these rare occurrences.

2.  This is a tough problem to solve.  Think about the constraints:  The safety device has to absorb a hit and not scatter material all over the track.  It has to be able to be ready for a second hit almost immediately, so any solution that requires repair of the wall when there is a routine hit is going to be nixed.  It can’t interfere with drivers getting where they need to go, or with emergency vehicles having access to the track.  It has to be easy to retrofit and can’t cost too much.

A couple people suggested rounding the wall, so that it’s a semicircular profile instead of flat. Unfortunately, that decreases the area of contact.  Making it a right angle so that there isn’t a wall end is a possibility, as long as you keep the corners rounded; however, a large round surface will either decrease the opening size or decrease the adjacent pit box.

One suggestion a lot of people had was to make movable gates that would cover the openings until they were needed.  The big problem becomes:  what if the car manages to hit the hinge (or other opening mechanism) and jams the gate so that you can’t open it?  If we’re talking about one of the openings where you see emergency vehicles and people waiting so that they can respond quickly, you are delaying the time it takes for a potentially injured driver to receive aid.  I know that research is ongoing as to how to adapt SAFER barriers to these openings.  If they had a feasible solution, we’d be hearing about it already.

Another interesting solution NASCAR is considering was discussed in a Popular Science article from 2006:  It’s a very special foam that can deform to 1/7th its volume during an impact, and then return to its original configuration within minutes.  Called FlexAll, it was developed by Battelle and is currently being adapted for applications in the military and on the highways you and I drive — where the ends of safety barriers represent a major safety hazard as well.  The problem with FlexAll is the cost:  I’m seeing numbers on the order of $30,000 per wall end.  That makes it suitable for the military, but difficult to justify for highways… or perhaps NASCAR.

 

 

 

 

 

The Reason for Decreasing Cautions

 Bristol Motor Speedway, Cautions, Consipracies, Martinsville, math, Texas Motor Speedway, Uncategorized  4 Responses »
May 262012
 

This was the first year that most people noticed a decrease in the number of cautions, but (as I’ve pointed out), 2012 is merely the latest in a six-year trend of decreasing cautions.  The same downward trend is evident in the Nationwide Series.  This year is perhaps notable for it being so extreme.

I’ve plotted the cautions per 100 miles (the best way I’ve found to compare changing race lengths and different tracks) for Cup races so far this year at right.  The plot shows the minimum and maximum values for each track, with the average shown by an open square.  The red square shows the cautions for 2012.  At California, Bristol, Martinsville, Texas, Kansas, Talladega and Darlington, the 2012 value is the lowest value in the last six years.

The data clearly shows the trend:  The question, of  course, is why?

Given that it’s happening in both Nationwide and Cup, that sort of eliminates issues like the introduction of new cars (either COT or the new Nationwide car), the Chase Format, etc.  What was left to investigate?  How about the drivers?  A number of commentators has suggested that drivers were just “better” now.  But how do you test this?

I started by deciding that experience and quality could be indicated by number of races run and number of races won, respectively.  I decided to compare 2005 (which had the highest number of cautions) with 2011.

My criteria for including drivers was that the driver had to have run more than 15 races during the season.  That kept the focus on the full-time drivers.  I totaled two quantities for the drivers that made the cut:  the total number of career laps they had run in the Cup Series (including the season in question) and the total number of career races they had won in the Cup Series.

Year 2005 2011
Races run 11109 12180
Races won 485 485

The drivers who spent the most time on track in 2011 had about a thousand (1071 to be precise) more races worth of experience:  with roughly 25 drivers included that’s an average experience level of 40 races, or almost a full season per driver. The number of wins was exactly the same.

I looked into the details as to what had really changed between 2005 and 2011.  We lost a lot of experienced drivers from active competition:  Dale Jarrett, Ricky Rudd, Rusty Wallace, Sterling Marlin, Kyle Petty, Michael Waltrip, and Ken Schrader for starters.  Their places were taken by drivers just starting out:  From 2005 to 2011, Kasey Kahne went from 72 races run and 1 win to 288 races run and 12 wins.  Kyle Busch went from 42 races and 2 wins in 2005 to 257 races and 23 wins in 2011.  Jamie McMurray didn’t make the active list in 2005, but in 2011 had 230 races and 6 wins.  Even the folks we think of as veterans, look at Tony Stewart: from 248/24 to 464/44, and Carl Edwards: 49/4 to 265/19.

Even drivers who haven’t won races have run a lot more races and gained a lot more experience:  Dave Blaney (200 races by 2005 vs. 397 races by 2011).

So I started thinking about the average experience of the drivers.  I made histograms of the number of drivers who had run some number of races, as shown at right and below.  They are plotted on the same vertical scale for easy comparison.

In 2005, 10 drivers had under 100 races worth of experience.  In 2011, only 5 drivers had 100 races or less on their resumes.  (One of those five was the 2011 Daytona 500 winner.)  In 2005, 27% of the drivers had fewer than 100 races under their belts, while in 2011, the figure was only 12%.  Yes, we lost a lot of really experienced driver with more than 600 races under their belts, but the younger, newer drivers also gained a lot of experience over those five years.

I’m not sure you learn as much from the races won.  There were 12 drivers with no wins in 2005 and 11 in 2006.  But there was only one driver who had won one race in 2005 and eight who had won one race in 2011.

There were plenty of people making the aggrandized claim that the reason cautions are decreasing is “these are the best race car drivers in the world”.  I’d make a slightly less aggressive conclusion and say that NASCAR has much more experienced drivers now than they had in 2005 and that’s why the number of cautions has decreased.

There are (as always) caveats.  Having watched the Nationwide race at Charlotte and poor Travis Pastrana causing multiple cautions, it would be interesting to go back and look at whether the drivers I didn’t count in this survey had more wrecks than the regular drivers.

 

Inforgraphic: Hendrick Motorsports – 200 Wins by Driver

 Brian Vickers, Darrell Waltrip, Geoff Bodine, Jeff Gordon, Jerry Nadeau, Jimmie Johnson, Joe Nemechek, Ken Schrader, Mark Martin, Rick Hendrick, Ricky Rudd, Tim Richmond, Uncategorized  3 Responses »
May 162012
 

Statistics Presented Without Comment

 

 

Source:  http://racing-reference.info/owner/Rick_Hendrick

Kansas: Temperature and Horsepower

 Andy Randolph, Electronic Fuel Injection, Engines, Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Apr 232012
 

There were a lot of engine problems at the Kansas race last Sunday — and a lot of theories as to why there were a lot of engine problems.  Let’s start with the cooler-than-expected temperatures on Sunday.

When the air temperature changes, so does the number of air molecules heading into the engine.  Colder temperatures make air more dense.  Since density is the ratio of mass per unit volume, a volume of air at a lower temperature contains more molecules than the same volume of air at a higher temperature.  The plot below shows how air density changes between 0 and 100 °Fahrenheit.

Before EFI, changes in temperature during a race posed a problem.  Fuel and air prefer to combust with a very particular ratio that is determined by stoichiometry.  Remember all the balancing equations you did in chemistry?  It’s the same thing.

Combusting two octane (a component of gasoline) molecules require 25 oxygen molecules.   The ideal air:fuel ratio is 14.7:1.  If you have one ounce of gasoline, you would need 14.7 ounces of air.  NASCAR engines run slightly richer (meaning a smaller air:fuel ratio).

Engines introduce a fixed volume of air, which means that the number of air molecules changes depending on the density of the air.  You would like a system that introduces exactly the right number of gasoline molecules for the amount of air being introduced.  A carburetor cannot automatically adjust itself to maintain that ratio, but the NASCAR EFI system can.  When the temperature at Kansas turned out to be 20 °F cooler than expected, engine tuners weren’t worried because the EFI automatically compensates for the changing in temperature.

In fact, cooler is better in terms of horsepower production.  The more oxygen molecules in the cylinder, the more gasoline you can inject and the more power you can make.  That’s the idea behind turbochargers – compress the air so that you have more oxygen molecules in a volume of air.

The change in horsepower depends on the square root of the absolute temperature.  You may remember absolute temperature from chemistry and/or physics class.  When you use the ideal gas law, for example, you can’t just plug in the temperature you read from the thermometer.

The Fahrenheit and Celsius scales were developed around things we experience every day.  Water freezing is 0°C or 32 °F.  Water boiling in 212°F or 100°C.  As we discovered more about the molecular nature of temperature, we learned that physics places limits on how cold something can be.  The coldest possible temperature corresponds to -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.  Rounding that to -460 °F for simplicity, 0 °F is 460 on the absolute temperature scale.  You get the absolute temperature by adding 460 °F to the temperature from the thermometer.  A temperature of 57 degrees F would be (460+57=)  517 F on an absolute temperature scale.  A temperature of 77 F would be 537 F.

The change in horsepower is proportional to the inverse square root of the ratio of the two temperatures.

If I go from 77 °F (537 °F in absolute scale) to 57 °F (517 °F in absolute scale), the horsepower would be:

This represents a 1.9% increase in horsepower.  If the engine was producing 850 hp at 77 °F, it would produce 866 hp at 57 °F.  In a sport where engine builders working really hard to get 1 or 2 hp, this is a huge change!

Some people have suggested that the engine failures at Kansas were due to the increased horsepower produced by the colder temperatures.  My favorite engine technical director Andy Randolph (of ECR engines) tells me this isn’t the likely cause for the engine failures.

What IS the cause will be my next post. (And it’s not EFI!)

OPINION The Future of Motorsports Safety II: The Center for Motorsports Safety Research

 Dan Wheldon, IndyCar, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Safety, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Dec 152011
 

The official Indycar report on Dan Wheldon’s death was released today.  The conclusions:  Wheldon died when his head/helmet hit a fencepost, but it took a combination of factors to bring about this awful tragedy.  They also noted that it wouldn’t have made any difference if the fenceposts were on the inside of the fence or the outside of the fence.  I pretty much said the same thing in my analysis of the incident.  Indycar, much to their credit, has released the entire 49 page report to the public, which comes to you here via pressdog.

The obvious question is “what do we do now”?

When I last spoke with Dean Sicking (the inventor of the SAFER barrier), I asked him who the primary groups were in the world who are doing motorsports safety research in the area of track barriers and fences.  There are a few, but most of them focus on human mechanics or medicine.  If you want to be specific, there is exactly one group in the country doing intensive research into motorsports track safety and that’s at the University of Nebraska.  Yes, I know that some sanctioning bodies have their own R&D divisions; however, they have limited staff and they also have the responsibility for doing things like certifying new products for use in their series.

Most research at Universities is funded by grants (usually from federal or state agencies, sometimes from private foundations) or contracts (usually from private industry and designed to accomplish a very specific objective, with deliverables.)

One of the primary issues with the catchfence is the vertical poles that support the wire mesh.  Initial reports argued that, if the poles had been outside the mesh, there wouldn’t have been a fatal accident.  This is not right.  Inside or outside, hitting one at high speed is going to be fatal.  I suggested before that a possible solution would be to somehow cantilever the fence so that the posts would be a few feet away from the mesh.  You’d need quite the system of wires, but I know it’s possible.

Let’s give Sicking and his group a grant to design a better catchfence.

Do you have  any idea how much money you would need to test such a catchfence?  When designing the SAFER barriers, Sicking told me that getting a driverless car to hit the barrier at a precise speed and angle was actually the most technically challenging part of the research.  Now we not only have to have a high-speed racecar hit the new catchfence, but we also have to have it in the air when it does so.

I suggest that the industry needs a Center for Motorsports Safety Research.  It would be a non-profit center operating independently of any sanctioning body, but it would work with the sanctioning bodies to prioritize research needs.   Representatives from the various sanctioning bodies, along with motorsports researchers, would form an advisory board that would try to anticipate safety issues, as opposed to how we deal with them now, which is reactively.

I think it’s important that this be an independent body and not beholden to NASCAR or IndyCar.  There would be a small research staff, with room for visiting researchers who can contribute particular specialization to specific problems.  I would (of course) put Dean Sicking in charge of it because he is one of the best engineers and most honorable persons I have even known.  He’s shown his ability to design for two very different cars at the same track already.   I’d also charge them with preparing educational materials for drivers at all levels to make them aware of state-of-the-art safety concerns and the equipment they need to be as safe as possible.

Who should fund this center?  The sanctioning bodies, the media who make money from broadcasting motorsports, the track owners, and you and me:  the race fans.

From Jayski’s track seating and attendance page, 3.6 million people attended NASCAR races last year.  Let’s add a safety surcharge of $2.00 per ticket is added on — and frankly, if you begrudge paying less than the cost of a beer to facilitate your part of this research, you shouldn’t call yourself a race fan.  That would be $7.2 million dollars right there for motorsports safety research.  Add on contributions from the media partners who broadcast motorsports, the occasional generous driver, and you have the start of a center.

As I said in my previous article, motorsports will never be entirely safe.   But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can to try to ensure that we never lose another driver again.

Kudos, Indycar for your transparency and commitment to learn as much as you can from this tragedy.

 

100 Million vs. 78 Million is not the Numbers Question for FOX vs SPEED

 math, Media, NASCAR, Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Jun 212011
 

The NASCAR pundits have again simplified a complex situation.  Incorrectly.

(Of course, at least they got the network right!  I got FOX and ESPN confused.  This is the problem with a 60-hour a week job and trying to blog about something utterly unrelated in the meantime.  My excuse is that I have a $3.5 million proposal due this week.  The same math holds, regardless of whether it is FOX or ESPN. Thank you Michael!)

The NASCAR Net is a-twitter since FOX floated a trial balloon about moving races from ESPN FOX to SPEED.  I’ve heard the argument over and over, in print and on radio that this is a bad idea because EPSN FOX is in 100 million homes and SPEED is in “only” 78 million homes.  They argue this would be a decline of 22 million potential viewers.  The question not being asked how many of those 22 million ESPN FOX watchers are actually potential viewers?

Point number 1:  Diehard NASCAR fans are going to find the race on television wherever it is.  Rabid fans are going to get whatever cable package they need in order to watch races, or they’re going to find a local sportsbar that carries the race.  Casual and incidental viewers are the ones that will make a difference in numbers.

Point number 2:  A very small fraction of households receiving a network watch it.  The highest rated race of 2010 on ESPN was August Pocono, with 6.3 million viewers.  Let’s assume an average of 2 people per household, so if ESPN is in 100 million households, that corresponds to roughly 200 million viewers.  ESPN pulled in 3.2% of the viewers who had the option of watching the August race at Pocono.

SPEED is in 78 million households, so assuming the same two people on average per household, there are 156 million potential viewers.  If SPEED captured the same 3.2% of their possible viewers, that would be 5.0 million viewers.  The difference is 1.3 million viewers — if you are willing to ignore point 3.

The numbers for FOX – let’s leave out the Daytona 500, which was 13.3 million and I bet FOX isn’t going to move that – are similar.  The highest rated race was April Talladega, with 8.45 million viewers.  Out of the 200 million possible eyeballs, that’s 4.2%.  4.2% of SPEED’s viewing audience is 6.55 million viewers, so again, we need an increase of about 1% to match FOX’s numbers.

Point 3:  Consider the demographics of FOX viewers vs. SPEED viewers.  SPEED is a motorsports channel.  I would think you’d be more likely to get a motocross fan to watch NASCAR than an average television viewer.  Which network is more likely to promote the race during other shows?  Which network is more likely to have the schedule freedom to do extended pre- and post-race shows?  All SPEED would have to do to equal the viewership from ESPN would be to attract 0.86% of the remaining viewers and about 1% to equal the viewership from FOX.  We’re really talking more like a difference of 2 million than 22 million.

There are many factors besides numbers, but numbers aren’t as big a factor as some are trying to make them out to be.

Just for fun, here are some stats for ESPN and SPEED viewership. They are from 2006-2007, but that’s the latest I have easy access to.

Category ESPN SPEED
Men 69% 80%
Women 31% 20%
18-34 28% -
35-54 39% -
55+ 33 -
18-49 - 69%
25-54 - 63%
$75,000/year + 43% 38%
$50,000/year + 62% 61%
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