PIt Road Speeding FAQ

 Pocono, Timing and Scoring  14 Responses »
Jun 102012
 

A new record for pit road speeding penalties was set at Pocono this weekend.  Drivers were able to compensate and there weren’t a lot of penalties after the first set.  The question remains:  why all the speeding penalties?

The Facts

Here's the list of pit road speeding (and other) penalti... on Twitpic

There were 10 scoring segments on Pit Road and almost all of the speeding penalties were in the last segment (Pit Road exit).  The photo at left was tweeted by @nateryan after the first round of penalities.  You can view a larger version here.  (Thanks, Nate!)

A few of the drivers shared how much they were told they were over.  Harvick said it was 0.06 mph.  That’s not much.

A Pit Road map showing all the timing and scoring lines was available well before the race.  Ralph Shaheen tweeted the map during the race (Thanks, Ralph!).  NASCAR doesn’t draw their maps to scale (which drives me nuts), so I re-drew the map to scale.  I just realized that I labeled P2 twice.  The first one on the left is P1.  This makes for 10 loops (the start/finish is not part of the pit road timing system).  Note that each of the loops is roughly 207 feet – except the last one, which is only roughly 80 feet.

Questions and Answers

Q. How do they check pit road speeds?
A. Scoring loops embedded in the pit road concrete send an electrical signal when the transponder in the car passes via a process called electromagnetic induction. It’s the same process used to keep track of where the cars are during the race. The transponders are mounted inside the car (I believe they are just a little forward of the drivers’ seat, inside the door.)

The important thing is that they are measuring average speed over the timing segment, not instantaneous speed.  Instantaneous speed is (just as it sounds) your speed at a particular instant.  A radar gun measures instantaneous speed.  If you are on the expressway, you can get a ticket if you go over 65 mph at any instant.  In NASCAR, your average speed is the important thing.  Pit Road speed at Pocono is 55 60 mph.  You can go 50 mph for half the time and 70 mph for half the time and your average speed would be 55 mph.

Q.  Wait – why isn’t pit road speed 55 mph?
A.  Teams get 5 mph over the “official” Pit Road speed.  They all are trying for 60 mph, so let’s not pretend anyone is thinking about going 55 mph.  The Pit Road speed limit is effectively 60 mph.

Q. Do teams know where the loops are?
A. They ought to. It’s not a secret – NASCAR puts out a map showing all the timing lines. Pocono changed the number and location of the timing lines when they repaved Pit Road. It’s hard to believe that a competent crew chief wouldn’t have asked for this information. Given that there was a significant change, it’s also hard to believe that a competent crew chief didn’t discuss this with his driver.  Knauss and a number of other crew chiefs walk Pit Road and inspect all the pit boxes to check on things like cracks, unevenness and little things that might throw off the pit crew.  If they are that attentive to the tiny details, they’d have to have had a major brain lapse not to have asked about the timing lines.

Q. Why doesn’t NASCAR move the scoring lines to keep things interesting?
A. They are embedded in the track. The picture at right shows the loops in Pit Road at Charlotte.  You can’t just pick them up and move them like a garden hose.  If I were repaving a Pit Road, I would play it safe and put in a whole bunch of them, because you can select which ones you want to use for timing and scoring.

Q.  Why didn’t they stop the race and re-calibrate their radar gun after all those penalties?

A1.  Aaragh!  There is no radar gun.  I know people thought it was funny to say because “why don’t they recalibrate their scoring loops” isn’t very humorous.  But don’t saying there is a radar gun because it confuses the people who don’t know.

Would you really want the instantaneous speed to be monitored?  Seems to me that this would officiating a race needlessly complicated.

A2.  I am very skeptical that there was anything technically wrong with the scoring loop system.  It is tested and double tested and the changes of a malfunction are fairly low.  My intuition is that the system was working exactly how it was designed to work.

Q.  Why don’t they just give the drivers speedometers.

A.  Because tachometers are actually more accurate than speedometers.  You can tell your speed to a fraction of a mph with a good tach.

The divisions on a tach are usually 100 rpm. If the driver can read the gauge to 100 rpm, for a typical gear ratio (i.e. let’s say a 1.45:1 second gear and a 4.22 rear end gear), each 100 rpm step on the tach corresponds (for 82.1 inch circumference tires) to 1.37 mph. If you assume that the driver can read the tach to 50 rpm, that’s 0.64 mph.

Besides – when drivers get caught speeding, it is usually because they were trying to cut it too close to the limit, not because they didn’t know how fast they were going.  Remember that you are being judged on average velocity and both the tach and a speedometer measure instantaneous velocity.

I’m not a fan of relying too much on the lighted versions they have now.  I’ll take a dial over a light any day.

Q.  It seems silly to penalize someone for going 0.1 mph over the effective pit road speed limit.

A.  It does; however, where do you stop?  If you tell them you’re giving them another 0.1 mph, then the person who gets caught going 0.16 mph over the effective limit will complain that he was only 0.6 mph over the limit.  NASCAR can’t win on this.  You have to draw a line and it’s going to be arbitrary.  Everyone races under the same conditions, so where the line is placed really doesn’t matter.

Q.  Why don’t they just show us the speeds on the television?

A.  I addressed this before in more detail – just my opinion, of course.  The more data NASCAR hands out, the more they’ve got fans picking apart every aspect of the sport.  I watch races with timing and scoring on my computer, twitter, the radio going over the TV, etc.  I like love data.  At some point, though, you want people watching the race and cheering on their favorites, not picking every millisecond of data apart. It’s a good race for me when I don’t want to look away from the television.

Q.  So why all the speeding penalties?

A.  We don’t know for sure, but here’s my thoughts.

1.  I’m 99.99% confident that the problem was not due to malfunctioning of the system.

2.  TNT advanced the theory that many teams didn’t know the scoring lines had been moved.  Look at the photo and who got nabbed.  The 48 got nabbed twice – once on the pit stop and once while serving the penalty for the first speeding incident.  Of all the crew chiefs who would  would have been on top of the location of the scoring lines, Chad Knaus is #1 on my list.

3.  The last segment – the one that gave so many people trouble – was only 80 feet.  If you’re going 60 mph, you spend 0.94692 seconds in that segment.

a.  At 60 mph, you spend 2.3475 seconds in the long scoring loop segment.  Let’s say you’re going 60.06 mph.  In the short segment, you would spend about one millisecond (one thousandth of a second) less in the segment.  In the long segment, you save 2.3 milliseconds in time.  It would be really interesting to know the accuracy of the system.

b.  A shorter segment is less forgiving.  The drivers are not going at constant speed throughout the loop.  If you push too hard on the throttle for an instant, consider how that affects the average speed if that instant is out of 2.3 seconds or 1 second.  The drivers are constantly trying to figure out how to get maximum speed withing the boundaries of the timing and scoring system.  I’m a little skeptical about the reliance on tach lights – but I’d need to know more about how the lights are set before I could say for sure.  Drivers have many things going on and light may make their lives much easier, but a light is never as accurate as a dial.

NOTE added:  Jimmie Johnson said after the race that NASCAR draws the yellow line at the end of pit road such that the nose of the car is at the yellow line when the transponder is at the scoring loop.  He suggested that the team might want to test that out themselves just to verify the accuracy of the line relative to the transponder.  As I said above, if any team was on the location of the scoring loops, it would be the 48.   I do not believe that not knowing where the lines were was the problem.

NOTE:  Robin Pemberton said on NASCAR Victory Lane that the old segments used to be 274 ft long.

Pocono: Slightly Shifty

 Denny Hamlin, Edwards Carl, Engines, rear-end gear, transmission  No Responses »
Jun 112011
 

The big news for Pocono is that drivers can shift…again.  Which brings up the obvious dual questions of: Why would you want to? and Why didn’t you before?

Compare how fast the wheels have to rotate with how fast the engine rotates.  Both are measured in revolutions (or rotations) per minute – rpms.  Assuming a tire circumference of 88.6 in, tires have to rotate from 417 rpm (at 35 mph), to 1490 rpm (125 mph) to 2146 rpm at 180 mph.  The graphic tachometer on television tells us that the engine runs between 7000 rpm and 9500 rpm most of the time.

Gearing for a Borg Warner MM6 manual transmission and a GU6 3.42 rear-end gear, as might be found in a Corvette.

You can’t connect the engine directly to the wheels because of the difference in rotation rates.  This is where the gears come in.  A car has two sets of gears:  The first I’ll talk about is the rear end gear, which I seem to remember is somewhere around 3.8 or 3.9 for Pocono.  The rear gear reduces the rotation rate coming from the driveshaft and sends that rotation to the wheels (as shown in the diagram).  A 4.0 gear would produce a rotation rate coming out of the gear that is 1/4th the rotation rate coming into the rear gear.  If the driveshaft is rotating at 5000 revolutions per minute (rpm), the wheels would be rotating at 1250 rpm. (A 4.0 gear would mean that for every four rotations coming in, one rotation goes out.)

With a 4.0 rear gear, your engine would have to change speed from 1600 rpm to about 8500 rpm going from 35 mph to 180 mph.  The problem is that an engine produces its maximum power over a narrow range of rpms.  (It also produces its maximum torque over a small range of rpms, although not the exact same range as the maximum power band.)  You’d like to have the engine operating in the target range all the time.

This is why you need a second set of gears, which are found in the transmission.  This series of gears (usually 4, 5, or 6 different gears) gives you different sizes so you can keep the engine running near its sweet spot — regardless of how fast you’re going.  Fourth gear on most transmissions is 1:1, meaning that there is no speed change through the transmission.  On a passenger car, like the one from the gearing figure, the higher gears (overdrive) reverse the ratio.  0.50:1 means that the rotational rate coming out is higher than the rotational rate going in.  NASCAR prohibits overdrive.

In trying to go faster and faster, teams were moving their engine’s target range to higher and higher rpms – which means higher and higher costs.  In 2005, NASCAR instituted a gear rule to keep engine speeds (and thus cost) down.  NASCAR gives you a limited choice of rear-end gears and dictates the transmission gears as well.  Those choices keep the maximum engine rotation rate below about 10,000 or 10,500 rpm without having to implement a difficult-to-enforce engine rule.

NASCAR changed the gear rule for Pocono this year.  First gear can be anything you want.  Second gear can be 1.70:1 or greater, and – this is the big change – the third gear limit changed from 1.28:1 to 1.14:1 or greater.  Fourth gear stays at 1.00:1.   (“or greater” means that the first number may be larger, but not smaller.)  NASCAR still doesn’t allow overdrive.  Normally, the rule book prohibits gears between 1.00:1 and 1.28:1 except for road course events.

Pocono - certainly one of the more unique tracks on the NASCAR circuit

Why Pocono?  Most oval tracks have four turns, with the frontstretch and backstretch close to the same length.  Pocono has three turns and three straightaways:  a frontstretch of 3740 feet, a backstretch (Long Pond) of 3,055 ft and a short straight of only 1,780 feet. You can imagine that the rpm the car reaches is very different coming down the two long straights (i.e. coming into turns 1 and 3) compared to coming down the shorter straight (i.e. into 2).  What you’d like is for the engine to be turning at about the same rpm into each turn.

It seems like NASCAR’s change is too small to be meangingful – from 1.28:1 to 1.14:1 is only 0.14, right?  Actually, it’s a factor of two.  What makes a difference is how much above 1.00 the gear is.  The important thing about moving from 1.14:1 to 1.28:1 is moving from 14 to 28.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the engine is ideally in 7200 rpm in fourth gear.  When you shift to third, a 1.28:1 gear (which used to be the lowest for third), requires the engine to run at 9216 rpm (=1.28*7200) to maintain the same speed.  That takes you far away from the best rpm range for your engine.  Changing from 1.28:1 to 1:14:1 means that third gear only requires your engine to run at 8208 rpm.  That may seem like it is still a big shift; however, given the way the power and torque curve vary with rpm, it’s small enough to mean that you’re close enough to your power band for it to work. It’s a shift of about 1000 rpm instead of 2000 rpm with the 1.28:1 gear.  That gives the engine shop – and the driver – some interesting options.

This type of a rules change is, in my opinion, exactly the direction NASCAR ought to be moving to open up areas for people to be innovative.  It’s a relatively minor change in terms of enforcement.  It keeps the teams from pushing into the higher rpm ranges (and thus steeply pushing up engine costs), but it allows the engineers and the drivers to pursue different strategies.  For example, most drivers will be shifting in turns 1 and 3, but others (like Denny Hamlin) plan to shift only in turn 1.  Another aspect is how shifting affects fuel mileage.  Overdrive gears are there because the more rotations an engine makes, the more friction it has to overcome.  And, as Carl Edwards points out, every time you shift, you run the chance of screwing up and damaging the transmission.  Most NASCAR drivers aren’t used to shifting this much during a race.  Do you try for what might be a small advantage and shift at the cost of possibly screwing up the transmission?  Do drivers like Marcos Ambrose, who have a lot more experience shifting, have an advantage?  Does the engine shop adapt different strategies for drivers who are comfortable shifting compared to those who are not?

Unfortunately, this rule really makes a difference only at Pocono due to it’s unique configuration.

The Math of Fuel Mileage

 Engines, Fuel Mileage, Kansas, Pocono  6 Responses »
Jun 102011
 

The gas needed to do one lap at a one-mile track fits in this quart bottle

I guess when you have people feeding you all the numbers you need through your earpiece, you think they’re easy to come by.  That’s the only explanation I can figure out for the snarky comments by television commentators about crews not being “smart enough” to figure out how much gas to put in the car so that it doesn’t run out before the end of the race.  There have been a lot of fuel mileage races the last few weeks.  Pocono is traditionally also highly likely to be a fuel mileage race, so let’s clarify how easy (or hard) it is to not run out of fuel.

Average mileage under green is about 4 miles per gallon.  At a one-mile track, than means one lap (one mile) requires one quarter of a gallon, which is one quart.  A car running out of gas coming out of turn four is short by probably a cup of fuel.   On the one hand, it’s amazing that it takes a whole quart of gas to do one lap.  On the other hand, the fuel cell holds 18 or 19 gallons.  Let’s say they get 18.5 gallons in the fuel cell – that’s 74 quarts, so you’re talking being off by 1/74th of a tank, which is a pretty narrow margin of error.

For comparison, a passenger car getting 32 mpg would need only a half a cup of gas to do a lap at Phoenix.  Although much more fuel efficient, the television ratings would likely be much lower.

There are some other considerations.  Here are two that are hard to quantify:

  • The pickups on the fuel cell can’t pull all the gas out of the tank, no matter how much swerving the driver does.  There’s likely to be some fuel in the fuel cell that just doesn’t make it to the engine.  It is a small fraction of the fuel cell, but  if we’re talking about 8 ounces of fuel being the difference between making it and not, small amounts matter a lot.
  • The driver’s ability to save fuel varies, depending on the driver and if he’s racing hard or if he’s able to set his own pace.  If he’s racing hard with another driver, he’ll likely get less than the expected fuel mileage.  If he’s skilled (getting off the throttle earlier going into the corner and getting onto the throttle later coming out of the corner), he might save a lap or two or three worth of gas.  It’s the same principle as you and I not stomping on the gas or the brake to be more fuel efficient.  When the crew chief asks the driver how much gas he’s saved, the only thing the driver can do is guess.  The more experienced the driver, the better feel he is likely to have for how much gas he saved.

One of the biggest challenges for the crew chief is calculating the actual gas mileage.  Let’s say you or I are calculating the fuel mileage of our car.  We go to the gas station and fill up the car.   The next time we stop for gas, we figure out how many gallons it takes to fill the tank back up and how far we drove.  For example:

I fill up my tank.  300 miles later, I stop for gas again and find that I need 10 gallons to fill up the tank.  It took me 10 gallons to drive 300 miles, which means my gas mileage is 30 miles per gallon.

OK, that’s not perfectly accurate because what does “fill up” mean?  Some people top off the tank and others stop as soon as they sense it is close to full.  There’s some variation in the fuel pumps as to where the pump shuts off automatically.  300 miles on the expressway is different than 300 miles in town.  If you want a meaningful number that characterizes your own gas mileage, you need to measure it consistently over a period of time and use an average.  Of course, that’s not possible in NASCAR.

But at least you and I get a decent measurement of how much gas we put in the car.  NASCAR teams don’t get to measure how many gallons of fuel goes into the car: They get to measure how many pounds of fuel went into the car.

A NASCAR fuel can holds about 12 gallons of fuel.  Gas weighs about 6 lbs per gallon, so the full gas can holds 76 lbs of gas.  The can itself is about 20-25 lbs, so round numbers, 95-100 lbs total. (Thanks to the NASCAR Insiders for the numbers.  I am writing this from a neuroscience retreat and don’t have my notes handy.)

Before each pit stop, the team weighs each one of the gas cans.  Let’s say one of them weighs 96 lbs.  The car comes in to pit, they add fuel and then weigh each gas can again.  Let’s say that the can weighs 36 lbs after a stop.  The change in weight is 96 lbs – 36 lbs = 60 lbs.  At 6 lbs per gallon, you can infer that the can is missing 10 gallons.

Note that I very carefully said ‘the gas can is missing 10 gallons’ because we have no assurance that all 10 gallons went into the car.  You’ve seen gasoline spill out everywhere when the gasman pulls the dry break away from the fuel cell inlet.  That happens even more with the new dry breaks because they are a little trickier to put in place and pull out than the old gas cans were.

The crew chief looks down and makes a mental estimate of how much fuel is spilled, converts the masses from the cans into gallons and comes up with a number for how much fuel he thinks is in the car.  From that, he estimates how many laps they can run.  If you want to see a frustrated crew chief, look for the gas man with the raised eyebrows and the shrugging shoulders.  He thinks he got it full… but he’s not sure.  That’s actually sometimes worse than the one who knows he didn’t get it full.  Sometimes it’s better to know the answer, even if it’s bad, than to be unsure.  The scales in the pits have at least one decimal place, and my friend Josh (a member of the ex-Elliott crew chief club) suggests that the better teams have almost certainly moved to scales with two decimal places.

Do the decimal places really matter?  Turns out they do.  Sunoco provides NASCAR teams with the exact density of the gas on race day, and they provide it to two decimal places.  So instead of 6.00 lbs/gallon, they’ll tell you 5.94 or 6.06 lbs/gallon.  If you weigh 60 lbs of gas, that’s 1o gallons @6.00 lbs/gal vs. 10.6 gallons @6.06 lbs/gal.  Remember that on a one mile track, one lap requires 0.25 gallons.  That 0.6 gallons difference is more than two laps on a one-mile track.

One more thing that’s different this year.  Here’s your word to impress people with this week:  Hygroscopic (hi-grow-skop-ick).  It means very attractive to water.  Ethanol – and 15% of the NASCAR fuel is ethanol – is highly hygroscopic.  If you turn your back on ethanol for even a moment, you turn back and there it is sucking up water.  We use ethanol in the lab to clean things and we actually have to use acetone afterward to get rid of the water the ethanol leaves.

Two issues with hygroscopicity:  First, you’re getting water in the fuel and water isn’t combustible.  You put the same volume of liquid in the cylinder and you get less power because some of the molecules turn into steam instead of combusting.  So you need more rotations to get the same power and thus you’re using fuel at a different rate.

Second, water has a different density than the hydrocarbon fuel molecules (or the ethanol), so the amount of gas you’re getting in the car is different that what you think.   Density changes with temperature, so if you think about a race like Kansas, where it was really hot, or like Charlotte, when the temperature varied quite a bit from start to finish, you might experience meaningful changes in the density over the course of a race.  Even if you did all the calculations successfully, you might still be surprised because one of the inputs was off. Also, when the temperature rises, more water can be absorbed by the ethanol.  The water molecules hang out in the gas, pretending they belong there.  But when it cools down, the water can separate from the fuel, so it’s possible to have liquid in the tank, but not have a lot of fuel.  This is a tremendous unknown that the teams have no experience with and it may account for why there have been so many fuel mileage surprises.

A lot of factors go into correctly calculating fuel mileage.  I think if you really want to get it right, you’d want to use a model that involves calculus.  And I bet there are at least a couple teams doing that.  You can make little widgets for things like fuel consumption or gear ratios and rpm using something as simple as Excel.  I know NASCAR likes to portray itself as simple, but let’s give the folks sitting with all the computers up on the pit box their due.

A few misc notes:

  • Happy to hear that Chad Johnston is getting a shot at crew chief for the 56 team.  Chad was the engineer for Elliott Sadler’s team when I was following them around for the Physics of NASCAR book.  Chad is a talented guy who reminds me a little of Rodney Childers – not self-promoting, doesn’t talk when he doesn’t have anything to say, but when he has something to say, make sure you listen.
  • I wish the story about what happened to the Second Chance Motorsports Nationwide crew at Chicago got just a small fraction of the attention Richard Childress/Kyle Busch did.  It’s sad, but there are so many people trying to get into NASCAR that there will always be some people who will work for someone who doesn’t have a history of treating people right.
  • BTW – I’m tired of hearing about RC/KyBu… you can stop now.
  • Here are a couple neuroscience tidbits I learned this week.  Perhaps the most useful thing was that if you get eight hours of sleep, but it’s not continuous (think new moms), your reflexes and ability to think are comparable to someone seriously sleep deprived.  The least useful (but perhaps most interesting) piece of information was that rodents lack the ability to vomit.  If you want to test whether a drug induces nausea, you use ferrets because they barf pretty readily.  Moral of the story:  If you’re going out drinking, take the rat as your bar buddy and let the ferret be the designated driver.  (The second moral is that if you went into physics because you have a queasy stomach, watching that talk right before lunch was maybe not the best thing to do.)
  • Where have I been?  Well, the last year or so I’ve been dealing with some really, really serious medical issues and it’s been all I can do to get through the day.  Blogging was one of the many things in my life that just seemed to require too much energy to manage.  I’m starting to feel better now – sometimes I would go so far as to say “inspired” – so I’m hoping my comeback will keep.  Thanks to the many online buddies who have kept me in their thoughts and brightened my days.  You don’t know how much you have been appreciated.