NOTE

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

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

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

 (photo Bill Friel)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.