Stock Car Science

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit Denver, CO - in a snowstorm. Never mind that it took me a couple hours to get past the thunderstorms in Dallas/Ft. Worth, I landed in Denver a few hours later in the rain, which turned to snow as I headed from the airport to Golden, CO.

The Colorado School of Mines was the site of the Colorado/Wyoming American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and Zone 14 Society of Physics Students (SPS) meeting. Chuck Stone, the meeting organizer, arranged for a group of students and teachers to tour the Furniture Row Racing shop.

I’ve been to a lot of shops, but the smallest shop I’d visited was the old Haas Racing shop before they became Stewart-Haas. Unlike the shops in Charlotte, you wouldn’t know that the warehouse building Denver was a race shop - it’s an unassuming box in a business park with no signs. They run the whole operation out of about 38,000 square feet, which is less than some teams’ engine shops alone. A team like Roush has more than 500 employees. FRR has between 60 and 80 employees. They are running a limited schedule this year, picking and choosing the races they think they have the best chance of doing well at. We visited on a Friday evening, while qualifying was going on at Phoenix.

John, the purchasing manager at Furniture Row Racing, was our guide and gave the group the full tour of the shop. I learn something on every visit, no matter how large or small the shop. Furniture Row is one of the rare shops that isn’t within a stone’s throw of Charlotte. John, who is the parts manager explained that the pit crew and the spotter live in and around Charlotte. Each week, he sends them a list of parts, the crew members drive around Charlotte to the race shop parts stores collecting what they need, and then it’s all packaged up and sent out to Colorado - on a furniture truck, of course

Furniture Row leases motors from Hendrick’s engine-building shop. Each week, two engines have to go from Charlotte to Denver, and the two from the last race have to return to Charlotte. Although FRR used to do their own motors, a team with limited resources really gains by taking advantage of existing expertise. Like most lease programs, engine shops put a lot of stipulations on the leasing teams to ensure that there isn’t any “reverse engineering” going on – no dynos or spintrons allowed. John put to rest a question about whether they thought they got ‘as good’ engines as the HMS teams - “within a horsepower or two", he said, “and when they’re getting toward the end of the season and points are really important, they may even give us the higher horsepower engines.” The verification, of course, is in the impressive finish the FRR team DEI had last Fall at Talladega, when driver Regan Smith would have won the race had he not gone/been pushed below the yellow line.

One of the things John pointed out that was new to me is that you can buy fenders ready made now. It used to be that the guys in the shop skilled in using the English Wheel made the fenders. The ability to make them onsite was important because of the sensitivity of the aerodynamics to the fender shape. With the new car and its strict templates, however, there’s not much latitude in design, so buying them ready made is easier in most cases. John shook his head as he noted that using the English Wheel is a skill that is rapidly on the way out because of the standardization of the new car.

Despite being a small team, FRR has their own seven-post rig, which is used to test vehicle dynamics. This is a million-dollar machine that simulates the behavior of the car on the track. The testing ban is a positive and a negative for the smaller teams. If they don’t have testing data from a track, they’re really stuck, as they have nothing to build on; however, some teams trade data to help each other out. But once you have baseline data, it’s really a matter of how clever your seven-post engineers (or engineer, singular, in the case of FRR) are in finding the right combination of suspension setups for each track.

The most impressive part of the tour was the one car John asked us to be especially careful around. Most complex ‘paint schemes’ are wraps these days, but not the National Day of Prayer car FRR will run at Talladega this weekend. It took 16 hours of airbrushing to finish off the paint job on that car, which will look just as spectacular as the car they ran last April. It’s the same car Regan Smith ran last Fall at Talladega, so the team has high hopes for a great finish.

As the students and teachers were wandering around taking pictures, I talked a little with a couple of ringers - Jamie Bubek and her dad Rich, both of whom race in the Colorado Automobile Racing Club series. Actually, they do a lot more than ‘race’ - Jamie was rookie of the year in 2008 - the first woman to win that title in the 62-year history of the club - and her Dad won the championship. The three of us ducked out to the television room to see how the No. 78 was doing in qualifying – except there was so much snow that we couldn’t get any reception on the satellite dish. There are a number of things I don’t miss about having moved to Texas. Snow is one of them. So I asked Jamie to let me take her picture in front of the show car John was nice enough to roll out for us.

Jamie gave a talk the next day at the physics meeting about a project in her high school physics class in which she tried to understand why drivers take a particular line around the racetrack during qualifying. Jamie’s got a great combination of brains and driving talent - look for her to be making waves beyond Denver before very long.

The No. 78 ended up qualifying 9th for Phoenix and would have finished better than the eventual 28th spot if not for some pit road issues. Many thanks to John for the great tour, to Joe Garone, GM at Furniture Row for setting up the visit and to Tim Lim, physics student and bad-weather driver extraordinaire, who kept the Toyota Tacoma truck on the road and out of the ditches the whole two days he was stuck driving me around. John gave me a great setup for my ‘Physics of NASCAR’ talk, with a lot of the audience having seen many of the things I was going to talk about. Thanks to the Wyoming/Colorado AAPT and Zone 14 SPS for inviting me, and a special thanks to Bruce Pearson and Rich and Jamie Bubek (and the Bubek family) for inviting me to come watch them race at Colorado National Speedway on May 2nd when I head back to Denver for a(nother) meeting. I’m looking forward to some short-track racing in person - let’s just hope that it doesn’t snow!

The Science of Speed video series is now up at www.science360.gov. We did a press conference at Texas Motor Speedway Friday April 3rd afternoon announcing the series. If you told me three years ago I’d be sitting at a racetrack in-between a real racecar driver and an official from the National Science Foundation, I would have told you that you were nuts.

Photo credit: Getty Images

We got great coverage from nascar.com and even a podcast that Marc at Full Throttle was kind enough to post.!

The Science of Speed was funded by the National Science Foundation as part of a major initiative to show people how math and science impact their lives in ways they might not expect. I’ve always advocated that we would have much more luck teaching math and science if we used things that people already care about. And a lot of us care about racing.

The videos were produced by Santa Fe Productions and they have an amazing crew of people involved. Jim Hoppin, Eli Brown, Ylonda Viola, Lennlee Keep and Tony Tiano did most of the real work on the project, and they came to it with virtually no background in NASCAR. The person who had the most challenging task was Leesa Travis, make up artist extraordinaire who had the dual challenge of dealing with me and my often-feral hair, plus trying to get guys who work on race cars to let her put on at least a little powder so they didn’t shine up our shots!

Hendrick Motorsports let us shoot for a couple of days in their lobbies and both Jeff Gordon and Steve Letarte sat for interviews. Steve kept insisting that he wasn’t really that smart, then went on to explain a very complicated topic in a much better way than I had planned on doing. I learned a lot from him, including that he is an extremely nice, down-to-earth person.

The series gave me a great opportunity to get some of the people from my book, The Physics of NASCAR on screen, so if you wondered what Josh Browne and Andy Randolph look and sound like, you’ll see them in a number of episodes. I also met a lot of new people who are now in my Rolodex of people to pester with questions. Patrick Canupp (aerodynamicist at JGR), Nick Hughes at MWR and Brandon Thomas and John Probst at Red Bull Racing were really generous with their time.

We shot a number of interviews at Daytona prior to the Shootout. People were really busy and it’s a very stressful time, but again, everyone was really generous with their time. I would really have loved to have had more time with Chris Andrews at Roush Fenway, who had an amazing knack for cutting right to the essence of a topic and giving us a response that was exactly what we needed.

Interviewing crew chiefs and engineers was interesting, because in addition to there being an inherently adversarial relationship between engineers and physicists (a topic for a whole different blog!), they have a totally different language and context than I do. The point of the series is to explain sometimes-complex topics; however, I’m not the expert - they are. I’m the interpreter, so my task is to get them to explain things to me, then figure out how to explain those same ideas to people who may not have the same technical background. Just as a physicist makes a big deal about the difference between weight and mass, a formally trained engineer like Bob Osborne wanted to be very specific about ‘load transfer’ (the correct term) vs. ‘weight transfer’ (technically incorrect, but perhaps more meaningful to people who aren’t engineers). And you’ll notice in the balance segment, we specifically made a point of using the words ‘load transfer’. There’s a fine line between “right” and “not wrong” that is unfortunately very fuzzy.

Carl Edwards’ brother was with him - I saw Kenny beat Carl at the I-80 Speedway before I left Nebraska. Carl actually used the words ’specific heat’ in one of his answers. Really, can you ask for much more in a man - good looking, drives a race car AND knows thermodynamics?

Speaking of guys who know science, I am throwing over Elliott for Brian Vickers, who was kind enough to not only participate in the series and the press conference, but also promised to take me bump drafting! Jeff Gordon called Brian “a math guy", which came up when we asked Jeff how long it took him to get out of a car. He didn’t know the time exactly, “but Brian’s a math guy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he had calculated it out.” Brian is a whole lot more than a “math guy” - he’s one of the drivers you can be proud of supporting. Despite being only 25 years old, he’s got a great deal of maturity and class. I’m looking forward to his first Red Bull Racing win.

Speaking of Red Bull, I learned an awful lot from my day with John, Brandon and Josh. Aside from being a trio of cutups (always a good thing!), they are very engineering focused. All three are formally trained engineers, so they think more mathematically than the folks who aren’t formally trained. I got into a disagreement with Josh about whether “grip” was a force. To me, grip is the lateral frictional force - the force that keeps the car from sliding up the track around a turn. The RBR guys weren’t happy with my definition. It wasn’t just one of those engineering/physics “you say centrifugal and I say centripetal” things.

Race teams deal in second-order corrections. If you ask how much a particular car costs and someone says “about $25,000″, then you press and they say “$24,950″ and you press more and they say “$24,949.65″, the $0.65 is the second-order correction. Grip is a force, but grip is the $25,000 and every race team has it. They’re working out in the sixty-five cent region, trying to gain a few hundredths of a second per lap. That’s why it’s so hard to get ahead - you’re looking for very small advantages. Everyone else is looking for the same advantages.

In addition to learning some science, I also learned something about television. While we were out at Texas Motor Speedway and Talladega filming B-roll (pictures you’re going to talk over) last fall, I was watching the people I like watching on television (like Mike Massaro and Randy Pemberton). I’m aware that you can’t learn by watching, but seeing how they moved and looked at the camera at least gave me something to use as a reference. You can see a really big difference in the segments we taped first (which were in October 2008) and the segments we taped at the end (February 2009). Any segment that is in a Hendrick Motorsports lobby was taped early on. The segments that show me at a track were the last ones we taped. It’s much like my experience driving at Texas Motor Speedway: You don’t appreciate how hard it is until you have do it yourself. It is not easy to stand in front of a camera and talk. Seems like it ought to be, but I think about how much I struggled with scripted lines and I am in awe of the pit reporters who have to compose complete sentences in real time. Taping during practice at Daytona meant trying to get lines out (correctly) before the next car came around the track.

It was fun, it was educational and it was a heck of a lot of work. Please share the website with your friends and help us get the word out.

The Science of Speed video series is now up at www.science360.gov. We did a press conference at Texas Motor Speedway Friday April 3rd afternoon announcing the series. If you told me three years ago I’d be sitting at a racetrack in-between a real racecar driver and an official from the National Science Foundation, I would have told you that you were nuts.

We got great coverage from nascar.com and even a podcast that Marc at Full Throttle was kind enough to post.!