NASCAR question

Don't want to potentially alienate those precious "NASCAR Dad" votes, but can anybody give me any stats as to gas/oil consumption for NASCAR?

Gas burned per race? number of races, etc...anything will do.

Is there a difference in the type and grade of fuel consumed?

In short, I'm trying to get an idea of how much oil and gas is consumed by NASCAR in the course of a year, not counting people who drive to the races.

Thanks in advance.

ON EDIT: Another question occurs - given the Oil Company sponsorship of professional racing, what sort of pricing cut does racing get for their fuel purchases?

Is NASCAR paying less for gas than the Pentagon is? SHould we festoon our Armored Vehicles with oil co. logos to get a better rate?

I'm sure if there isn't a techie page, there's a Q&A link that you can ask someone ....

Their response would be interesting, to say the least !!

:hippie:

But couldn't find anything of substantive use on first glance. Will grit my teeth and look again, but was hoping I'd get lucky and happen to find that Neo-Anarcho-Enviro-Demo-Nascar Fan.

ya gotta admit, if I were to ever find such a person, it would be here!

The amount of gas used for a NASCAR event would be the same as a NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB game per spectator. That's because 99.9 % of the energy used is used by the fans getting to the stadiums.

You HAVE to count the gas used by the spectators. Otherwise, you are simply creating the type of rubbish stats that people hate.

A whole lot of energy gets used jetting pro teams from city to city as well. Many pro teams have their own team passenger jets for the players and staff.

I did hear last night in the Aussie Grand Prix Coverage last night that F1 cars have 30 gallon tanks. Figure out hom many pit stops the cars take, length of course, and do the math.

But in doing a comparison of one sport v. another, I imagine racing's overall fuel consumption would still be higher, since consumption of fuel is integral to the actual event.

But thanks for the thought re: transport of teams. thats another angle, definitely.

There's 38 cars in a NASCAR race. The race cars get better mileage than the RVs that fans drove to the race sit in the infield and get blasted. There are 200,000 cars and RVs in the parking lot at Daytona and Indy.

It's not even worth an asterisk.

And there is no way they get better mileage than the RV's that fans drove to the race.

Winnebagos get notoriously bad gas milage.

I see where you are going with it, and I'd say I have to agree when you put it that way.

I'm still going to try and dig up some figures, though, and see what comes out. Thanks for the input

1.5 miles = 1 lap.

Average race car gets 2.6 laps per gallon.

1 gallon every 3.9 miles travelled.

3.9 MPG.

For 500 laps = 750 miles.

~192 gallons of gas per car per race. That's a lot of gas.

Times ~40 cars...

7680 gallons of gas used by all 40 cars per race, excluding practice and qualifying rounds.

42 gallons per barrel.

That's just about 183 barrels of gasoline per race.

Not to mention the amount of oil changes in your standard 16 quart capacity engine, but it's 7:30PM and I'm tired. :-)

How many races per year?



In all honesty, this isn't much compared to the necessary amount of driving people do per day. However, most people need to drive in order to work and life and there are a lot more working people than race car drivers sweating in circles for 3 hours. NASCAR is still a gigantic waste of resources. IMHO.

There's 38 cars racing once a week. Your average smoker probably gives off more pollutants in a year than a NASCAR vehicle gives off.

This is the sort of nit-picking that gives liberals a bad name. Find a real cause. Trillion dollar deficits, or alternative energy sources to world oil use would be good ones. The differences made would be real one, not nit-picking pettyness.

(catalytic converters, mufflers)will increase friction and slow the cars down. Besides,why would you want mufflers?

...you have 40 cars in the line-up to start with. Total run for the Daytona 500 is 500 miles, but only about 45% of the cars actually finish. These are all stock cars, but high performance engines, running on special fuels. I wouldn't be surprised if the fuel has special additives like are used by the military and NASA. :evilgrin:

Anyway, they make five to seven pit-stops per car per race and there are two guys who pressure fuel up each car in the team, so my guess is they have extra large tanks, like SUV's making that at least a 60 gallon capacity, so you got 300 to 420 gallons used by each car per race. I doubt if these cars get more than 1.00 to 1.25 miles per gallon. So 40 cars, average distance including non-finishers say 350 miles, that looks like about 11,200 gallons of fuel just for the race, not counting what gets spilled in the pits and blown up on the track. :puke:

They also spend two weeks qualifying for their positions, plus what about the 500,000 people that drive to Daytona to watch this grand day? Even if I'm off by 100%, GW Bush would not let an occasion like the Daytona 500 that so unabashedly celebrates the great American passion for pollution, waste, unfettered consumption and sheer power slip by him.:nuke:

It is like the Golden era before the coming of Mad Max.:wtf:

Just higher octane than you get at the gas station. There are places that sell it though.

The cars have 22 gallon tanks for most races. Lower capacity for some races. These things are regulated and they do inspect the cars, you know. There are a total of 3 practices per race and one qualifying session which is 2 laps long.

They get more than 1 mile per gallon too. I'd cut your fuel estimate in half, at least, for a 500 mile race assuming all 43 cars finished. Less than an international flight.

The Sunday race in vegas was 267 laps. They pit for fuel every 60-65 laps. They used approx. 88 gals Sunday per car or a total of 3344 gals not counting qualifying.It really is absurd to waste your energy on Nascar.

Sheet, man, no wonder these twerps don't want us to know - it took me 20 frigging minutes to find a link that goes into a car's statistics!!!

While SUVs get crap mileage, it has to be remembered that a car with more cylinders usually gets lower gas mileage. More cylinders = more power. SUVs need power. Therefore sports cars need power too, to go at those speeds...

http://www.hendrickmotorsports.com/teams_schematics.asp?team=2&bhcp=1

2.6 laps/gallon (intermediate track) So how long is a lap? 10 miles?

would be around 1.5 miles.

...I believe Daytona is a little under 2.0 miles per lap so they have to do 260 laps per race. So, the mileage being specified as 2.6 laps/gallon means about 5 miles per gallon, but this is Detroit specs. Notice what they show as the mileage for the street version (22/33) which is always overstated by 20% or more. Then these guys are driving flat out top speed, I really doubt if they would get even half the stated miles per gallon.

From a (non-automotive) engineer and race fan:

NASCAR uses 104 octane unleaded gasoline, formerly supplied by Union 76, changed to Sunoco this year.

The car's gas tank fills with two 18 gal "cans" and run about 50 2.5-mile laps at a high-speed restrictor-plate circuit like Daytona. That particular track would work out to 3.47 mpg.

43 cars are qualified to run in the (now) Nextel Cup Series, so for a no-caution race (yeah right) like Daytona described above, the total fuel consumption would be 6192 gallons, or about 80% of a standard over-the-road gasoline-bearing tractor trailer. Of course that does not take into account qualifying, happy hour, practices, testing & tuning, etc.

To avoid accusations of favoritism, I believe all teams are required to pay for their fuel, and the fuel company pays NASCAR to be a sponsor. The most recently I have seen 104 octane racing fuel sold to the general public the price was around $10/ gallon - it may be more than that now.

Since fuel is not sampled with any high frequency, many teams use "cheater" fuels which contain percentages of toluene, ring molecules, and oxidizers. This is where I have an issue with NASCAR, not in the fuel consumption while racing: the race fuel rigs sometimes spill gallons of that toxic brew onto the pitlane in close proximity to the pit crews and reporters, but the racing body has avoided improving the transfer technology to avoid long term carcinogenic exposure to the very people who make the series run.

18 gallon cans, but the cars only have 22 gallon tanks.

...I had heard that charge, but officials look the other way. Steroids for autos!!!:freak:

So where else have these additives been used where the public is exposed? :eyes:

For the fuel capacity....http://www.mphmotorsports.com/factstrivia.htm


Las Vegas is a 400 mile race with each lap being 1.5 miles. Can't find anything verify the 60 - 65 lap stops.Just being a fan I know thats the norm. The other side of this is the Atlanta race this weekend will generate a boost to the surrounding economy double that of the super bowl.Nascar comes to Atlanta twice a year

A pity about the energy consumption the sport demands, but the factoids were genuinely interesting.

would be approximately 4,300 gallons per race, and that would be a 500 mile race. Many races are now much less than that - Las Vegas, Michigan, Watkins Glenn, NY, and some of the short tracks.

They also use some fuel during practice and qualifying. My best guess would be a total of about 220,000 gallons for the 36-race season. In other words, less than is used in LA traffic in one afternoon. Now if you added up all the various auto racing divisions around the world, you
would be in the millions of gallons. Then you might have enough fuel use to power all the cars in LA for a couple of days.

There is not enough use or pollution here to even waste your time on. Air Force one probably uses up more resources than NASCAR.

...Stealth bombers and fighters. How many gallons of jet fuel did WTC jets deliver on impact?

Don't remember if they were 757's or 767's.

Boeing's website lists technical specifications:

757: 11,500 US gallons, max takeoff weight 272,500 lb

767: 24,000 US gallons, max takeoff weight 450,000 lb

both use standard JP4 jet fuel.

For comparison, a standard-sized tractor-tanker with "1203 flammable" (gasoline) placards seen on the interstate carries 7800 US gallons.