Understanding NASCAR, part 3: Cars and teams

They say there ain't nothin' stock about a stock car.

When NASCAR first started, the division now called Nextel Cup was called Strictly Stock...and they'd disqualify for having a part on your car that wouldn'thave been there when it was on the lot. And the 1960 Daytona 500 was won on Sunday in a car they bought on Thursday.

NASCAR has gone through a LOT of changes in the last fifty or so years, and one of the biggest is the manufacturers whose cars were allowed to compete in it. They've always had a list of approved cars...and, until Toyota came into the truck series a few years back, all those brands were at least historically headquartered in the US. Now they let you slide if your car is made in the US--which explains why of the four cars being used in the current series, only one is actually made in the US.

The NASCAR stock car is a front-engine, rear-wheel-drive automobile with a 350-cubic-inch engine, a four-speed transmission and a rear end out of a Ford F-350 pickup. It carries its fuel in a "fuel cell" which is a very impact-resistant way of hauling gas around, it has a dry-sump oiling system and, up until today, it ran on Sunoco leaded racing fuel. Today's race at Fontana, California, will be the first Nextel Cup race in history to be contested on unleaded gasoline. It uses one brand of tires--currently Goodyear Eagles--and one brand of gasoline.

The car's built around a tube chassis--two-inch AISI 4340 chromoly steel seamless tubing is welded into a car-shaped cage from which all the good parts are suspended. (AISI means American Iron and Steel Institute.) It has very thin steel body panels welded to it. They are shaped and formed in the brunt of a wind tunnel...and then they're reshaped and reformed with a 16-pound sledgehammer during the race if the driver hits something. There are two tubes in the chassis of note: the Petty Bar, which goes from the roll bar to the floor, and the Earnhardt Bar, which is in the middle of the windshield. They're named this because Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt bent racecars in such fashion as to prove the bars were needed.

The car has six windows: the windshield, the rear greenhouse, two where the doors would be if there were any, and two for the nonexistent backseat passengers to look out of. All are Lexan polycarbonate. The windshield has "tear-offs"--thin sheets of plastic that cover the Lexan, and that are torn off during the race to clean off oil and tire chunks. The driver's side door window has a net over it, which comes off so the driver can get out. The net serves another function: if the driver crashes, he drops the net after the wreck's over to let the safety workers know he's all right. The back window has holes in it through which the rear suspension is adjusted, and the other three windows all have inlets to bring air to cool something in the car--one window cools the oil, one cools the rear end and one cools the driver.

We already covered the size of the engine: 350 cubic inches, or as close to it as the manufacturer makes. The engine has a forged crank, forged pistons, usually titanium connecting rods, a camshaft in the block and pushrods, usually titanium valves...basically, an engine that Harley Earl would recognize, and he died a long time ago. It mounts a Holley Dominator four-barrel carb that flows 650 cubic feet per minute when it comes out of the box. You're allowed to port and polish it, and mess with the jets and stuff. When they run at Daytona and Talladega, they put a restrictor plate under the carb. A restrictor plate is a piece of aluminum that replaces the carb spacer, and it has small holes to let the fuel/air mixture into the engine. The trick is that the holes are smaller than the ones in the carb, so you go slower. This is important not because Bill Elliott turned 211 mph in a qualifying lap at Talladega, but because someone in the race two days later almost put a car over the fence into a crowd of people. The catch fence at Talladega is 12 feet high and a stock car weighs 3200 lbs. You figure out how many people would be killed if a whole car landed in the grandstands. At Lowe's Motor Speedway, an Indy driver put a tire over the catch fence and took out three people, so I don't want to think of how many hundreds would go if the whole car (which, of course, would be on fire when it hit) landed in the crowd.

They run electronic ignition on these cars. It's almost always from MSD. You carry two complete ignition systems except for the distributor (which is bolted to the engine--Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars have two distributors, and it ain't for backup--they run two sets of plugs because nitromethane is very close to not being flammable*--but NASCAR doesn't go for that fancy stuff), but you only run one at a time. There are two switches on the dash, one to select the ignition box to be used, the other to select the coil to be used. If the ignition starts screwing up, though, most guys just flip both switches and keep going. The ignition system is in the driver's compartment.

One other fun fact about the engine: dry-sump oiling. There's no oil in the oil pan. If there was, the oil would pull away from the pickup tube, starve the engine and seize it up. Instead, there's an oil tank at the back of the car. The oil comes out of the tank, goes through a pump driven by the driveshaft, runs through a braided-stainless oil hose to the front, enters the engine through a tube in the bottom, lubricates the engine, then is pumped through an oil cooler back into the tank. It holds 22 quarts of oil, which the team got free from the oil company. After the race, they drain the oil into a little drum and give it to the oil company guy, who ships it to their lab. It's a good cheap way of stressing a lot of oil quickly.

The transmission in these cars has four forward gears and is made by Jerico. You can put any four-speed transmission in your car, but Jerico is the preferred maker because of the ease of rebuilding it: take the lid off, pull two pins, remove all the guts from the transmission, stick new guts in, put the two pins in and put the lid back on. You can do it in about a minute, which is why the Jerico is such a fan favorite--you don't even have to push the car behind the wall to do it. And there's no NASCAR rule about gear ratios, so Jerico will build your guts any way you want them.

The rear end is straight off a Ford F-350 pickup. You can change the gearset in it, and everyone does to suit the track they're on. You want the engine to turn fast because you designed it for high-speed operation, but on a track like Bristol or Martinsville where you run all day below 110mph, it won't turn fast unless you put a really obnoxious gearset, like 6.30:1 (6.30 turns of the crankshaft give one turn of the wheels) in the car. You can change it during a race if you'd like. If you did you'd lose because it takes so long, but you can.

The tires are Goodyear Eagles. On oval tracks they aren't grooved because you get better traction. Road courses can be run on grooved rain tires. Fun irony: The tires Goodyear first sold to racers were the same tires they sold to police departments...the irony comes when you consider that the whole sport of stock car racing began when bootleggers, whose cars were designed specifically to evade the police, started racing their cars after church on Sunday.

The interior of the car contains the seat and controls. The seats are form-fitted to the drivers, they have these huge wings to keep the driver's head looking straight forward, and they're upholstered in Nomex. The steering wheel comes off because it's so close to your chest you'd never get in if you couldn't take it off. There's a net to keep your head in the car, and a six-point safety harness. You've got a lap belt, two shoulder belts and two "antisubmarine" belts between your legs to keep you from sliding out of the car.

The dashboard is regulated by NASCAR--they set the size and position. Other than that, you can put pretty much what you want there. Most cars have: a tachometer, an oil pressure gauge, a fuel pressure gauge, a voltmeter, a water temperature gauge, the master power switch, the switches for the MSD stuff, and a bank of switches to control fans and the like. They also put things like sponsor logos, lucky pennies sick little girls give them, teddy bears, pretty much whatever they want so long as it's not dangerous--I think they'd have a little chat with you if you insisted on putting your lucky anvil on the dash. The fuel pressure gauge is very important; when it starts dropping, you're running out of gas because the pickup is sucking air along with the fuel.

Let's talk aerodynamics. There are three ways to adjust the "downforce"--the amount the car is pushed down by oncoming air. Two of them NASCAR sets--the height of the front spoiler and the height of the rear spoiler. The third is the air inlets in the nose. You need air to keep the car cool, but more comes in than you really must have. So you can tape up some of those holes with duct tape, and the front downforce will increase. At short tracks like Martinsville, NASCAR allows teams to open a set of holes to cool the brake system. Those holes are NEVER taped up, even though they'll let you. You've also got a set of flaps on the roof of your car. If you turn the car around at speed, they deploy and keep you from rolling. One of the most famous pieces of crash footage is Rusty Wallace flipping end-over-end for about a quarter-mile at Talladega in 1993. That's what these are supposed to prevent. NASCAR's put a lot of screwy shit on these cars to make them slower--little wickerbill flaps on the rear spoilers, things on the roofs...the 2001 Daytona 500 was run with a lot of aero-killing shit on the cars, and all it did was bunch the field up a whole lot.

- - - - -

Let's talk about the race team. This is definitely a team sport.

The driver drives the car. He also reports to his crew chief as to how it's running.

All of the current Nextel Cup drivers, with one exception, are white males. There's a reason for that: anyone who's come into Nextel Cup in the last ten years was born into a comfortably middle-class family who could afford to start them racing go-karts when they were five or six years old. (This includes Juan Pablo Montoya, whose father loved racing.)

The last woman to attempt to drive a Winston Cup car was Shawna Robinson. Oh God, what a piece of work she was. She ran all over the TV claiming she'd "earned" the right to drive Winston Cup. Then a woman named Beth Ann Morganstern, who had a LOT of money, built a team to showcase Robinson, the first female driver in a hell of a long time. It was called BAM Racing. They couldn't get sponsors because sponsors want to back likeable drivers and Shawna Robinson is an abrasive, unattractive person. She ran ten races, tore up ten race cars and BAM Racing finished the season with a male driver.

I am starting to think there is a problem with the Nextel Cup car itself that discourages women and minorities (except maybe for JP Montoya, but that guy won the Indianapolis 500 his first time out) from driving it well. Other forms of racing have successful female drivers. Danica Patrick, Lyn St. James and Shirley Muldowney are/were successful Indy car drivers. Drag racing has a lot of women in it--Angelle and the Force sisters, right off the top of my head. There are even a couple of women in NASCAR Craftsman Truck. Antron Brown's a black guy, and he's fantastic in Pro Stock Motorcycle.

Okay, enough muttering. The Crew Chief is the foreman of the whole operation.

His second-in-command is the Car Chief.

Seven people go over the wall to service the car in a pit stop: front and rear tire changers, front and rear tire carriers, gasman, catch can man and jackman.

Jackmen are big men--shaped like NFL linemen to more quickly pick the car up. Many jackmen WERE NFL linemen.

The tire guys, when they get the tires back across the wall, check the tire temperature and remaining tread depth. This tells the crew chief how the car is handling. The ideal is consistent wear across the tread.

The gasman is responsible for fuel mileage calculations. They know how much gas they SHOULD be burning; if they're burning more, they know to schedule pit stops closer together.

The catch can man is also responsible for getting more gas. In the infield is a gas station. You put your two gas cans in a cart, pull them to the gas station, and the friendly Sunoco guy fills them up.

Finally, there is the spotter. He stands at the top of the grandstand and guides the driver around the track. You can have more than one, but most tracks only call for one.

During the week, most of the pit crews work at the race shop. Jeff Gordon was the first to hire a separate pit crew.

Teams will also bring mechanics, engineers or whoever else they feel like as part of their crew. They also have a spy: this person sits with his fancy scanner and listens in on other teams' conversations.

They usually also bring the car owner...except in 1997 and 1998, when Rick Hendrick was away from the track. Every time Jeff Gordon would win a race, he'd take a call in victory lane from Mr. Hendrick...who, in 1998, was under house arrest for mail fraud. (They didn't throw him in jail because his leukemia would have made caring for him in the joint prohibitively expensive.)

Thanks again for this!

Interesting.

Otherwise, I'll continue to make fun of them for going around and around in a circle.

Are these cars still street-legal? How much would one cost, tricked out for the track like you describe?

I've seen estimates...one of these cars is worth between $100,000 and $150,000 depending on who built it.

Right now, a Toyota is the most expensive car to build because they're still not sure how to get it to run fast. A couple of years ago, Dodge held that distinction--they hadn't been in the series that long, and DaimlerChrysler got rid of the Intrepid after just a few years of racing it.

I just had a thought of something to add: what happens when the manufacturer ceases production of the car they're racing.

NASCAR expects all the manufacturers to run a current production automobile. If Ford's teams are running a Taurus, say, NASCAR expects to be able to send someone to a Ford dealer and have them come home with a new Taurus. It typically takes two years for a manufacturer to stop production of a car, so here's what happens, at least in the case of the Dodge Intrepid and the Ford Taurus:

Step 1 is for the manufacturer to choose a car to replace the to-be-cancelled car, and to announce the choice in a press conference. This normally happens two years out.

Step 2 requires the participation of one NASCAR team: they design the new car and build one copy of it. They paint it in a red, white and blue color scheme and hold an unveiling.

In Step 3, the car is presented to NASCAR, who tests it to be sure it will be at least minimally competitive but that it won't give the teams who run it an unfair advantage. Once everyone's satisfied that it's a decent car, NASCAR blesses it by creating a set of templates and issues them to the other teams running that make of car.

Step 4 is for every other race shop to build one of the new car. They test and tweak and finally get the car good enough to run.

Step 5 is to put the new car in races. All new cars are first raced at Daytona Speedweeks, because they're the first races of the year.

Once the manufacturer stops making the street car, the teams have three years to transition to the new racecar. Normally it doesn't take that long.

now it's just bullshit.


here's the real thing...