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DISTRO 03.08.13 THE RACING LINE: EXPLORING NASCAR’S TECHNOLOGICAL DICHOTOMY
QUESTION:
“ If you could
add any piece
of technology
to NASCAR
for the 2013
season, what
would it be?”
SCOTT MILLER
EXECUTIVE VP OF
COMPETITION AT
MICHAEL WALTRIP
RACING
TRACTION CONTROL
“Not necessarily for
Daytona, but for our
season in general,
I’d probably have to go
with traction control.”
tionwide and, at the top, the Sprint Cup. There are separate
sanctioned stock car series in Mexico, Canada and Europe,
plus regional series on the eastern and western coasts of the
United States. Finally, for those who prefer road courses,
there’s the Grand-Am series, which itself campaigns four
real-world racing series (plus a fifth, virtual one, the iRacing.com
Online Sports Car Series) and next year will grow to
consume the American Le Mans Series.
NASCAR racing is, then, big business, and that’s not
the half of it. For each of the 43 drivers that took the green
flag at the 2013 running of the Daytona 500, hundreds of
other souls played a part in getting them onto the track,
ranging from the folks who clean the shops back in Wilkes
County, N.C., to the guys and gals who handle the frantic
wheel changes in the pit stops. (Most of whom, by the
way, are scouted out of college sports programs for their
strength, speed and reflexes.)
However, there’s a new breed of crew member at the
track, often sporting bespectacled faces and distinctly
English accents. They’re engineers, and a surprising number
have made the transition to NASCAR from what is
considered to be the pinnacle of motorsport technology:
the international Formula One series.
“Formula One has always been based off of engineering,”
Kenny Wallace, a longtime NASCAR personality
and current driver of the #29 RAB Racing Toyota, told
us. “This is still a new world for us, but now it’s here for
real. Twenty years ago it was ‘Hey, I got an engineer.’ ‘Oh,
what’s he do?’ ‘He tells ya what time you ran.’ Now it’s
here for real... It’s so real now, that if you don’t have this,
you’re behind.”
Indeed, on race mornings you’ll see engineers frantically
wielding a variety of tools, but the humble laptop (and,
on some more progressive teams, Microsoft’s Surface tablet)
has become a recent addition thanks to the introduction
of electronic fuel injection (EFI) to the cars in 2012.
EFI replaces clunky, complicated carburetors, the sort that
hasn’t been seen in production cars in the United States
for 20 years. (Similarly, leaded fuel was banned from US