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DISTRO 03.08.13 THE RACING LINE: EXPLORING NASCAR’S TECHNOLOGICAL DICHOTOMY
RADIOS
Radios are used extensively
so that drivers
can talk to both crew
chiefs on the pit wall
and spotters, positioned
with a high vantage
point of the race. Radio
communications are
strictly between
driver and crew — driver-to-driver
communications
are banned —
and NASCAR mandates
they be non-encrypted.
The Freescale and McLaren EFI system does
provide a very simple feed of data, but teams
have to physically tether a laptop to a car to access
it. That, it must be said, is rather hard to
do while the car is hustling around the track at
200-plus miles per hour, so data acquisition
occurs only before and after the race. Prior to
a race, you’ll commonly see engineers standing
there looking intently (sometimes confusedly)
at laptops sitting on rooftops as V8 engines rumble away in
the garage, slowly coming up to temperature.
When the race begins, the laptops are put away and the
cars effectively become black boxes.
“Once we start the race, we’re locked down. We’re all
stopwatches and tire pressures,” Darian Grubb, crew chief
of Denny Hamlin’s #11 Toyota, told us.
It’s the drivers that provide the best insight into what’s
happening under the hood thanks to an array of old-school,
analog gauges scattered across the dashboard. If any needles
start sweeping in a wayward direction, it’s up to the driver
to spot it and call it out over the radio to his or her crew —
while at top speed in a pack of 40 other cars.
But there’s another source of information that virtually
every team on the pit wall deploys before the race, beamed
GYRO CAMS
NASCAR has recently introduced a camera that rotates
to maintain a perspective parallel to the horizon, showing
just how steep the banking is. These cameras were first
used in motorcycle racing, to show how far riders leaned
their bikes over.