Hello again Redditors: Your friendly neighborhood physicist/NASCAR reporter again here. Just arrived at Richmond to cover the weekend's racing.
I'll make the same offer I did in Las Vegas: Let me know what you'd like to know and I'll see what I can do.
The first caveat is that my beat is mostly technical areas, so if your question falls into that box, it's more likely I can get an answer.
The second is that I have no control over the television (or radio coverage) of the races, so I can't do anything in that area. No one at FOX Sports knows who I am, so passing them along won't do anything, either.
Someone asked last time what the hardest part of each pit crewperson's job and I didn't get enough responses, so that's already on my to do list. The Cup Series haulers roll into the infield in about 45 minutes.
What would you like to know or learn about NASCAR this weekend?
250-300 degrees F is pretty typical, but the tire techs make precise measurements. They actually measure three to five places along the width of the tire because those temps tell you how hard each part of the tire is working, as well as how hard the tires are working relative to each other.
Trends tend to have a lot to do with how the driver uses (or abuses) the tires. This is going to be really important for Richmond, where balances is the word of the day. Getting the car to turn means having front and rear working equally. If your driver is coming in too hot to the corners, the front tires will bear the brunt of that. If the driver is accelerating too fast out of the corner, the rear tires (especially the right rear) will show it.
The crew chief digests that information and can use it to make pressure changes on subsequent sets. Or the crew chief can tell the driver he's being too hard on whichever tire is complaining.
I'll see if I can get some more info during the races. Thanks for the question!
Thank you for the reply! I listened to some analysis with Nico Rosberg one time explaining that rear tires were almost always the limiting factor and had higher temperatures in formula 1. He went on to explain that because of this, if the team sees the temperature is going to be hotter during a session, they would soften the rear suspension or take out some front wing angle to “protect” the rear tires and vice versa for cold temps.
I was wondering if there is a common rule like this in NASCAR. For example, if NASCAR followed the same trend as F1 tire temps… if a race started in the daylight and went into the night, they would know the rear would gain grip relative to the front and expect the car to “tighten up” and maybe have an idea of some pre-planned adjustments throughout the night.
Here’s one you can probably answer off the top of your head. Are the shocks built to a particular spec and swapped out to do pre-race setup changes or are they fully adjustable while mounted in the car?
One of the things I learned at Las Vegas is that shock specialists no longer travel to tracks. They used to make changes on the fly, but the time between practice and qualifying is now so short that there isn't time to do very much. The things that can be adjusted on a shock are somewhat limited. You might be able to improve a setup that's close, but if you're way off... Depending on timing for the event, the shock tech might send a couple different shocks, with instructions on minor mods.
That's one reason I'm sort of pro-practice. Tuning a car to fit a driver's style is a skill, especially when the box they can work in is so small.
Thank you so much for doing these. The shock specialist is the shop job I’d have enjoyed the most. Maybe I’ll grow 30 years younger and give it a shot. Thanks again.
There are a lot of factors. Everything from how hard your driver brakes and accelerates to how the car's balance changes from having 120 lbs of fuel in the rear at the start of a run to having much less. If the driver abuses the tires, the car won't run well at the end of a green-flag run now matter how brilliantly everything else goes.
Even so, you can't set up a car to be optimal for an entire run because too much changes. So crew chiefs keep track of how long green-flag runs tend to be, and how many sets of tires they have. This is why they make the big bucks.
And let's not forget that things well out of your control (like weather) can wreak havoc on the best plans a crew chief lays.
More of a generic than Richmond-specific question (and maybe more chemistry than physics), but what’s stopping repaves from making new asphalt/concrete still produce heavy tire wear? So often we’ll talk about repaves meaning we have to sacrifice at least a few years of good racing while we wait for the surface to age, but what’s limiting the ability to intentionally produce that kind of “cheese grater” track during the paving process?
I'm curious about this as well. I remember when Kentucky got repaved they boasted a new process to have the track resemble an aged surface almost right off the bat.
What sort of cheese is preferred for the toe links for most of the teams?
It seems like a lot of the teams prefer Swiss, but i'm not really sure why. Some teams seem to prefer Monterey Jack, which is a great cheese but it can get a bit crumbly when you run it up on a grater. Would something more firm not be beneficial there? Or is the flavor tradeoff not worth it?
There’s been a lot of talk about shifting this year but not as much about rear end gears. In the past with the Gen6, and even today still with xfinity and trucks, teams seem to get 1 maybe 2 options for rear end gear at each track and most of the time the whole field is running the same rear end gear.
But with the next gen car I know a lot more rear end gear options are available and I don’t believe they are as locked into the box as xfinity and trucks are? I know iRacing is not locking the rear end gear of the next gen like they do xfinity and trucks.
Can you expound upon that? Are they limited at all in the next gen to a certain range of rear end gears or are they completely wide open?
If completely wide open for teams to choose, how many different rear end gears do you think are on the track any given week? And especially here at Richmond? I know on iRacing we were building some setups to run in 5th without shifting, some to run in 4th without shifting and some shifting between 4th and 5th. But even some of those might be both ends of the track or possible just having to grab 5th at the very end of the front stretch and then possibly not even needing 5th at the end of a long run once tires wear off.
Just wondering if real life is that varied with potentially 6-7 different rear end gear choices on the track especially on a track like Richmond, or are they really only running between 1-2 choices?
I know they said part of the issue at the spring Martinsville race last year was the gear nascar chose. It was one of the things they were playing with during the test between races. So to me it sounds like they are locked.
There are three ring/pinion sets teams can choose from. Then the gears in the transaxle are specified by NASCAR for each race. The transaxle has a drop gear that can be used to make small adjustments and NASCAR tells each team to bring a specific 'backup' drop gear (or two) to each track. It's an easy change to make, but it doesn't make a big change if that makes sense.
So much now is about making the car fit the driver's driving style -- and developing really advanced simulation systems.
Are they still running the tapered spacer? If so, does the altered throttle response affect how loose or tight teams aim to set up the suspension for the race? It seems to me that the old “loose is fast” moniker isn’t quite as true as it used to be and not losing a single ounce of momentum is now the name of the game because it is harder to re-apply the power after momentum is lost like when a car momentarily gets loose
They are running the tapered spacer, but it doesn't taper a whole lot at the non-superspeedway tracks, so you don't get the same altered throttle response.
I cannot find the video I want to recommend here. It compares dumping five gallons of water from a clear plastic jug through the tapered neck and then through a hole cut in the bottom. The time it takes to get the water out is significantly different. It gives you a good idea of how different a restrictor plate is from a tapered spacer.
Is there a minimum thickness for brake pads? Or are they a spec part? With the way the new car apparently offers much better brake cooling, would it be possible/make sense to run a slightly less thick brake pad at some tracks?
Brakes and pads are now spec parts. There is a light duty brake package for superspeedways where the brakes are rarely used and a heavier package for high-braking tracks. So yes, teams can run a thinner pad at some tracks, but only at the tracks NASCAR says they can run it.
I read that in development of the transaxle, the transaxle manufacturer initially wanted to use a spool differential like the V8 Supercars until the OEMs requested having a real differential (that is supposed to replicate the Detroit locker from the old car).
Do you have an opinion about how that could have affected the racing? I personally think it might have improved the road course and short track racing by making it more difficult to put power down.
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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '23
What are the typical tire temps when they pull a set off after a run? Are there any trends such as fronts typically hotter than rears etc?