Days 2 of NASCAR Next Gen testing is rolling at Daytona.
I’m following the stream here:
It is really nice of @PettyGMS to help their drivers to have a better view of the palm trees outside the track.
@PettyGMS I do appreciate their creativity here in trying to collect data at the far ends of the spectrum but that's all this is so don't get too excited about seeing skewed cars in race conditions because there is only a tolerance of -/+0.30 degrees for rear steer per the rulebook.
As I've said in the past, we shouldn't judge what we see in testing as something that we can expect in a race. Teams have a variety of checklists for a test and they are open to try whatever they like to collect data at the far ends because there is no inspection at a test.
My guess is that they're pushing certain measurements past their limits to test sensitivity of said measurements to know how much they can push things when it comes to race setup versus what benefit they might get.
This is the latest version of the inspection measurements for the NASCAR Next Gen car per the rulebook.
Here are the reference points in the rulebook for those measurements.
An excellent explanation from @TStrunk33 to expand on the description above on why you test certain things at the extremes in a race track environment.
@TStrunk33 There are so many easy ways to accomplish that with independent rear suspension. The simplest method is to make adjustments to the rear tie rods which I have circled in red here.
@TStrunk33 That rear toe link connects to the clevis (C) that we see here and can be shimmed in and out using the shims (E) that we see in the illustration. Basically what you would do is run no shims on one side and a full stack on the other.
We can see how the other side of the toe link (C) connects to the upper control arm (A) in this illustration.
The other option instead of shims to test skew would be to fabricate one long and one short toe link just for testing.
Another interesting perspective here about accomplishing this by shimming the rear clip at an angle.
The shims are shown in red here so you could possibly stack more shims on one side to tilt that entire rear clip in a specific direction.
The question here would be where the centerline is being referenced from and whether it comes from the center of the center section or from the center of the rear clip.
I marked the shim locations here in red.
Actually shimming that rear clip would probably run afoul of the Wheel Offset formula so this wouldn't pass a technical inspection either.
We're back to the skew being illegal unless there is something else that pops up so I wouldn't pay too much attention to it.
There has been some discussion about the brakes on the stream and Daytona is one of the tracks that gets the Light Duty variant of the brakes because they brakes don't get used as much when compared to other tracks.
I believe that Daytona, Talladega, and Atlanta are the ones currently assigned to have Light Duty brakes from the last I heard. The details on the pad types for Light Duty and Heavy Duty below.
It sounds like NASCAR is going to take one car from each OEM from back to R&D so they can re-evaluate the cars since all of the cooling changes that have been made.
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The battery issues in the No. 2 and the No. 21 and the disqualification of the No. 43 at Martinsville are likely all related.
Let's talk about weight at Martinsville and what happened to those cars.
Let's start with the basics of what makes a car race well at Martinsville and discuss some concepts of the physics of a race car.
The first thing we need to consider is lateral stability which in its simplest explanation is a gauge of how well a car stays in a straight line.
Having great lateral stability helps a driver have better control of a race car but the nature of an oval track means that there is centrifugal force once the car reaches a corner.
This force tries to push to car towards the outside of a turn.
The No. 19 of Chase Briscoe was hit with a large penalty for modification of a single source supplied
part under the following sections of the rulebook:
Cup series cars are required to run a 7″ x 60″ spoiler face (F) on a tall spoiler base (E) for superspeedway races which is shown on the bottom half of this illustration.
NASCAR runs such a large spoiler base in order to slow the cars down and teams obviously want to find ways to make speed so getting air away from the spoiler is a priority whenever possible but NASCAR tries to make sure that the spoilers cannot flex through multiple methods.
We saw that pit crew members from @JoeGibbsRacing had tablets that would light up in green as a car reached its fuel fill target to tell the driver and fueler that the car can take off.
Let's dig into how this works and how they choose the time when it should change colors.
In this video we see a fuel only pit stop on the No. 11 of Denny Hamlin in the Duels last night.
Due to the distance of the race being so short, the car does not need a full fill of fuel so teams try to predict exactly how much fuel to add in order to maximize track position.
In the first part of the stop, we see the fueler approach the car and as soon as he plugs in, the crew member at the front of the car presses a button to start the timer on the tablet. The timer starts with a yellow bar that counts down and turns green at a predetermined time.
NASCAR has added torque sensor details to the rule book.
Ramping up testing with torque sensors is a significant step towards possibly allowing new engine types which could potentially lead to a new OEM.
Let's get into the details of how it all works and what it means.
A very simplified way to explain a torque sensor is that it is like a mobile dyno because the sensor is mounted on the driveshafts/axles leading to the wheels which allows it to calculate a torque output figure at the wheels.
Once a car is moving, the driveshaft produces a magnetic field which is detected by the torque sensor surrounding it. That magnetic field is converted to measurable voltage which corresponds to a given torque figure that can be transmitted over the cars data system.
I did a little digging and noticed that there is small used car lot called Effortless Motors in Riverside, CA that specializes in specialty cars and has 5-10 cars in inventory at any given time. Their Instagram shows a 1987 Grand National for sale late last year.
GNX stands for Grand National Experimental and only 547 were built. Kendrick owns number 191.
He is deeply ingrained in Grand National lore and has even mentioned internal GM build codes for the GNX in the past.
From a post announcing the purchase of his GNX:
"make you realize the only thing that matters in life is that original paper work. that TL2 code"
T2L was an internal GM RPO code that marked a Grand National destined to be turned into a GNX.
Those 547 Grand Nationals were sent to American Specialty Cars (ASC) McLaren Performance Technologies where they got a big turbo and big intercooler among other upgrades.
They can easily be identified by the GNX turbo heat shield as seen in one of the photos in the post above.