Inside NASCAR: A look into what it takes to put a car on the track (NASCAR.com)
September 1, 2010
Walk about a NASCAR garage on race weekend and be witness to a crew member attaching a hose to a NACA duct. Or another crewman greasing a spline. Walk along pit road and see such items as a blow torch and putty knife being put to good use, and even a common, everyday hose clamp serves a dutiful purpose.
Busy garage bays are teeming with race car preparation in the days and hours leading up to the race. A bustling pit road, well back of the wall and the pit box, is flux with activity before, during and after the race.
With the help of former crew chief and current television analyst Larry McReynolds, take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the aspects that help put a driver’s most definable image—his car—on the track and keep it there for the balance of a Sprint Cup Series race.
The hole story
It’s Saturday after the final practice at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, and final preparations for Sunday’s race are under way. This includes adding tubes to the holes on the back window for track bar and wedge adjustments. Up until the race, only the holes are there.
“For qualifying, you want as few pieces on that car as you possibly can get by with,” McReynolds explains.
Using a T-handle wrench, tubes are placed inside the holes and serve as a guide for the extension of a ratchet or similar tool which will be placed in the hole and turned to make adjustments during a pit stop.
Oil, well
Another significant change to the car from pre-race conditions—i.e. practices and qualifying—to race setup is the viscosity of the oil. A lighter grade is used through the final practice, then teams switch to a thicker oil. The oil tank reservoir is located behind the driver’s seat, and the oil is funneled in through the quarter window.
Wheels on the … go round and round
Axles turn the wheels. The gears turn the axles. And it’s the splines that, in turn, make the gears go. Splines are teeth located on the end of the axle that go inside the gear.
Once an axle is checked post-practice, it is lubricated and placed back inside the gear.
“They’ll pull them out and inspect them, make sure everything looks good, put the grease on them and put them back in. Or if they decide to put fresh axles in for the race, they’ll do the same process.” McReynolds says.
Bondo is its name-o
Things don’t always go according to plan in practice. A blown engine can lead a team to the hauler for the backup. A scrape with the wall can send a team scrambling to the garage for repairs—on the inside of the car and out.
“If a team wrecks a car, they can’t just automatically decide they want to go to a backup car,” McReynolds says. “NASCAR has to bless them going to a backup car. They have to deem that car is damaged beyond repair.”
Body-work repair includes banging out sheet metal, adding a little Bondo (body filler or putty) to the damaged areas, then sanding down to get a slick finish before putting on the race wrap (body decal), which makes the car look as good as new.
Nowadays, decals are the preferred method to painting, and repainting—and the reason is two-fold.
“With so many different teams running so many different paint schemes, it just makes it a lot easier,” McReynolds says. “You don’t want to just keep repainting a race car, cause if you keep repainting it, no matter how much you strip it down, you add weight to it.”
Checking a list
It’s Sunday morning at NHMS, and it’s time to go over the pre-race checklist. Make that checklists, several of them the car chief assigns to the crew members. According to McReynolds, there can be up to 350 items for one car’s set of checklists.
“In between that car coming off the track after the last practice and before you push it to the grid for the race, every item [is checked off] on all these checklists—everything from checking things on the engines to underneath the car, suspension, inside the car. And in most cases you initial it, that way they know it’s done and they know exactly who did it.”
Hot side hot, cool side cool
Another piece of equipment critical to the weekend is the cool down unit, which in essence plays a role in aero advantage. Once a crew member dumps ice into the cool down unit and fills it with water, two hoses are attached from the unit and it pumps hot water out of the engine and the radiator and replenishes it with the cold water.
“The goal with a race car engine is to keep the oil as hot as possible and keep the water as cool as possible,” McReynolds says. “The cooler you keep the water, the more tape it will let you run on the front end [for aero advantage].
For good measure
Another simple device which comes in handy is a tape measure. One can be used to check the oil level prior to the race. Although the oil was changed the day before, the level needs to be checked again as the engine goes through its final tune-up.
Race cars have a dry sump system, which leaves very little oil in the oil pan.
“You only want enough oil in the oil pan to lubricate the crank shaft, because the more oil that crank shaft has to turn, that’s just robbing horsepower,” McReynolds says. “So you send just enough oil in that engine to keep everything good and lubricated.”
Gauging interest
Setting the tachometer, which basically serves as a race car’s speedometer, allows a driver to know when he is approaching the danger zone when it comes to pit-road speed. Once set, a series of green, yellow or red lights will alert the driver of a particular speed.
“It just keeps the driver from having to look at numbers. He can just look at lights, which is a lot easier to look at,” McReynolds says.
“You want to see all green lights. You want all those green lights lit up because what that means is you’re right there on the edge. If some of those lights start turning yellow, it’s like, uh-oh, I’m getting too fast, and if any of them turn red, you’re way over.
The tach also is used to measure the number of RPMs the car has turned, which is particularly useful in qualifying and practices. Pit-road speed is crucial for races.
Air supply
NACA ducts supply air to crucial parts inside the car, such as the cool box unit which supplies cold air into a driver’s helmet, or to the oil tank box to keep fumes out of it. They look like a funnel—it’s real narrow at the front and gets wider in the back. The further you go into it, the duct tapers down.
“This has a great air flow but isn’t a huge drag penalty,” McReynolds says.
NACA ducts are attached in the quarter windows, which are taken out to apply the hoses that will channel the air. In the case of the driver’s cooling system, a convex screen wire is placed in the hose.
“You don’t want any kind of debris getting in there,” McReynolds explains. “It’s coarse enough that is not going to hurt he air flow, but it would keep any rubber or anything like that from going into that hose.”
NACA ducts, developed by the institute which eventually would become NASA, can be commonly found on the wings of airplanes.
NASCAR’s checklist
Race cars will go through a handful of inspection bays prior to hitting pit road where, among other things, height, weight and engine specifications will be measured.
One particular inspection is the wheel base of the car, which is the distance between the center of the front tire and the center of the rear tire. It’s called checking the offset, which is determining if the body of the car is setting straight on the chassis or if it is moved over to the left or moved over to the right.
“The more offset you have, the better the car will go around a corner,” McReynolds says. “[NASCAR] only allows you a certain amount of offset.”
There are two holes in the sides of the car, one near the front and one near the rear. Both sides of the car are measured.
“Those pegs go in and they touch the frame, so they’ll measure how much they go in on both sides and that will tell them how much offset is in the car,” McReynolds explains.
Eye in the sky
Most pit boxes are set up with cameras that allows teams to go back and study their pit stops.
“It’s something that [teams] do to try to maximize their pit stops. After the pit stop the pit crew will go behind the pit box to a monitor—they will look at it and see what was good, what was bad, what they were fast on, what they were slow on,” McReynolds says.
“The pit-crew coach will have every pit stop taped. He will go back to the shop on Monday and really break down every pit stop.”
These cameras are not mandatory, and are the responsibility of the team to decide to have any installed. Even so, don’t anticipate seeing this camera angle on the nationally televised broadcast.
“There will be some teams that will let the networks tap into their cameras, but it’s getting rarer and rarer because they don’t want competitors to be able to watch and see what they’re doing with pit stops,” McReynolds says.
Power trip
It’s still a couple of hours before the race when the cars are taken to pit road. Sometimes, NASCAR officials step in to park the car.
Behind every car is a generator box, which supplies power to a heating element wrapped around the oil tank (located behind the driver’s seat). A thermostat is hooked to the window and set to when they want it to come on and kick off.
“It’s just to keep the oil fairly warm when it sets for a long time,” McReynolds says. “You don’t want to crank these things with stone-cold oil, because that’s hard on the bearings and hard on a lot of the parts in the engine that needs to be lubricated.”
This also is done prior to qualifying.
Probe station
One of the most familiar items on pit road is the gas cans used to fill the car during pit stops. The piece attached to the gas can that is inserted in the car is called the probe.
“That part is what opens up the receptacle on the car itself and lets fuel flow in,” McReynolds says.
The probe is held in place by those multitasking hose clamps. To fill the cans, the hose clamps need to be loosened so the probe can be pulled off, then tightened when reattached.
Carrying a torch
Teams often check the wear of a tire, especially during the course of a race.
A race tire is slick with no tread, but picks up a lot of excess rubber in the heat of making laps. In order for teams to truly gauge the tire’s performance, the five wear check holes that every tire has must be examined.
“You take this torch and you heat the tire up slightly and take a putty knife and scrape all that rubber that it had picked up coming off the race track, you scrape it off and that gets you back down to the wear pin holes and you can see how much your tire has truly worn and you can see the pattern of how it’s worn.” McReynolds says.
I can see clearly now
Race car windshields are not made of glass, rather a product called Lexan, which in layman’s terms is a hard plastic. The problem is they can become very hard to clean.
So the windshields are layered with several tear-offs with little pull tabs located at the top right-hand corner. This is especially handy during the race.
“Whenever the windshield gets very nasty or very dirty or very sandblasted, rather than trying to clean it they just pull a tear off and it’s like a new windshield again,” McReynolds says.
And what becomes of an old tear-off? Yep, it gets thrown in the trash can.
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