TRACKMAN2

http://www.theonion.com/content/vide...eveals_winning

OKsweetrides

Hahaha.
I was waiting to hear for the tricky part of turning left.

Tintin

I think most NASCAR "drivers" will find that a little complex and overwhelming....

petefias

John Wiz

I love it.. I think a few of those drivers though need to see that..

Z06cool

I saw that before and forwarded it to a NASCAR fan friend of mine. I thought it was hilarious but he didn't find the humor in it...

I have driven a ROVAL and actually have a little more respect for NASCAR guys after it because it took guts to carry serious speed ("GO FAST") through the banked turns.

xsiveone

FYI..

Very interesting comments here from Montoya regarding NASCAR and CART. This article is taken from Road and Track magazine.

One of Juan’s first lessons was that every NASCAR car is unique because the car is built around a welded, tube-frame chassis. “In Formula 1, once the car is sorted, you’re very close on setup everywhere you go,” Juan observed. “But here, because the ovals are so different from each other and the cars are so different, you really need to treat each car as its own animal. With a f1 car, everything is made out of molds, but here the cars are welded together and if the guy put more welding on it for some reason, the car may be stiffer and it may be a little bit heavier. They try to make all the cars as close as possible but they’re never going to be identical.

“Some of these guys have run this car for the last six races and they’ve won five of them, and they just love the car. You don’t see that in F1. In F1, whatever car you get in, they all handle the same way.”

Contrastingly, each individual NASCAR car is developed in its own way, and Montoya was surprised to see the depth of engineering applied by the top teams. “The crazy thing is how limited NASCAR’s rules are for technology and how far they go with the cars. If you would bring an engineer from F1 and show him how detailed the cars are, he would be shocked. When you look at the cars on TV, they all look alike, but they’re different. You have to look very closely to learn how different the cars are. The guys in the team tell me, ‘That spoiler is more to the right,’ and I say, ‘Is it?’ I’m driving the car and I don’t see the differences yet.”

Montoya is intrigued by the complexity of dialing-in a stock car to each track. “There are so many tools to make the car right, or wrong, that it’s really hard. At the same time that you can make the car really good, you can make it really bad, really easy.”

The Columbian says most motor racing people in Europe and F1 have no appreciation at all for NASCAR or oval racing. “When I came from CART to F1, people in Europe said, ‘You did good on the road courses, but those ovals are a waste of time. They’re easy.’ And I said, ‘No, the road courses are actually the easy bit. The ovals are the hard bit.’

“On a road course, there’s one line. There’s one way to take a corner and that’s it, and you’ll see everybody will go through the same place. But on an oval, there are probably four or even five lines at some tracks. You can run high, or on the line at the bottom, or up in the next groove, and at some tracks you can use the groove to help the car turn. There are so many little details to learn.

“When you do open wheel racing on an oval, there are a lot of things you miss because you’re going so fast and the grip level factor is so much higher. One of the things I’ve learned with these cars is that if you put the car on the seams in the pavement between the grooves, it will actually help the car turn. There are so many little things that can help make the car tighter or looser. And because the car changes so much during a fuel run, it makes the car very, very critical to drive.

“They tell you to start with the car really loose. You go out and have a good car for two or three laps, but then it starts getting tight and it just doesn’t want to turn anymore. You need to find ways to make it turn, maybe by going in a little bit lower, or if it’s really tight, to run really high. When I ran on ovals in CART, there was one, maybe two race lines. But these guys go all the way up to the wall. I’m trying to get a handle on it.”

Montoya was immediately impressed with Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s uncanny ability to run an extremely high line very close to the wall almost all the way around some tracks. “I’ve gone up high to learn how high you can run and I think I’m running really high and then I see Junior and he’s going three cars higher than me! And that’s like, wow! It’s hard having the confidence to get up there and know the car’s going to turn because the speed you’re going to arrive at is so much higher than if you go in tighter. I need to go up there and run for a hundred laps before I even get comfortable, let alone run quick.”

TRACKMAN2

i have eperince in several aspects of racing ,, ive run super bikes, my c4 race car my stock zo6 .. ive driven a nascar at ketucky motor speedway and recently been driving formula atlantic cars,, every one is different in its own right and have there own science to get them to go.. i have a ton of respect for all types of motor sports and do admit that nascar drivers are probibly the most talented of the bunch.. next spring i want to add late model dirt , ,and spint cars to my adventures..