Friday 29th July 2016

Five things we didn't know about NASCAR

It isn't all left turns and spectacular crashes!

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As James lives out his Talladega Nights fantasies at Rockingham Motor Speedway, we look at the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) as a sport and find out a few things that may surprise you.

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1. Stock cars were originally used by bootleggers during Prohibition in the 1920s and 30s. Cars had to be fast, light and able to carry moonshine safely whilst escaping the police. When Prohibition was lifted, these stock cars were then raced for 'pride and profit' and nowadays races can last - Daytona being the most obvious example - up to 500 miles.

2. Since Bill France Sr co-founded NASCAR on Daytona Beach in 1948, the sport always shied away from technology with the emphasis being on driver skill. Engines are all aluminium V8s using a two-valve per cylinder configuration and only switched over from carburettor systems to electronic fuel injection in 2012.

3. A pit-stop generally takes a little longer than what viewers are used to in F1; eight seconds vs. the average 2.8 seconds in F1. In Formula 1, each member of the pit crew has a single task whilst the crew of six on a NASCAR team (a seventh is there for safety reasons) have to firstly leap a concrete wall to gain access to the cars. Two men change tyres pneumatically removing five nuts off each wheel, fuel is added during a stop and while that is going on eight stewards are analysing every move, deeming whether it was safe or not.

4. The highest speed ever set in NASCAR was in 1987 at Talladega Superspeedway by Bill Elliott. Elliot managed to wrestle his car to 212.809mph. In the same year he managed to set the second highest speed at Daytona International Speedway hitting 210.364mph.

5. The race series has seen some familiar faces make the jump to the high speed oval. Kimi Raikkonen, Jacques Villeneuve, Nelson Piquet Jnr and Juan Pablo Montoya have all switched from F1 to NASCAR for a period. Female drivers have also been eligible to race since its start in 1949 - Shawna Robinson was the first to win a NASCAR event in 1988; she was also voted 'Rookie of the Year' and 'Most Popular Driver' that year.

[Sources: NASCAR ,Wired, RedBull]
[Images: NASCAR, LATPhoto]

[Turbobanana]

It's always puzzled me how unstable these things look.

I know they're travelling at a fair rate but when there's an incident you seem to see about a dozen scatter in all directions, many into the wall or the infield. Given the drivers' obvious skill, are they that hard to control that mayhem is inevitable, or is it just the sheer speed they carry that causes so many to spin out?