Unstoppable by Bill Nye

Author:Bill Nye [Nye, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466869899
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19

NASCAR—A CATALYST FOR CHANGE

My sister, nephew, nieces, spouses, their exes, kids, and more kids live in and around Danville, Virginia, where it’s a big deal to go to the races. The boys of various ages, and occasionally some of the girls and women, will pile into vehicles to go see races in South Boston or other tracks nearby. I’ve been to the track in Martinsville, which is still the shortest track on the NASCAR (National Stock Car Racing) circuit. It’s less than a kilometer long, only half a mile. But it is exciting. The cars go just crazy fast, and they are amazingly loud … or LOUD!! But beyond the heart-pounding, are-these-cars-going-to-jump-the-barrier-and-kill-me exciting quality of it, it’s depressing—leastways depressing for me as an engineer. Because here I am trying to envision the smart, efficient transportation technology of tomorrow, and there is NASCAR celebrating a very old transportation technology of yesterday. You might call NASCAR the anti-NASA.

As the CEO of The Planetary Society, I’m around space exploration people all the time. So these days when I hear that NASCAR sound, I think, What if NASCAR became more like NASA? After all, NASA sets up Grand Challenges to inspire companies and individuals to create novel technologies. There are current challenges to come up with ideas to mine an asteroid, build a better space suit, and survive the radiation environment in deep space. Those competitions are kind of like races, with winners who get significant grant money. Or look at Google, which created the Lunar X Prize, a genuine competition to see which private group can land a robot on the Moon and send pictures back home. There’s no reason why NASCAR couldn’t be like that: a race with rules designed to reward the coolest, most advanced vehicle technologies.

The way NASCAR racecars are designed now, they can go almost 350 km/hour (215 mph) … but only around in circles. NASCAR has phased out the “road courses” because the current cars cannot turn very well. They have huge V-8 engines, which are massive and take a lot of energy to speed up and slow down. The engines lift and lower the valves with pushrods. If you went looking out on any U.S. street today, you would have a difficult time finding a single vehicle whose timing cams (egg-shaped wheels) still use pushrods to lift the valves instead of cams driven by a toothed rubber belt (overhead cams). My 1969 Volkswagen Bug had pushrods, and they were recognized as old, 1930s, tech even back then. It takes more energy, and the ignition system has to be downgraded to use pushrods, and so on. But they are traditional, and NASCAR seems to love that, leastways, right now.

NASCAR vehicles also still use carburetors. This is a device that mixes air and petrol or gas before it’s put in the engine’s cylinders to explode. No modern car is equipped this way. Haven’t been for decades. Every modern car uses a fuel-injection system in which fuel is squirted into each cylinder at just the right moment in each cylinder’s piston stroke.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.