“It’s not about faith in technology. It’s about faith in people.” —Steve Jobs
“If you’re not a race driver, stay the hell home. Don’t come here and grumble about going too fast. Get the hell out of the race car if you’ve got feathers on your legs or butt. Put a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won’t climb up and eat that candy ass.” —Dale Earnhardt
Make no mistake, NASCAR is not just one of the most popular spectator sports in the country; it is also one of the most high-tech sports. On any given Sunday, 100,000 Americans gather to witness an awesome spectacle of engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, and electronics. It takes an extraordinary machine to go 200 miles per hour for 3 hours with 39 other cars trying to run it off the road. That is why it is somewhat surprising, even paradoxical, that the skills and instincts of the drivers and teams make all the difference between winning and losing.
This was one takeaway from our fantastic behind-the-scenes tour of the NASCAR world at Fontana’s Auto Club Speedway, the only NASCAR track in Southern California. NASCAR brass—Zane Stoddard, Matt Summers, Meghan Miley, Gwen Sullivan, and more—hosted a handful of visitors from The Exchange in high style, showing us the impressive logistics behind the race and introducing us to key players and even one of the top drivers.
It is a world of cutting-edge, gleaming tech. A NASCAR team—which typically runs two to four cars in a race—costs $20 to $30 million per year to maintain, between manufacturing their own engines, hauling cars and supplies across the country and back again, and paying their highly educated crews. We toured the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team hauler, which felt more like a hospital or modern restaurant than your local mechanic stall. No grease monkeys, these are squads of top engineers and scientists focused on a single goal: finding miniscule ways to give their cars one-hundredths of a second worth of edge.
And that is no small task. NASCAR’s rulebook is specific, draconian, and several inches thick. Everything from body shape to weight to horsepower to paint is heavily regulated. All cars must use the same tires, provided by Goodyear, and the same gas, courtesy of Sunoco. In fact, teams like Hendrick make parts not just for themselves but for their competing teams, so many cars are actually using the exact same engine parts. Along with regular inspections in which cars are completely disassembled and reassembled, NASCAR has (along with Microsoft) developed a highly sensitive system of sensors to make sure that the teams and cars are complying on race day.
All these tech specs, ironically, serve to minimize the importance of technology in these races, and that is exactly the way NASCAR wants it. They understand that the races should be about people, not gizmos, so they try to keep the playing field as level as possible. Drivers and teams have small amounts of leeway in determining, say, the feel of the suspension, or the inflation of the tires. But the crews’ ability to scientifically craft their approach to the race is deliberately limited. The race cars do not have the kind of real-time telemetry that is common these days, and the drivers do not even have speedometers or gas gauges, forcing them to rely heavily on instinct. As driver Carl Edwards put it, the most important tool he has is the feel of the car when his butt is in the seat, or his “ass-o-meter.”
Carl Edwards is one of a host of elite athletes who are the celebrity faces of the NASCAR world. Part astronaut, part gladiator, these folks (rare in the sports world in that they come from varied gender and ethnic backgrounds) are revered as heroes. Just to complete the feeling of inadequacy that we mere mortals are left with, Edwards flew himself to California for this weekend and camped out on top of Mount Baldy to prepare himself for the race. And he is a gracious, smart dude. And good looking.
But let us remember that it takes an extraordinary human being to do what Edwards and his compatriots do. Because NASCAR insists that winning is about driving, not technology, these cars are not that easy to handle. They have to be maneuvered around an oval track at breathtaking speeds for hours on end, surrounded by billows of aerodynamic turbulence (they call it “dirty air”) and belligerent competitors who might just slam into them to get them out of the way. (Surprisingly, there are very few rules in the actual driving of the cars, just a vague code of etiquette that does not preclude aggressive maneuvers.) Every decision is split-second and intuitive, like playing a musical instrument, only way more ballsy and high stakes. To be a NASCAR driver is to tempt fate and risk death, every Sunday.
NASCAR understands that it is the human factor, not just the technology, that engages fans with the sport. As the sport expands around the world, even as automotive technology changes in the decades to come, it will always be the human drama that draws crowds.
