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dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

iospace posted:

The ones that are tame looking tend to be the most dangerous. Dale hit the wall at pretty much full speed in the pre-HANS, pre-SAFER era. It's possible that either one of those things (as well as him not loosening his seatbelts on the last lap) saves his life, especially HANS.

Cars going airborne, while bad and can end up like this today, usually are "good" in so far that a lot of speed gets scrubbed off mid-air, meaning the impact tends to be lessened. It means gently caress all if someone hits you at 200 MPH because they have no time to react though.

Yeah, cars getting into the air is dangerous for drivers mostly because they can hit things that weren't designed to be hit with parts of the car that weren't designed to take a hard impact (and of course there's the risk of other people getting hurt when cars and/or parts end up in places they shouldn't be). And in an open-wheel car, leaving the ground is really, really bad, since the driver's head is exposed and doesn't even have the protection of a roll cage. A car just flipping or rolling on its own without getting hit or hitting other stuff is generally safer for the driver than a sudden hard impact, though. Similarly, whole sections of the car being crushed or flying off is actually better for the driver as long as the safety cage remains intact, as all of that dissipates energy and reduces the maximum G-forces that the driver experiences. It's when you hit the wall at an acute angle with some part of the car that has little or no crumple zone, causing the driver's body to go from 150+ MPH to almost zero in a fraction of a second, that really bad things happen, even though the car doesn't look as torn-up and the hit didn't look "spectacular".

Newman's wreck here was a worst-case scenario; he was hit very hard directly in the roof right above the window net on the driver's side by another car. The cars today are designed with reinforced roll cages to prevent the roof from collapsing entirely in an impact, which were implemented after Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s crash at Talladega in 1996 where his car was struck in the front roof section while on its side (and after Russell Phillips was killed in a Sportsman race at Charlotte the same year in a :nms: roof-impact crash), but there's only so much that you can do to strengthen the cage, and Newman's was just hit at the worst possible spot. It's a miracle that he survived that hit, really, and I hope he's going to be able to recover.

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dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Cygni posted:

drivers busting "track limits" rocks in all cirucmstances. if you dont want em driving out there, make it grass. thats the track owners problem... so in NASCAR, thats nearly always NASCARs problem. trying to use rules to keep people from going out there is dumb and bad.

Then it becomes a safety issue. Paved run-off areas are much safer than grass, so ideally you'd like as much pavement as possible for drivers to be able to use to slow their cars or avoid obstacles in the track in an emergency without losing control, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want drivers to just be able to drive anywhere there's pavement at any time. Other series set and enforce track limit rules consistently even on tracks with large paved runoff areas, so there's no reason NASCAR couldn't do it in theory (though history suggests they would probably have a hard time with the "consistently" bit...).

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Cygni posted:

sausage curbs

Well, "sausage" curbs have their own issues...

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
Here ya go...

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

CactusWeasle posted:

I like Kenseth, I find him ... acceptable? :shrug:

Well, of course; Matt Kenseth is specifically programmed to be acceptable.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
They should just limit 'em to four people per team; driver, hauler driver, spotter, and one mechanic. Owners can watch on TV like everyone else. If they don't want to attempt real-time one-man pit stops, split the race into stages shorter than a fuel run and have a fifteen-minute break in between each, like the original Truck races back in the day.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
The spotters are definitely going to be an issue no matter what they do; there's only so much rooftop space at many tracks with a clear view of the whole circuit. There's no way they can run without spotters, though, unless they want to see another Eric Martin incident... :(

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

CBJSprague24 posted:

Interesting Moments at Nashville Superspeedway: An Animated History:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKhIybAhEFQ


That abomination of a PowerPoint slideshow is about as "animated" as the Nashville track is exciting. It's like watching an old Clutch Cargo cartoon, sans the creepy lips and with slightly less racism.

Edit: Here's a better version, if you want to see the only interesting thing to happen at the Nashville Superspeedway at a frame rate that can be measured in frames per second instead of seconds per frame...

dennyk fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Jun 4, 2020

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

CBJSprague24 posted:

Man, I remember when that was the only way to watch NASCAR clips on the internet.

Ah yes, the *(...buffering...buffering...buffering...)* good ol' days of watching *(...buffering...buffering...buffering...)* 144p RealPlayer highlight *(...buffering...buffering...buffering...)* clips on *(...buffering...buffering...buffering...)* NASCAR.com!

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
Atlanta was so boring that Fox had to put the end of Stage 1 in their "highlight" video twice just so it would have more than three minutes of on-track footage.

Hope Bubba is OK; that was scary watching him pass out twice. Hopefully he was just tired/dehydrated or something.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Shinjobi posted:

Maybe I'll need a cop one day in an emergency and it'll take one 3 hours to actually get to me and do their job hopefully in a non-halfass way.

Or maybe I just won't need a cop.

Or maybe you'll need a cop and they'll get there really quickly and shoot you. v:shobon:v

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
Always thought IROC was kinda badly executed. "Hey, let's take champion drivers from a bunch of different racing disciplines like stock cars and sprint cars and sports cars and Indy cars and shite and put them all in stock cars on 1.5 mile ovals and plate tracks and see who wins!" Should have thrown some dirt tracks and short tracks and road courses into the mix if they really wanted it to be interesting, but I suppose that wouldn't have made sense from a financial perspective.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

dentist toy box posted:

Make the cars hard enough to drive that guys like Hoff can’t even dream about cup and mediocre drivers crash out enough we know they’re bad.

The cars are dead easy to drive now and yet Seven Time NASCAR <Your Name Here> Cup Champion™ Jimmie Johnson keeps crashing into other cars and/or stationary objects like every week... :crossarms:

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
We'll always have Daytona 500 Winner Derrick Cope.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
How 'bout Daytona 500 Winner Trevor Bayne? Only took him two races to get his one win (and 185 more to get his zero subsequent wins...).

Now he runs a coffee shop...

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
Qualifying should just be done by drawing drivers' names randomly from a bingo machine.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Cygni posted:

now-a-days EPA

Yep, the Environmental Profiteering Agency would definitely be all for some Superfund mixed-use developments.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
Are we sure ol' Jimmie should be planning to drive an open-wheel car? Those things don't tend to last quite as long as a stock car when you run around crashing into other cars every week...

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

chamois posted:

So SRX is like a seniors league?

Those never seem to go well. Didn't the last such attempt almost kill Larry Pearson at Bristol a few years back?

Also, who remembers that crazy series back in the early 90s on ESPN where a bunch of retired race car drivers kept destroying a bunch of million dollar Jags every night over at IRP?

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dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Peanut President posted:

edit: it just hit me that cup is running seven road courses next year

If this trend keeps up, the drivers might actually get good at road courses and then they'll be somewhat less entertaining.

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