Modern racing has developed drastically from the early 1920s and 1930s competitions that included such legends as the Mercedes-Benz Silver Arrows. The story stands that in the 1930s cars had to undergo weight checks, similar to wrestling competitions. The Mercedes-Benz car was found to be 751 kg of the 750 kg limit. Who came up with the idea to sand food and beverage industry in india 2018 pdf off the paint is contested, but the paint was sanded off and the car came down to the 750 kg weight. The Silver Arrow went on to win several competitions that decade and earned a name for itself in a field of cars with vibrant paint jobs that resembled a peacock competitions, each racer had to have a more vibrant color to one-up the next racer.
More important to the racing sport has been the advent of safety equipment. The development of the equipment has usually followed technological development and tragedies. For example, after the 2001 death of Dale Earnhardt on the last lap of a Daytona race did the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing revisit the massive G-Force deceleration that the driver experiences when they crash. The technology for the SAFER-barriers existed prior to this development, and was proposed by Smokey Yunik in the 1970s. However, because of the cost and the lack of public interest in the movement, NASCAR didn’t move to install the barriers until after Earnhardt’s tragedy. Although perhaps the most visible, this was by far the only development since the early days of the sport.
Much of the racing equipment has been modified from the original days of the sport. The drivers have received cages and elaborate seats made from carbon fiber which can absorb and disperse more force that the previous aluminum seats. They’re also lighter weight, which is a serious consideration when you are planning on achieving speeds upwards of 200 miles per hour. The seats have been developed to surround the driver, especially around the rig cage where sudden impacts can be fatal. The Head and Neck Shoulder device has removed the potential to snap your neck from sudden deceleration by stabilizing the neck with the rest of the seat. The helmet is tethered on either side to the back of the shoulder harness which looks slightly similar to a back plate that rises out of a football player’s pads. The shoulder harnesses also help central torso impacts to be dispersed onto the shoulders which can absorb more than the soft tissue in the torso. When you combine the advances in the seat composition with the integration of the HANS system and the ubiquitous use of roll cages within the car structure, the multipoint seatbelts, NASCAR drives stay in their seats and are well protected from even the most horrendous crashes. One such example is in 2008 during the qualifying laps Michael McDowell hit some dry oil from a previous accident and ran into the SAFER-barrier and rolled and flipped several times. After the crash that left his car completed decimated, McDowell was able to crawl from the crash and walk away with only minor injuries.
Besides the advancement of the personal protection of the driver, which is the end game goal of all safety equipment, certain developments have made it so the car is less likely to be destroyed. The most obvious is the application of a restrictor plate to the air intake which prevents the car from exceeding certain speeds. One of the less obvious pieces of racing equipment was the invention of the roof flaps which are recessed during normal use. These flaps attempt to counteract the inverted air foiling that takes place when a car becomes airborne. The aerodynamics of the NASCAR vehicles force downward pressure when they are driving normally on the road, however when the car become airborne and it can easily flip and the downward pressure becomes upward pressure making the car fly for a time. The roof flaps were invented to deploy when the airfoil is inverted. These flaps create enough drag to minimize the potential for the car to create vertical lift, instead the car will simply roll. The roll is preferable to the gaining altitude away from the track because the roll cage absorbs and mitigates impacts better than the sudden impact of hitting the pavement after getting 15 feet of air at 150 miles per hour.
The safety standards of the modern NASCAR organization have been due to developments that followed the scientific advancements in their respective fields as well as tragic racing fatalities that food processing growth spurred their implementation. The technological development in the fields of aerodynamics and structural engineering has permitted the well watched racing sport to become safer over the years.
