How Tony Stewart's NASCAR Tech Trickles Down to Your Car

The strict NASCAR regulations that control fuel, aerodynamics, and most other parts of the race cars force teams to get pretty creative in search of a competitive advantage. For three-time NASCAR champ Tony Stewart, the next frontier in racing tech is something that sounds simple, but the team hopes could make all the difference: grease.

We recently headed down to Dover International Speedway to see for ourselves what's going into the No. 14 car. The Stewart?Hass team has a unique "technology partnership" with Mobil, and Tony's car runs several custom lubricant formulas in the seven or eight different places it uses lubricants.

The engine, for instance, runs a low-friction formula of Mobil 1 created just for Stewart?Hass (NASCAR teams can get very aggressive with their oil blends since the engines need to last just 500 miles). The most shocking statistic: The "low-traction" differential grease the Mobil boys created for Stewart lowers the differential temperature in the 14 car by 80 F. Such a decrease in friction can provide a meaningful advantage when the racing is tight.

"Lower-traction lubes generate less heat due to the properties of the oils," Mobil U.S. Motorsports technology adviser Roger C. Hood says. "This results in increased horsepower to the rear wheels and greater efficiency, which leads to better fuel economy and more on-track time. The high differential temperatures are a result of friction, and it was a drastic reduction in friction that led to the corresponding decrease in temperature."

Mobil engineers are hoping to use what they've learned from the development of Stewart's special grease in a low-friction consumer automotive engine oil, but they are still in the early research stages. They've still got to refine the formula, field test it, and establish its durability characteristics before releasing it to consumers.

Other NASCAR technology trickles down to consumers in a similarly roundabout way. Tires, for examples: A blowout in NASCAR could be catastrophic, so all tires on the Sprint Cup and Nationwide cars and Craftsman Trucks have an inner air container that allows the car to continue rolling even if the tire?which the Goodyear engineers call the outer air container?is compromised. It's a development that goes back to the 1966, when Goodyear started manufacturing the inner liners.

The tall tire sidewalls in NASCAR mean that a race car would lose all steering capability if a normal tire deflated. The inner air container's sole job is to reach past the chassis to the ground in the event of a blowout. While the outer air container has all the technology you'd expect from a regular racing tire?various plies and layers of fiber?the inner air container is made only of rubber, rather like an inner tube. But the inner layer of a NASCAR tire isn't quite like an inner tube in that itdoesn't press against the outer layer. Thus, each wheel needs two valves stems?one for each air container.

It's not easy to fit those inner air containers inside a tire. They're softer than a tire but still quite stiff, and the opening in the tire is just big enough to fit over a 15-inch wheel, so a lot of manpower and finesse is required to stuff the large inner container into the outer container. At Dover, we saw an experienced Goodyear mechanic insert an inner liner in less than 10 seconds, and it was clear that he knew a few tricks. First, he wedged the inner liner tread-first as far as it would go into the hole of the tire. Then he flipped them both over and twisted the inner liner before tugging it farther into the tire. He then flipped the tire back over and repeated the twisting and tugging until the inner liner was in place. NASCAR crew members have plenty of opportunity to practice; between the racing cars and trucks, about 2000 tires are used during each race weekend. Each one has an inner liner to keep drivers safe in the event of a tire puncture.

If this sounds familiar, it's because the same kind of technology is now in the run-flat tires that come on many cars. Goodyear's RunOnFlat tires have stiffer sidewalls than normal tires and no inner liner, but the concept is the same: It lets a driver maintain control in the event of a loss of tire pressure. RunOnFlat's stiff sidewall makes sense for a passenger car, since the tires fit on a standard rim (and have only one valve stem), and in the real world, a flat tire has to make it farther than one lap around the track.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/vintage-speed/how-tony-stewarts-nascar-tech-trickles-down-to-your-car-10251068?src=rss

michigan state city creek center andrew luck pro day josh johnson kim kardashian flour matt forte jeremy shockey