StarTalk Radio - Innovations in Racing with Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

What difference does the driver make? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly break down the science of NASCAR in Neil’s interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. with the help of physicist Diandra Leslie-Pelecky.Simplecast Description: 250ish characters with spaces (plain text)What difference does the driver make? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly break down the science of NASCAR in Neil’s interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. with the help of physicist Diandra Leslie-Pelecky.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/innovations-in-racing-with-dale-earnhardt-jr/Thanks to our Patrons Mud Runner, Jeffery Arzt, Valentin Ivan, Stuart Baker, Byron Griffin, and Michele Baldacci for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: Photograph by D Ramey Logan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we have as our guest, Dale Earnhardt Jr. I sat down with him and we talked about everything under the sun. I got Chuck. Nice, Chuck. How you doing, man? Hey, what's happening, Neil? All right. All right. Gary, Gary O'Reilly.

Neil. So always good to have you guys. So we have clips from my interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr., but, but, we, Gary, you, you, that wasn't enough for you. No. We went out and found a friend of ours that we had back on the show when it was Playing With Science many years ago, Dr. Deandra Leslie Pilecki. Undergraduate degrees in physics and philosophy,

PhD in condensed matter physics, Neil. Loving it, loving it. Loving some condensed matter. I knew this is definitely for you. Researcher in magnetic nanoparticles, focusing on medical diagnosis and treatment, a science

communicator, radio, TV broadcaster, an author of the physics of NASCAR. Not only is Dr. Diandra an expert in NASCAR, but she is also working with NBC on their motorsports and has become co-opted into the Formula One family. So I think we have just the right person. Let's meet our dear friend, Dr. Deandra Leslie-Pelliccio. Deandra, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you for having me.

I'm glad to be back. So where did they find you? Oh, you're back because when you were last on, I wasn't on that program. So it's my first encounter with you. Yeah. And I guess if you write a book called The Physics of NASCAR, that makes you pretty findable in our circles.

It certainly does. Yes. All right. I didn't know about the magnetic particle research for the purposes of medical diagnostics. Yeah. I just want to find out how she makes this transition. How do you go from nanoparticles, which nano is the metric prefix for a billionth, and it's just been everybody's prefix for small, like nanobots and this sort of thing, but they don't literally mean a billionth

of something. But the idea is clear. Nanoparticles, how do you go from there in medicine into NASCAR? What's up with that? Well, nanomaterials were actually one of the fields that the public didn't understand. And when they first hit in, I don't know, the 90s and the 2000s, those of us working in the field had to work very hard to explain to people what we were actually doing and the implications of what we were doing. So I learned a little bit more about how to communicate with the public then. doing. So I learned a little bit more about how to communicate with the public then. But actually, the reason I got into the race cars was because I was teaching the intro 101

basic physics, and all of a sudden I realized I could teach all of this using cars. And the kids would be a whole lot more interested than they would be if I'm doing balls rolling down inclined planes. Frictionless inclined planes and massless pulleys right right so

and that was in the genesis of your book it was in the genesis of NASCAR it's actually interesting because I always like to ask if there are physicists at the race shops and one of the guys said no I don't think we have any physicists you guys think everything interesting

is negligible. Okay. Ooh. Ooh. Science put down. All right. All right. Well, let's get into our first clip with Dale. Is he abbreviated D.E. Jr.? Is this, like,

in the know, like, if you're buddies with him? You know, I want to be respectful. Oh, we just call him junior junior okay no other junior junior well there is another junior but he's in his 80s or 90s so yeah if you say junior we all know what you're talking about okay all right so i wanted to know uh we have several clips we'll bring in here but let's start off i wanted to know what was different about each car if each car had to had to submit to regulations and size and and parameters then what's the difference okay and then dale set me straight Let's check out this first clip. That's interesting because there's a long history of NASCAR itself and stock car racing.

Taking one example of motorsports that I'm familiar with, there's this long history of how the cars are measured and there's a technical inspection and they all have to meet the same measurements, requirements. And so how does a manufacturer differentiate itself from the others if they all have to appear, you know, measure the same body panels? Right. And how about a piston? I mean, the pistons have to be this. All of the engines are, there's a bunch of restrictions on how the manufacturers can build their motors and what's allowed

to be able to create a certain amount of, they want to target on torque and peak torque and peak horsepower. They don't want you to exceed or get outside of this box. They want all of the manufacturers to live in this same sort of area so that no one has an advantage over the other. And it seems about that that would be conflicting

to the true core of racing. Racing is building a fast car and building one better or faster than the next guy. But like I say, I mean, 50 to 75 years of history has, you know, created this massive sort of rule book with all kinds of restrictions and limitations and guidelines that everyone now has to fit into this tiny, tiny little space. DeAndre, I'm confused. I mean, I hear him, but how do you advance a sport if every time everybody's got it, however clever your engineers are, they got to make it, they have to obey the rules and regulations

set out about the design and then the in the aerodynamics the tires the the restrictions focus on one part of the car and not another and and whatever part they don't focus on do you have the freedom to make that part badass and then win every race like i'm just setting me straight here These rules would ruin horse racing. Okay. Okay. It would. So there's sort of two answers to that. One is that the reason for all the standardization is because what NASCAR doesn't want to happen is that the people who have the most money win.

Because then you just keep ramping everything up and all of a sudden no one can afford. Deandra, this is America. That's right. We like our races just like our elections. Whoever has the most money should win. Whoever dies with the most toys wins. And we did that for a long time. And what happened was people started dropping out of the sport. One driver, Martin Truex Jr., won the championship one year.

And the next year, his owner shut down everything because he just couldn't afford to keep doing the racing. And that's how you kill a series. And so a lot of the standardization was basically to save the series. Now, where the innovation has really come in is that NASCAR designed the car we're racing now, which is called the next gen car. A lot of the innovation is there. And so the teams have a small area in which to work. They can change springs, shocks, suspension geometry. You know, for example, when you stop at a stop sign, you go forward, right? Right. Well, your entire car does that because the car is attached to, the top of the car is attached to the wheels by springs. And so that's your suspension. Well, that transfers weight. And you know that frictional grip you have depends on the weight pushing down on the tires of the car. So every time the part of your car goes backward, forward to the side, you are changing the grip on your four tires.

you are changing the grip on your four tires. That is an incredible amount of freedom that the teams have. Now, Junior doesn't know that because he's not the one who's trying to figure out what springs and what shocks we use for a particular track. So he doesn't see a lot of that. And it's really a matter of how do you match the car setup, the suspension mostly, to a driver's style. Because you could put Junior in one of those cars. You could put another driver in the same car. And one would be able to go faster than the other. And that doesn't necessarily mean one is better than the other. Just that the car suits one driving style better than it does the other.

Let me ask you this. Has there ever been pushback from the teams where NASCAR have said, this is what's going to come in as a restriction this season. And they've all turned around and gone, nah, not happening. Has there ever been that or do they all do as they're told? A lot of the impetus for the standardization came from the drivers and the owners. Because imagine if you're a driver driving for a team that doesn't have as much money. Do you want to spend 36 weekends a year running, you know, 21st or 30th just because you don't have enough money money? Do you want to spend 36 weekends a year running 21st or 30th just because you don't have enough money

to make a car faster? Or do you want to have an equal platform and then you've got a better chance at showing off your skill? Because it's not the car that's winning, it's the driver who's winning. Okay. So when you say that,

when the restrictions come in, who eventually ends up working the harder? The engineers in the pit or the drivers themselves? Because they've got to adapt and survive out there on the track. It really depends on the change. So some of the changes really affect the drivers more than the teams. But they're making a lot of changes. NASCAR is, especially this year,

they're trying out mufflers for the first time. They ran mufflers at the preseason race. They only muffled them down to somewhere around 80, 90 decibels from 110. What is the point? Well, the point is that they were racing at the LA Coliseum and people live around there. I got you.

And it makes a huge difference, that 20 decibels, to the people who live outside. Okay, okay. The Nimbys. The Nimbys all protested outside the Coliseum at Placard. But you couldn't hear what chants they were screaming. Let's go to my next clip where this notion that

you're doing something to win the race, but in fact, innovation. You know, where does anything innovate? Are the cars we drive on the street because some people are saying, let's have innovations for the regular driver or do they have other origins? So let's go back to my exclusive conversation with Dale Earnhardt Jr. on just that.

Check it out. While everything is really tight in the rules, there is this sort of little small area that the manufacturers tend to create advantages in. For example, right now, the Chevrolets would be, they would appear the Chevrolets have a little bit of an advantage on a track that's a mile and a half in length. And their nose and the other components on the body that they do have some liberty in allowed them to develop an advantage over the other two manufacturers. And that ebbs and flows back and forth as the manufacturers continue to develop and introduce new pieces. And so... In a subsequent year, would other manufacturers copy that innovation? They might look at it and learn how to do it better. And that's sort of been the way that this sport's evolved for 75 years is, I'll make a better mousetrap than you. You'll look at my mousetrap and you'll figure out what I might have not seen. And you'll take my idea and improve on that.

And it just continues to layer upon layer upon layer of improvements to the same theories and ideas. So I heard that many, many features of the modern internal combustion engine car owe their origin to innovations in NASCAR. And let me just mention a few. You tell me if I'm right. Or like fuel injection. Was that first in NASCAR and car racing more broadly? Well, I think motorsports more broadly.

NASCAR actually hung on to the carbureted engine a little bit longer than most. I think, though, that fuel injection and those types of improvements on our road automobile, the car you buy off the dealership floor, those improvements in those cars certainly come from motorsports. improvements in those cars certainly come from motorsports. Seatbelts, safety innovation, and durability in suspension components. All of those things originate from what we learn on the racetrack, the wear and tear and the durability. And we'll put these components to the test and we find their weak spots. The manufacturers pay attention to that. They take that back to the car that me and you buy off the showroom floor. So, DeAndra, there are test pilots. I love it.

Is that a fair way to think of them? In some ways it is, but, you know, NASCAR is much more of a reactive series. If you look at the origins of motorsports, they came about when the cars first got invented and manufacturers were trying to convince people. These are good things. These are better than your horse and buggy, for example. NASCAR has always been more about selling cars. And so there hasn't been as much innovation. However, they're very good at popularizing things. And so I think, for example, there is a material called compacted graphitic

iron, which is in between cast iron and ductile iron. And you know that engine blocks are made of cast iron usually. The problem is they tend to crack. Well, this material, which was invented in the 60s because we finally got metallurgy down to the point where we could actually make it, is a lot lighter. You can make much thinner features. And so, you know, one of the things as manufacturers turn to electric vehicles is they need to reduce the weight of the cars. So some of the materials, some of the tricks that racers have been using to decrease the car weight are things that will directly translate to production cars, especially as we move to electric vehicles. Are we at the limit of our innovations,

Dr. with NASCAR, in the sense of, you know, all the stuff we can see with the aerodynamics, you've talked about the engine blocks, you know, we're going to talk about tires in the next segment. And there's things on the floor of the car that are built specifically to add to downforce. Are we at the limit or are we just beginning?

Oh, no. I mean, what is limiting us is money. Ah. Oh. How about that? Yeah, I mean, wind tunnel time. I could have said that, DeAndra. I don't need you on the show.

That kind of translates across everything. Yeah, it does. But time in a wind tunnel is, you know, I forget how much it is now, about $1,000 an hour. Up and over to that. You know, teams used to spend 12 hours in a wind tunnel, take the car back, strip it, and start over again. And again, that kind of cost just keeps going up and up and up. But really, the need for innovation changes from area to area, right? As the needs of the consumer changes. So like you just said, right now, we are looking at the

electrification of pretty much our entire economy. So now the urgency for lighter materials that are durable, that can stand up to the road, that becomes very, very important as before it was a luxury. Like to have carbon fiber in your car. Oh, look how cool that is. So cool. Well, now it's like, yeah, you kind of need that. Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of the processing, figuring out how to make carbon fiber

in extremely intricate shapes, for example, a lot of that comes out of F1 and out of NASCAR. Yeah, yeah, cool. So is there an area that the engineers haven't really got heavily into yet, doctor, in terms of where you think, you know what, if we go there, we could really make something special happen? Yes, and it goes back to nanoparticles. Ooh.

Libertans. So one of the things you have to worry about is a cooler engine produces more horsepower. And everything… Why is that so? Because you get more air molecules in when the air is cooler because it's sensor. Wow, look at that. That is so simple. That is such a simple concept.

Mic drop right there. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Of course. So could you put a little cooling thing in there to shrink it back down? Or that would just be extra weight? That's the thing.

If you were able to make fluids that could transfer heat better away from the car, you would have an advantage. And the best part is there'd be no way. I mean, F1 made a rule

against nanomaterials. How are they going to find them? Honestly. Phoebe up to a little magnifying glass, looking over. Yeah, there you go. That's pretty funny. Wow. I found a nanoparticle right here. A guy in a deerstalker in of magnifying glass, looking over. Yeah, there you go. That's pretty funny.

Wow. A truck, I found a nanoparticle right here. A guy in a deerstalker in a magnifying glass. However, you just made like, well, then again, we are moving away from combustion engines, but still, I can't believe nobody's figured out a way to make a lubricant that actually cools the engine at the same time. So like, it wouldn't just be motor oil. It would be motor oil and some kind of additive that would bring the temperature down.

Yeah. That would be amazing. Well, isn't that to do with all the vents on the cars and the air vents? You know, not just for downforce, but as a natural free coolant. Yeah, 200 mile an hour air is going to cool stuff down, right? Well, yes and no. So the most important thing you have to keep cool

in a race car is the driver. Don't worry, baby. I'm cool. But also their body. So we've really closed up the cockpits. And so the problem is it's getting to be 120, 130, 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the car. And so the problem is it's getting to be 120, 130, 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the car.

And so we're now worrying about how do we keep the driver's temperature from getting up too high? Because when your temperature gets up high, you lose your ability to think correctly. And you don't want to be doing bad at 200 miles an hour. So the other area of cooling is ways that you can force cooled fluid through a shard or something more sophisticated than dumping a bag of ice down your fire suit at the next pit stop. Right, right. But of course, NASA, there are spacesuits where there are tubes

that move through, that thread the suit to particular areas where you can most benefit from a heat exchange if you're trying to stay warm or cold either, right? Yes. So that's interesting. And so drivers do have these shirts. They're called cool shirts, very descriptive name, that are just capillary tubes sewn onto a shirt.

But the biggest problem they have right now is the capillary tubes tend to clog. And then you're stuck in the car with warm water going through the seat. So that's an area if you're going to start a business, that would be a really good area to go into. There you go. Yeah, he's a great driver, but we lose every race because he insisted that we put an air conditioner in the car. He is.

Wants to drive with the windows open. And a stereo. And a stereo and a stereo right guys we gotta take a quick break but when we come back more of my exclusive interview with the one and only NASCAR legend

Dale Earnhardt Jr. supplemented by the physics expertise of Dr. D'Andra Leslie Pilecki author of The Physics of NASCAR. Where else are we going to get that expertise but from her? We'll be right back. We're back.

Segment two. StarTalk Sports Edition. Featuring my exclusive interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. And we've got with us Dr. D'Andrea Leslie Pilecki, who wrote the book on the physics of NASCAR. And guess what that book is called? I'm going to go with the physics of NASCAR. And guess what that book is called? I'm going to go with the physics of NASCAR. The physics of NASCAR.

All right. In my next clip with Dale Earnhardt Jr., I heard that they don't inflate their tires with air. Air. Like air, the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. Instead, they remove the oxygen and stick just nitrogen in the tires. And I'm thinking, why? Oh, my God.

Check this out. That's because we want the heat that's created in the tire. I believe the nitrogen will be less affected by that temperature. And so this air is going to increase, right? And you're going to, as the tire gets hot, gets warmer, the size of this tire, we want to minimize the change in that tire from the moment it leaves the race, leaves pit road and goes out on the racetrack and performs. And so they found a mixture that would be less volatile, less affected by temperature. The tire, like the inside edge of a right front tire during a run,

it's going to go over 250 degrees, 280, 300 degrees. Whoa. And so the air inside of the tire is affected by that heat. And as the air increases in the tire, the size of the tire changes. That changes the setup and the way the car drives and feels. Oh my gosh. You want all of those things to be minimized.

And so using nitrogen has gained the teams a bit of control and predictability, I think, over just how much the tire is going to change. You know, we have a target pressure. Working with Goodyear, they give us a lot of tire data, and they'll tell us your target pressure for maximum grip and performance in the tire is going to be 55 degree or 55 pounds. And so if the tire is likely to gain 15 pounds in, you know, while out.

In the race, in the race. Yeah, while we're racing it, if it's going to gain 15 pounds and sort of plateau, then we want to pull off pit road with 40 pounds of air in the tire. Whoa. Yeah, and so there's... Most of the teams all understand where they need to be. There's not somebody out there that's smarter

than the next guy trying, you know, that knows a little bit more and is doing that job a little better. Goodyear provides all of the teams with tons of tire data on sidewall stiffness and all kinds of pliability and the rubber and everything else to help them understand, you know, air pressures and what they need to run. And there's also a safety factor. Like if you start the air pressure too low, the tire itself will come apart over time.

So, DeAndre, I have a zillion questions after that clip there. So, first of all, nitrogen is slightly lighter than oxygen. Is this why they're removing the oxygen and using primarily nitrogen? No, actually, it's not. What they want, so we call it a tire build. It's the difference between the tire pressure when you're on pit road and the tire pressure, you know, when you're just running rain, flying laps. That build, you want to be predictable.

Now imagine if you have just say compressed air, you know, and you put it from a compressor into the tire tire that air is going to have a lot of water in it and you heard him say the temperature is going to get between 250 300 well that's above the boiling temperature water right so what's going to happen is all of a sudden you're going to get a change in pressure and that change in pressure will upset the car enough for a driver to crash. So what they found was that by using nitrogen, which is dry, has no water in it, rather, that made the builds more predictable.

Wow. Damn. Okay, so a couple of things. But under pressure, the water would, would turn to steam and even higher temperature than 212. So maybe if it's getting up to 250, 260, maybe 300 is not out of the question. So, okay. So now I asked him, why don't they preheat the nitrogen before they put it in the tire? Then you don't have to build anything. You come out of the pit ready, you know, ready for prime time. And he didn't have a good answer for that.

Do you have any insight into that? Oh, yeah. The answer is because NASCAR won't let you. No. Okay. You know, honestly, that one I understand because I do not want people with compressed air cylinders, which by the way are sort of dangerous, heating them up. Right.

You're just asking for an accident. What could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Oh, the pit manatee. The pit manatee. I did want to mention that a couple crew chiefs every so often decide they're going to get really smart. And instead of using nitrogen, they decide they're going to use argon or xenon, both of which are also ideal gases. And what they learn almost inevitably is that the additional cost is not worth any gain in performance.

So if you go to gases down on the noble gases on the right-hand side of the periodic table, they really need to use Krypton. That's the one. Right. Yeah. Then you get Superman power out of that one, I'm pretty sure. Or at least your car won't have superpower anymore. Oh, Kryptonite. Oh, got it.

That's the opposite. Sorry, my bad, my bad. And obviously, it'll have to be green. Oh, yes, yes. All right. And obviously, it'll have to be green. Oh, yes, yes. All right. Goes without saying. What if the tire pressure is too low? Because don't you get to go quicker with lower tire pressure,

but the trade-off is the integrity of the tire itself? Yeah, there's a happy pressure spot for a tire. If there's too little air in it, you'll actually see the sidewall start to flex. And if you go to a track, a small short track, Martinsville, which is a half mile, they will actually start the cars out between 9

and 11 PSI. And they will build up to 35, 32 PSI during the course of a run. But if you started at 32, you'd get a build and then they'd be so big that you'd be having less of the tire in contact with the track,

which would give you less grip. So there's a happy spot. Right, right, right. We did a whole explainer video on the tire pressure and if you multiply the area of tires in contact with the road by the tire pressure you get

the weight of the car and so yeah if your tires get over inflated they have to rise up on a center line there so that all those all those numbers believe it or not that's the same for your regular car that you're driving on the every single person you know there's a recommended PSI for the tire themselves. There's a pressure it has to be. And they tell you, if you run it low, you wear your tires out. And if you run it high,

on the edges, so yeah, it screws up the tread. Right, right. But then again, see, we always think of straight line speed and grip for a tire. But when you watch NASCAR, and I've watched a couple of races just so as I can understand

a little bit better, there's a lot of need for lateral grip. So if you over-inflate a tire, it becomes too high a pressure, then that's where your loss comes in. Now you got me. This is where I want them to over-inflate all the tires. Now you just made this game more exciting. You're welcome. So, Doctor, do we get that?

Do we have a sweet spot for lateral grip? Because if I'm going to overtake or come underneath a car in front of me, I'm going to need to have that lateral ability without just sliding all the way off. Yeah, lateral grip is actually much more important than the speed down the straightaways, for example. So one of the problems is that if you are underinflated, when you turn, you can imagine you're actually shearing the sidewalls of the tire.

Yep, yep. And if it's way too low, you could actually shear them off the tire. So that would be dangerous. And then if it's too high, you just simply don't have the grip to make the turn, and you're going to hit the wall. Look at that. Well, so, you know, you watch NASCAR, and you think it's just about driving fast, right? And then

sitting down with Dale Earnhardt and have him sort of reflect on what's going on inside the driver's head, a good driver's head. What is he thinking about? Is he just, is it pedal to the metal or is there some other sort of thinking about the engineering and physics? I know one thing he's thinking. What? Damn, it's hot. Okay, let's find out. Let's find out what else the driver is thinking. Could it be the aerodynamics? Let's find out in my next clip.

Here it is. In our racing, since we drive on ovals and we are always turning left and we're always going in the same direction, we really need the right side of our car to perform almost like a wing on an airplane. to perform almost like a wing on an airplane. And how do you, if we have a car that's tracking straight down the straightaway, if we can control how much y'all movement or how much the car goes into y'all, into the corner, and almost, you know, it almost, as the car pivots into y'all, into the corner, that right side becomes a wing. The air now is pushing on that right side, trying to straighten the car out. That means I can go faster. I can match the gas and go

harder. And so we control the y'all movement and we focus on side force or the amount of air pushing on that right side of the car, trying to keep that car from spinning out and losing control. And, you know, that's been, that's really been the main focus in NASCAR and oval track racing probably over the last two decades. So he was saying yaw, right? Y-A-W, not yaw. Yeah, I know.

I thought he was talking about the people's watching. Yaw watching the thing. He's about to pitch in the yaw. Pitching in. So, yeah, he's using terms from flight airplanes and aerodynamics. So, can you comment on that, Deandra? Yeah, so the aerodynamics of a race car are really important. And what he's talking about is, you know, you have a car and it's coming straight towards you.

And if the car is in zero yaw, the tires are both lined up straight. It's actually better if you're turning left. It's better for the car to be a little bit like this. So the right side's poking out. That means that you're going to get more air coming along the right side of the car. That's going to give you side force. That's going to help you turn. And so, you know, everyone has pretty much the same mechanical grip, but it's the weight

of the car. So anything you can do to increase your aerodynamic grip will give you more speed. So could I design the right-hand side of the car in a slightly advantageous way to build that out, to kind of make it naturally be doing that. Gary wants to... Or am I now in trouble with the big... You're an aerodynamic cheater. He's a cheater.

Aerodynamics. Let's say that you came up with something that actually accomplished that within the rules, NASCAR would probably make it illegal right after that race. You have to win the race first. If he came in dead last, they would say, yeah, use it anytime. I'm getting laughed out of town. Why is this NASCAR shaped like a rhombus?

What is going on? All right, we've seen the drafting. We've seen ridiculously close drafting. We've seen them in a single file, we've seen them three abreast. But when they're racing and in different stages and different positions, is there a sweet spot? Or are there at times multiple sweet spots which the drivers themselves can exploit? You mean location among other cars, Gary? Say it again? A sweet spot. As a sweet spot, you mean location among other cars?

Yeah, where all of a sudden the aerodynamics are more beneficial for the car trailing. So is that kind of, I mean, there's all sorts of thoughts that go off in your mind once you start to watch one of these things. Yes. The question of how the air coming off another car affects your car is one that has been with NASCAR ever since drafting was discovered in the 60s. It's almost more of a question of making sure you're not in certain places. So when you get right behind someone, if you get to one side,

in fact, we saw this at Atlanta this week, one driver just actually moved behind the other from right to left, and the driver in front spun out. There was no contact, but it changed the air so much that it made him spin out. Oh, man. He did a draft pit move on him.

Whoa. Damn. Okay, so with the outer wall, how is that affecting, apart from the fact you don't want to be hitting it, how is that affecting the aerodynamics on the cars that race closer to the wall as opposed to those inside of the track? So if you're running the outer wall, you're at a slight disadvantage because you're going a longer distance, right? Right. However, if you're running the outer wall, some drivers can take advantage of sort of the cushion of air between the car and the wall and pick up a little speed that way. Now, you have to have some guts to do that because the closer you are to the wall, the less tolerance you have for air, right? Wow. So, what's interesting there,

if, because the more you draft and the more you become efficient, the, maybe you could work it so that it's one fewer pit stops to refuel. That can make a very big difference, can't it? It can. And also, it's going to depend how many cautions there are in a race. So, you know, you load up a full tank of fuel, how many laps you get is going to depend how many of those laps are green and how many are yellow, because obviously you get better fuel mileage when you're not going as fast.

Wow. Okay. Damn. are green and how many are yellow because obviously you get better few mileage when you're not going as fast wow okay damn i i who who thought did how just do all the do the fans know all these details that are going on or they just want a fast race and an occasional crash some know some aren't interested i mean that's the great thing um i was out at las vegas two weeks ago just going out and talking to fans about some of this stuff, and a lot of them really want to understand, why isn't my driver winning? What's happening? Why did he crash here? So that's the great thing about using motorsports to get people

interested in math and science. They want to know. I have one friend who's in the NASCAR, and he's, you know, he's obsessed. So, like, he's with all this stuff that we're talking about. There's something wrong with him, though,

because he actually, I'm serious, he has an autographed tire slick that he uses as a coffee table. Like, he's in that space. All right, all right. So, what are you doing? Are you critiquing him because of his interior design?

Or are you critiquing him because he likes NASCAR? Well, first of all, he thinks I'm gay because I don't have a tire slick as a coffee table. So that should let you know what different wavelengths we are. We got to take a break. But we're going to come back with D'Andra Leslie-Pelecki telling us about the physics of NASCAR.

And in the final segment, I look forward to just learning about transition to electric, any other thoughts and physics insights that are going on in that fascinating sport when StarCraft Sports Edition continues. We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition, featuring my exclusive interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr., otherwise known as Junior. And we've got deep physics insight coming to this episode from Dr. DeAndre Leslie-Palecki, who wrote the book The Physics of NASCAR.

You know, I asked him about going electric. And if you go electric, then you might have aerodynamic noise, but you don't get that engine noise. That engine noise that is so characteristic of the sport. And so I had to ask him about it. What happens if the music goes away and it's just silent running?

Check it out. I think their ambitions are absolutely there. I don't know that there's concrete plans what that looks like, but there's an adage or a phrase that we used to say all the time in racing in NASCAR. And that was win on Sunday and sell on Monday.

And what that meant is the car, the manufacturer that would typically win on Sunday, they were gonna have a good day at the dealership on Monday. They were going to sell. Yeah, so if Chevrolet was successful on the racetrack, their belief, the reason why they're in motorsports in general is to sell automobiles. And so if their sedan that they're trying to sell to the market

is doing well on the racetrack, then more people are likely to buy that car. And so that still has some truth to it. Now, the race car that I'm riding, that we race on the racetrack, isn't anything like you're going to buy off the showroom floor. But we still sort of adhere to that idea that the manufacturers, that the manufacturers, their whole purpose is to raise the profitability of their... Yeah, why not? Why not?

Of course it is. And if they're building hybrids and they're building and studying how to build electric cars, fully electric cars, then we too need to adapt some of that technology. We need to be a place where the manufacturers want to be, to be able to showcase that technology. If hybrids is the future and if fully electric cars are the future for the consumer, then where are they going to truly test that technology? Where are they going to put that technology to the ultimate test

that's on the racetrack? That's our belief. And I believe it's the manufacturer's belief as well. Plus, I own an electric car, and as you surely know, they have very high acceleration, right? Yes. Massive torque. Very, very high torque at low speeds.

So that's an interesting feature that could manifest in interesting ways for races designed just for that kind of car. I think that's true. And another conversation is what will be fascinating to me is as hybrids become more commonplace in motorsports. We lose that combustion engine sound, the engine breaking of a decel into the corner, the sound of the RPMs accelerating out of the corner. We, as I say, race car drivers listen to those noises to determine whether we are at, above, or beyond the level of grit, right? Or we're over-accelerating, we're over-pushing. It's talking to you. The sounds are talking to you. Yeah. And so when that's gone, when you get into an electric car,

you lose some of that. You lose some of the understanding of what that combustible engine is telling you. I think that's going to be so fascinating watching drivers that have sort of lived both worlds, right? So, Deandra, do you foresee electric NASCAR anytime soon? Yes. The current generation of car, they designed with the intent of eventually being able to add hybrid features to it.

And what Junior said is exactly correct. The manufacturers are in NASCAR to sell cars. When they're trying to sell electric cars, NASCAR will be racing electric cars. I think the important thing there is that NASCAR is in a position to change people's minds. And so the people who now say, I hate electric cars, may get used to it,

may change their mind about electric cars based simply on NASCAR adopting them. So, Deidre, I just had an idea. All right? Have you ever seen low riders that move into town real slow? Yep. If you want to sell low riders, you got to have a slow NASCAR.

They're bobbing up and down, and they're just slow, and they're just slow, and they're there to be looked at as you drive by. That's a new kind of NASCAR. Gary, isn't Formula One having that problem with the porpoising? Yeah, maybe it is, but I don't think anyone's buying a Formula One car

out of a showroom. And he doesn't. Hey, I must ask you, what you heard there with Dale Earnhardt Jr. was the relationship, the intuitive relationship of sight, sound,

and vibration, everything. If the NASCARs are now electric, does that relationship get broken between driver and vehicle? How are we going to solve that problem if that is now going to be a problem of the future?

So they no longer become one with their car? No. Oh, I don't think so. So there's two ways that the drivers are sensing things in their car. One is eyes, ears, right? And the other, and that's where sound will come in. other one however is

through their butt basically is their feeling how the balance of the car is shifting as they're you know as you lose fuel you lose rear grip for example as your tires wear you lose grip they feel that in the seat and have to adjust accordingly how fast they go to make sure they're not exceeding the limits of grip so that will still be there with the electric cars. I've talked to drivers who have driven both and they say it is a very different technique to make an electric car go fast than it is an ICE car. But when they rely on that engine rev

as an audible clue as to where they are in terms of the power output, in terms of when they need to make the maneuver. If that's just, how do you tap into that? Lights on the dashboard. So it's the same way they go. They have meters.

They have the, what do they call it? It's not a heads up dashboard yet, but it's an electronic, a digital dashboard. And so they can pull it up. They can see the RPMs. They can see how close they are to pit road speed.

They can see diagnostics for the engine, if the engine is working. But this is like Luke. This is like the thing that Luke was going to use, but then didn't. Oh, the thing that came down early. Yeah. Trust the force, Luke.

And then he put it away. And then he pulls it away. And he pulls it away. And then you hear R2 going, what are you doing, you idiot? Look at all this technology. How would you trust the force? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. R2 doesn't speak.

Well, you know, Luke understands. Chuck was interpreting, Neil. Luke understands, too. So the thing is, by the way, Neil. Luke understands, you know? So the thing is, by the way, Neil. I don't want you to embarrass me on my show by not knowing that R2 is not having a conversation. Here's the thing. I mean, you got to suspend so much disbelief

in order to accept anything with Star Wars. And you're going to draw the line at the talking robot? Okay. Deandra, talking robot. Okay. DeAndre, please continue. Okay. Sorry. Ignore us. Now, my problem with this is,

if I go to reach the radio while I'm driving on an empty road, I have a concern. I don't want to be on a NASCAR track with 20 other cars at 200 miles an hour going, oh, what does that heads-up display say? What was that again? And I don't need to be looking there when I need to be looking there. So surely that audible note allows me to focus with my eyes and use this other sense here.

It definitely does. It definitely does. It's something they'll have to learn. There are other things that become intuitive as you drive. And I only say this, not that I've ever driven a NASCAR, but I ride motorcycles and the same thing happens. There is no instrumentation when you're riding 95 miles an hour on a twisty road. You don't ever look at instrumentation. But also at that speed, a lot of your hearing, which you rely on to listen to the motor, is also impaired because of the rush of wind.

Yeah. And so you find other ways to feel the road, to feel the bike. You know you're at a certain speed when you go to turn and because it's a gyroscope, there's a certain amount of force that you need to use in order to pull the bike. So I, without ever looking down or hearing the engine,

I know, oh, I'm above 50 miles an hour right now going into this turn from how much force I have to pull on the bars to pull the bike down into a turning position. So these are all things that you just, when you are deprived of any sense, you find another way to sense the circumstance.

That's all I'm saying. Let's jump into another clip of my exclusive interview with Junior. DeAndre, can I call him Junior? Am I allowed? Everyone calls him Junior. Good, thank you, thank you. I I allowed? Everyone calls him Junior. Good. Thank you.

Thank you. I don't want to be out of order here. So, my exclusive interview with Junior where we talked about safety. Safety. And he said safety is not a destination. And so, I wanted to know how safe is NASCAR these days. So, check it out. There is a lot of subtle things.

The wheel tethers, like you say, there's tethers to the hoods of the cars so they don't go flying into the grandstands when they come removed from the cars and crashes. But there's been a lot of things. Safety is not a destination. And, you know, there's no, there's no end game. We, I, Neil, when I was driving cars in 1995, I thought those cars were as safe as they could be. And, and, and it's miles from where we are today and what we've learned and what we understand. It's not just the car. Isn't your head now attached to, because your head is this thing on this thing

we call a neck and your head is moving 200 miles an hour, right? People aren't thinking, they thought it's the car. No, your head is moving 200 miles. As the car stops, your head keeps going. Yeah, and that's a fatal injury.

That's part of my father's injury that caused him to lose his life. The basal skull fracture is something we heard a lot in years past. But when the Hans device comes out, which was developed because of the many drivers like my father that had this injury, the Hans device basically kind of keeps your head from coming off of your shoulders in those high, high speed wrecks. And so I also learned, we've learned a lot about the head surround, which the padding around the helmet itself to try to protect drivers from concussions, which I know a lot about myself, unfortunately. DeAndre, does it take a tragedy

to introduce a safety feature? I mean, it kind of seems like it does, but must it, I guess I'm asking. In some ways it does, because there are always things that can happen that you can't predict. So for example, one of the things we thought at one point was the stiffer a car was, that is the less give it had, the safer it was. So you were enclosing the driver in a cage that would not allow him or her to get any of that energy. Well, it turns out you want a car stiff, but not too stiff. And so we're still learning about how

stiff to make a car, for example. We went through the same thing with safety belts. The problem is if you are studying motorsport safety, you don't get a lot of data points every year. So there are less than 30 serious accidents in NASCAR. By serious, I mean, you know, someone hitting a wall really hard, someone going upside down and catching on fire. We don't have a lot of those. So if you're trying to study how to prevent them,

you just don't have the data to be able to predict everything that's going to happen. Oh, so that's a good problem then. It is and it isn't. You don't have the data on bad accidents because there aren't bad accidents, right? I mean, that's kind of interesting. Well, there are bad accidents,

but there aren't enough of them that you could, you know, it's like if you have an incomplete data set and I ask you to predict something from that, you're not going to be able to predict everything. You can't. But if you take the element of danger away, You can't take everything. You can't.

But if you take the element of danger away, are you not then affecting the certain bit of something that attracts the crowds to the track? He's talking about me. He's being polite. He's saying, if you take the potential of death out of the sport, don't you get rid of the macabre people like Chuck Nice who just love to don't want to see anybody get hurt,

but are thrilled by the potential of it happening. Maybe. You may, but there's a whole other group of people who have no interest in that. Look at sports car racing. They very rarely have accidents, and there's a whole slew of people who follow that.

Yeah. Listen, i think that uh as long if nobody gets hurt crashes are spectacular but what you want to see at the end of it is when the guy gets out and they walk and they walk away like and they walk that that is the happiest you can be it's like you saw this spectacular crash, and then you saw a guy get up and walk off. And it looks back at it. Right. It's in the middle of that.

You know, because it's really, I mean, we went through it in the NFL this year. We actually saw an ambulance take a player off of the field first time in God knows how long that's happened. And it was really just kind of almost like a, you felt, it was like a national tragedy because it's something about that shared experience of seeing it all together. It was awful. It was just awful. So you just never want to see it. So for me, Neil, the chilling words by Dale Earnhardt Jr. there at the end, concussion, that's something I know a lot about, unfortunately.

Right. From your discussion, and we've not got into hearing him say this, but he's going to donate his brain to science once he passes away because of the concussions he has. Yeah, I know. Fine. Devil's in the detail there. So it's that sort of thing where you're saying people need to know that much more. And so to your point, doctor, the data points are going to come from a whole lot of different sources,

not just from the cars themselves. Most definitely. And in fact, one of the things Junior has done already, including in addition to donating his brain, is just speaking out and getting out of the car when he had a concussion and telling people, look, it's not safe to drive when you have a concussion. Because there is that, you know, macho, you know, I'm going to have a broken jaw and drive. I'm going to have a broken arm and I'm still going to get in the car. He really changed a lot of people's attitudes about that. And so he's done a great service to the sport that way. So, Gary, I think we have an extra clip on brain research. So let's see what's going on there.

Check it out. There's been a bunch of studies on NFL football players and other athletes as well. It wasn't anybody really in the motorsports industry that was looking at this and thinking and considering donating their brain. Oh, so that came after the football awareness. Yeah. I saw all of that happening and saw the, you know, the groundswell support to try to provide anything for research, right? To move this further. I met with a lot of doctors in my own rehabilitation that I fell in love with and really respected. And I wanted to help them

and do the right thing as well for them, well beyond my life. I wanted to continue to be an advocate for helping other people. And so, you know, anything they can learn from my experiences and anything they can learn from anything that I can do post my life, after I'm gone, I would want to be able to do that. So yeah, that was a very easy decision for me. Yeah, I'm glad we had that clip. So that really, that completes the picture of this treasure, this American treasure,

Dale Earnhardt Jr. and what he's done for the sport and what he'll continue to do for the sport, even in death. Deandra, do you have any sort of closing remarks you can give us based on all you've heard and what you know and your wisdom and insight? So I really enjoy listening to drivers talk physics because when they talk the science of the racing to people like us, they feel compelled to use the right words and talk about aerodynamics and that. But what's really fascinating is that they have an experience of physics that you and I don't have because they have all the G-forces, all the turning, you know, all the feelings that you get driving a car. And I think it's a really great way to sort of merge these two worlds. And I'm really glad you talked to Junior because I think he's one of the great

ambassadors of the sport. So we learned as well. It's been a delight, Deandra, to have you back on StarTalk. So Deandra, where do we find you? What's your social media footprint? I am at DrDeandra on Twitter. I am at DrDeandra2 on Instagram, only because I had one account and couldn't figure out how to get back into it. Oh, okay, okay.

And I think you can find my page, my website, Building Speed. It's buildingspeed.org. That's where I put most of my really technical stuff about motorsports. But then again i also i write two columns a week for nascar talk for the nbc sports and you'll find things on there that cover everything from uh things that we talked about today with the tire to the odds of you know someone winning the daytona 500 wow okay so that's the math and the physics coming coming through there it's been a delight

thank you for giving your time to us and our uh sports loving audience thank you for having me all right gary good to have you man pleasure my friend all right chuck this has been another episode of star talk sports edition the dale earnhardt jr interview neil degrasse tyson here always, bidding you to keep looking up.