Understanding Auto Racing
The Cars, Classes, Rules and Engineering Behind Going Faster Than Somebody Else
Auto racing has been around long enough to develop its own language, its own machinery and enough classes to confuse anybody who didn’t grow up hanging around a track.
A Funny Car isn’t particularly funny. Pro Stock hasn’t been especially stock for a very long time. Circle-track racers can spend an entire evening arguing about the fastest way to turn left. Road racers occasionally turn right just to make everybody pay attention. And land-speed racers removed the other driver entirely and discovered the clock was worse.
Understanding Auto Racing: Drag Racing | Circle Track Racing | Road Racing | Land Speed | Surviving It
This section sorts that out.
The idea isn’t to reproduce sanctioning-body rulebooks or bury the reader under every class designation somebody used in 1967. It’s to explain what the cars are, why they developed that way, how the racing works and what made each form important.
Staging beams, Christmas Trees, nitro, door cars, factory muscle, gassers and several different ways to discover that the other fellow got there first. Start with the basics, then wander into the machinery.
NASCAR, short tracks, Modifieds, Dirt Late Models, Sprint Cars, Midgets and Supermodifieds. Turning left is the easy part. Figuring out how to do it faster than everybody else created most of the machinery here.
Sports cars, GT racing, Trans-Am, Can-Am, Formula cars and Indy machinery. Braking points, apexes and enough different corners to keep the steering wheel busy.
No door-to-door battle and no last-lap pass. Just a machine, a measured distance, a clock and the belief that whatever number somebody ran last time needs improving.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Starts Arguing About Classes
Bottom Line
Race cars make a lot more sense once somebody explains the rules that produced them.
The high nose on a gasser, the wing on a Sprint Car, the long wheelbase of a Top Fuel dragster and the tube chassis underneath a modern stock car were not styling decisions. They came from racers trying to go faster while staying somewhere inside whatever rulebook was sitting on the table that year.
Understand the kind of racing and the machinery usually starts making sense.
Usually.
↑ Back to the Top — You Now Know Enough to Start an Argument in the Pits