Posted on 05/22/2012 3:52:32 PM PDT by ColdOne
President Obama’s eco-friendly EPA inked a green partnership deal with high-octane NASCAR Monday to promote recycling and environmentally-friendly products to the sport’s millions of fans. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, NASCAR will encourage fans to buy “sustainable concessions” at races, expand the use of “safer chemical products,” conserve water, reduce waste, promote recycling, push products approved by the EPA that have a small enviro footprint and encourage suppliers to get an “E3 tuneup” aimed at promoting sustainable manufacturing.
Missing: any talk of greening races or race cars that consume about two million gallons of gas a year and average five miles per gallon.
“Yes, the focus is on suppliers and programs, not green cars,” said an EPA spokesman.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
NASCAR and the EPA. It ain’t gonna end well
They don’t even vaguely resemble a production car any more. The ‘CAR OF TOMORROW’ they introduced a little while ago has a standardized outline that looks like nothing on the market today.
The short blocks aren’t based on anything in production any more either. They vaguely resemble a Gen I or II Small Block Chevy, but we’re at Gen III now out here in the real world and the only thing that has in common is the bore spacing and the number of cylinders.
“In these other sports, people turn left as well as right, they brake and accelerate hard several times during a lap,”
I suppose you can demonstrate that a right turn is more difficult than a left turn.
As a former oval dirt track driver, I challenge you to go a hundred laps on maybe a half mile oval track and then shoot off your big mouth about left turns.
To enlighten the “left turns are easy crowd”, the reason for an oval track is two fold. Yes, it reduces the foot print and associated cost of the track, but much more importantly it allows the fans to see most if not all of the action. The morons at Indy sure screwed that up the the stands on the inside of the front straight.
Road racing does add the element of shifting, I will give you that. However, unless you are watching it on TV it sucks as you can only see a small segment of the track. I love F1 or Moto GP, but only on TV.
I suppose somehow you can prove a Cup car does not brake and accelerate at the short tracks like Martinsville. Cup cars have to operate on a wide range of mostly oval tracks of various lengths, banking and a few road courses.
NASCAR has gone into the dumpers but it has nothing to do with left/right turns or braking and accelerating. It has to do with boring cars and drivers spending 450 miles playing it safe so as to be there at the end.
I have stated many times, NASCAR needs to award championship points for every lap and bonus points for the last lap to force hard racing the entire race.
Funny the Indy and F1 drivers seem to have trouble handling all those simple left turns when driving a high HP but very heavy car without all the fancy electronics and aerodynamics. You will find NASCAR drivers are among the upper echelon in racing BECAUSE their cars don’t have all the bells and do funnies to assist them.
See post 40. True competition is alive and well, just not in NASCRASH.
You can’t fault Tony for meeting with Obama as a winner of a major sport, like all other athletes do that win major events.
Bingo! Once the commie libs get their foot in the door... They’ve been after NASCAR for a long time. NASCAR has just made a big mistake. Bill France Sr. and Bill Jr. would have told them to take a hike.
If it’s so hard, why do the “NASCAR Driving Experiences” where you get to pilot such a car around a track take only a little while to instruct would be operators on how it’s done, whereas it can take a day or more to get a road racing instructee up to speed, hm?
NASCAR is a form of racing, a retarded form. Left turns only are boring to many, this writer included.
Yes, a Cup car does brake and accelerate at the short tracks such as Martinsville, but nothing like a car does at, say, LeMans or even Laguna Seca. Watching a Cup car tiptoe through the corkscrew at LS is hilarious.
A more important point in terms of getting manufacturer participation and keeping it there - what does NASCAR contribute to the production cars and therefore the bottom line? There hasn’t been any R&D fruit from that series in over 20 years.
Another point is how concerned NASCAR is about safety, or how they claim they are. Yet they won’t do something simple that would prevent many accidents. Such as mandating a brake light, which would get rid of so many rear-end crashes.
“If it’s so hard, why do the “NASCAR Driving Experiences” where you get to pilot such a car around a track take only a little while to instruct would be operators on how it’s done, whereas it can take a day or more to get a road racing instructee up to speed, hm?”
That statement is almost too stupid to warrant a reply. If you can actually read English I did admit shifting was an added element to road racing. From a fan AT THE TRACK standpoint it still sucks.
If you think anyone achieves racing speed in a day, week, month you know nothing about racing. The NASCAR experience is NICE but nothing like the real thing.
I have driven many types of race cars some with exotic aerodynamics and electronic traction controls etc and by far the most difficult cars are those similar to NASCAR with minimal aerodynamics and only maybe some brake bias adjustments. The added weight, without all the do funnies makes for a car that only a very experienced driver can handle. Just look at the problems the Montoya seems to have in the Cup cars. Danica? Well if she had male bits, she would be driving go karts.
If you cannot comprehend that then the problem is not with the cup cars but with you.
Who said anything about achieving speed? I’m just pointing out that in equal ‘fans can emulate drivers’ events, it takes a short period of time to get people to go around the oval, yet it can take half a day to get people ready to go around, say, Mid-Ohio.
Difficulty in driving FOR NO APPARENT REASON does not automatically make for a superior form of racing. If this were so, semi-truck racing would be the pre-eminent motorsport.
Danica made a decent mid-level touring car driver but I agree she’s over-rated. I’d also point out that a number of Americans from NASCAR have tried to transition to F1 over the years and they pretty much all failed. So that’s no qualifier either.
Also, you want to address why they can’t be bothered to fit a $10 brake light to the cars to avoid accidents?
France is going to destroy NASCAR!!!!
A beer and a hot dog are out. What do you drink to washdown tofu ?
Cyanide. :P
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