| G-Forces
G-force, a measure of stress on a body during rapid acceleration, is a familiar term to military jet pilots. It also applies to auto racers.
One G is the force of gravity, the weight you feel standing around. At a race like the Indianapolis 500, where speeds surpass 220 mph, that's significantly multiplied in the turns.
"Elite drivers will put up with 4 to 5 G's sustained in a corner for between five and 15 seconds, maybe even 20," says physicist Brian Beckman, a software architect with Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., and an amateur sports car racer. Since 1990 he has authored a series of articles on the physics of racing. "If you weigh 200 pounds, at 5 G's you're being pushed sideways at 1,000 |
The Garage Area
It's no secret that the chassis affects the car's performance a lot. For example, say you go test somewhere and you think you nailed it on something in the chassis. Now you take what you learned from that test, go to a race track and apply it at the race track only to find it dosen't work. A long day just got longer. The chassis is probably one of the most important pieces on a race car because if it doesn't work, the motor doesn't work and the driver overworks, and that's not a good combination. The chassis is the main ingredient in a race car. High-banked tracks take a different geometry setting than Flat tracks. The main chassis is probably not any different, it's just the settings in the front end geometry that makes it different. You build short track cars as light as you can build them. When you take a car to an intermediate track, you may not want it quite as light. A speedway chassis is different from an intermediate, and an intermediate chassis is different from a short track.
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