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NASCAR RACING
The unbeatable draw of road legal stock cars, big engines, loud exhausts and the oval track

On the final lap of the race, Cole Trickle feints an overtaking manoeuvre from the outside of rival Russ Wheeler's car. As Wheeler moves to cut Trickle off, he pulls off a spectacular stunt overtaking Wheeler from the inside. If you've seen it, and you probably have, then this was the final sequence of the Tom Cruise starrer 1991 film Days of Thunder about the NASCAR championships. For the uninitiated, NASCAR is an acronym for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing and is also one of the most popular forms of motor sport in America. One of the reasons for its immense popularity is because the race is about road going sports cars that one can relate to. Not the missile shaped aerodynamic marvels of other forms of single seater racing that resemble a car as much as a taxiing aeroplane does.

Daytona Beach in Florida, USA, remained a hotbed for land speed records attempts through the 1900s until the Bonneville Salt Flats became the preferred holy ground for speed freaks. Between 1905 and 1935 as many as 15 land speed records were created in Daytona. In 1936 the beach began hosting car races until NASCAR came into existence on February 21, 1948. Indeed the first rules governing NASCAR were written on a restaurant napkin! Modern NASCAR racing came about after a series of important changes in the 1970s. Eventually in 1979 the Daytona 500 became the first nationally televised motor race in America.

Stock car racing was originally meant for normal road going cars that would be modified to make them race worthy. With time and technology cars got faster and races got more exciting. At the same time the races got increasingly unsafe for the drivers, especially in the event of a crash – a more than likely possibility when 43 cars share a single track and drive at insane speeds. In modern day stock car racing, the outer body of the vehicle may well resemble a normal road going Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Corvette, Chevrolet Lumina Dodge Viper or any other muscle car but they are quite different from their road legal brethren. To start with, the cars, tracks and drivers must comply with certain minimum safety requirements. These include special seats that provide lateral support to drivers, five or six-point harness seat belts, roof flaps to prevent the car from taking off at high speeds, specially designed soft energy absorbing barriers and specified speed limits in the pit lane. Speeds usually hover around 256kmph as opposed to open wheel racing where one can see speeds in excess of 320kmph.

The circuits on which NASCAR races typically take place are banked ovals that help drivers maintain top speed through a corner by partially eliminating centrifugal forces that tend to pull the car towards the corner's outer edge – in this case, the barrier wall. While the challenges of driving and setting up the cars around similar banked ovals are probably fewer than learning varied road circuits, aerodynamic factors lead to contests which bear some resemblance to forms of track cycling, particularly at large oval super speedway tracks such as Daytona and Talladega. The aerodynamics ensure that cars, which are following each other, have less drag than either car alone. This is known as drafting. Therefore it is in the drivers' interests to cooperate in forming chains of cars with low drag. However, a driver must at some point end cooperation in order to win the race. The combination of cooperation and non-cooperation leads to some very sophisticated strategic decisions. It should also be noted that the tracks, at least those used by NASCAR, are not identical. While some are oval others are tri-ovals, one even being triangular, and two of them in fact being road courses that are also used by road racing series. At many of these tracks, drafting hardly has a role to play.

The start of a race is also different from what one would see in Formula One or most forms of racing in Europe. While in the latter the races start from standstill, in NASCAR the cars observe what is known as a rolling start. A pace car takes the 43 cars on successive laps of the circuit helping the cars to reach race speeds. While the pace car is out on track the cars cannot overtake. When the vehicles have reached race speeds the pace car moves off the track, a green flag is waved and racing in earnest begins.

From its early days there are approximately 100 races held across 1,500 tracks spread among America, Mexico and Canada. Indeed the sport's popularity in the USA is second only to the National Football League – there are approximately 75,000 fans that help NASCAR earn close to US$2bn in annual licensed product sales.