Racecar

Race Cars is a picture book that serves as a springboard for parents and educators to discuss race, privilege, and oppression with their kids.

Though students aren’t yet old enough to drive, that doesn’t mean they can’t satisfy their need for speed. Author and physics teacher Bobby Mercer will show readers 25 easy-to-build racecars that can be driven both indoors and out. Better still, each of these vehicles is constructed for little or no cost using recycled and repurposed materials. The Racecar Book will teach readers how to use mousetraps, rubber bands, chemical reactions, gravity, and air pressure to power these fast-moving cars. They will learn how to turn a potato chip can, a rubber band, and weights into a Chip-Can Dancer, or retrofit a toy car with a toy plane propeller to make an air-powered Prop Car. An effervescent tablet in a small canister makes an impressive rocket engine for a Mini Pop Car, and old CDs, a small cardboard food box, and drinking straws become a Mac-n-Cheese Roller. Every hands-on project contains a materials list and detailed step-by-step instructions. Mercer also includes explanations of the science behind each racecar, including concepts such as friction, Newton’s laws of motion, kinetic and potential energy, and more. Teachers will appreciate the opportunity to augment their STEM curricula while having fun at the same time. These projects are also perfect for science fairs or design competitions. Bobby Mercer has been a high school physics teacher for over two decades. He is the author of The Flying Machine Book and Smash It! Crash It! Launch It! and lives with his family outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

An exciting day at the races highlights the letters of the alphabet as a variety of automobiles burn fuel speeding through the curves of the track.

Data acquisition has become an invaluable tool for establishing racecar - and car/driver - performance. Now that the ability exists to analyze each and every performance parameter for car and driver, accurate use of this data can provide a key advantage on the racetrack. This book provides a thorough overview of the varied methods for analyzing racecar data acquisition system outputs, with a focus on vehicle dynamics.

This is a mechanics story. Lew has worked on a variety or cars and racecars though out his career. This is also the story of a little boy who used to listen to the Indianapolis 500 on the radio in his little hometown in Pennsylvania and dream about going there. This is the story of a man whos dream came true when he walked through the gates of the Indianapolis Speedway for the first time in 1970. It is also the story of a family, their friends and a lifestyle. Lews wife Joan always said, Life with Lew has been interesting, I never knew what to expect. That is the truth.

For many years, the evolution of safety improvements in motorsports was the result of a combination of science and perceived safe practices. Most safety developments were not based on rigorous laboratory testing, but rather on intuition and a “let’s try it and see what happens” approach. During the last few decades, motorsports has benefited from the organized research efforts made possible by academia, manufacturers, and sanctioning bodies, leading to present-day motorsports safety methodologies based on solid data and testing. This compendium, edited by some of the foremost racing safety experts, comprises selected technical papers that document the development and implementation of key motorsports safety technologies now in use. It is intended to provide racing professionals and enthusiasts with a concise overview of the significant engineering developments in motorsports driver safety that has occurred during the past two decades. The 13 papers chosen for this compendium, published between 1990 and 2013, reflect landmark safety studies and developments of that time. Eleven of the papers were published by SAE International and two were presented at the Stapp Car Crash Conference. The papers cover the following topics: • Crash testing simulations • Human crash injury and survival • Reducing driver injury in severe crashes • Head and neck restraints, including the HANS device • Race car seats • Restraint systems • Track safety and barrier systems The final paper is a study on the detailed performance of restraint systems and seats in examples of severe stock car crashes. The paper represents a succinct example of modern crash investigation of racing crashes with crash recording data, detailed injury analysis, and protective system performance. The progress in motorsports safety, as described in this compendium, has been dramatically effective in reducing driver injuries at the top levels of motorsports. Unfortunately, this is not true at the lower levels, where drivers continue to suffer preventable injuries and fatalities.

Racecar data acquisition used to be limited to well-funded teams in high-profile championships. Today, the cost of electronics has decreased dramatically, making them available to everyone. But the cost of any data acquisition system is a waste of money if the recorded data is not interpreted correctly. This book, updated from the best-selling 2008 edition, contains techniques for analyzing data recorded by any vehicle's data acquisition system. It details how to measure the performance of the vehicle and driver, what can be learned from it, and how this information can be used to advantage next time the vehicle hits the track. Such information is invaluable to racing engineers and managers, race teams, and racing data analysts in all motorsports. Whether measuring the performance of a Formula One racecar or that of a road-legal street car on the local drag strip, the dynamics of vehicles and their drivers remain the same. Identical analysis techniques apply. Some race series have restricted data logging to decrease the team’s running budgets. In these cases it is extremely important that a maximum of information is extracted and interpreted from the hardware at hand. A team that uses data more efficiently will have an edge over the competition. However, the ever-decreasing cost of electronics makes advanced sensors and logging capabilities more accessible for everybody. With this comes the risk of information overload. Techniques are needed to help draw the right conclusions quickly from very large data sets. In addition to updates throughout, this new edition contains three new chapters: one on techniques for analyzing tire performance, one that provides an introduction to metric-driven analysis, a technique that is used throughout the book, and another that explains what kind of information the data contains about the track.