Why They Turn Left

When you have a lot of opinions, you're bound to step on some toes. I have a lot of opinions, and I have gotten in varying degrees of trouble throughout my life because of them. It is a burden I accept, for I do my best to formulate my opinions based on facts available at the time. If new facts come to light, I am all ears, but otherwise I stick to my guns.

One such area is in motor racing, specifically my stance on NASCAR.

My first objection is to this obsession with turning left, going round, and round, and round...Who drives like that in the real world? Most other forms of motorsport involve turning right and left, which we do in our everyday driving. NASCAR racing, with the exception of 2 road courses - Sears Point (Infineon) and Watkins Glen - turns left all the time using albeit heavily modified 50 year old engine and suspension technology for the most part. In many ways, your passenger car is more sophisticated than a Nextel Cup Car.

Let's get this out of the way once and for all: That "Monte Carlo" that Dale Earnhardt, Jr. drives has absolutely nothing in common with the Monte Carlo you drive except the name. There is nothing "stock" about these purpose built race cars; hasn't been for 30-35 years. The cars used to be heavily modified versions of their actual street counterparts in that the teams started with the street car, then added necessary re-inforcement in critical chassis areas, and modified driveline and suspension components to handle the increased horsepower and torque of the heavily modified versions of, again, the same engine that was available to the general public in an actual passenger car.

But even then the manufacturers were savvy in interpreting the rules. Ford (and Mercury), for example, developed this really spectacular engine called the Boss 429 (Ford's own version of Mopar's dominant 426 Hemi) specifically to beat the Mopar guys in '69 on the superspeedways like Daytona. The homologation rule stated that there had to be at least 500 of these motors in a production street car. Even though Ford was racing the Gallaxy followed by the Torino while Mercury was racing its Cyclone, the rules didn't say the engine had to go into that actual street car; just a car they sold to the general public. So Ford contracted the automobile R & D firm, Kar Kraft, to modify 500 Mustangs calling them, well, Mustang Boss 429.

Today the cars have very sophisticated steel tube chassis (which are often purpose built for each race track by the high dollar teams), cloaked in sheet metal skin that approximates the shape and dimensions of the street car it is supposed to represent (but the shape and dimension change slightly for aerodymaic purposes at different race tracks.) The rules allow for these changes, and there is always bickering about "Ford's aero package has an advantage over the Chevy (or vice-versa) at this track or that," and NASCAR makes adjustments to try to keep it "fair." Hey, if the Monte is a brick in the wind compared to the Taurus (or vice-versa), then tell Chevy to make it more aerodynamic next year - that is, if it still is somewhat of a "stock" car... Also, the cars have rear-wheel drive and V8 engines, whereas their street counterparts have front-wheel drive with at most V6 engines. And don't even get me started about the Craftsman Truck series where they have Toyota "Tundras" racing with push-rod V8's and Toyota doesn't even make a push-rod V8!

The engine department is perhaps the most flagrant violator of the "stock" principle, yet it is my favorite. Let me be perfectly clear: In non-computerized, normally-aspirated, gasoline powered, single 4 barrel carbureted, push-rod, small block V8 engine technology with a design application lasting longer than 5 minutes duration from start-up to shut-down or a distance of 10 lineal miles, the NASCAR Nextel Cup engine builders and engineers are the best (their unrestricted engines rev up and down from 6,500 to over 9,000 RPM, making roughly 800 horsepower for over 500 miles, and I am aware of nowhere on the planet where anybody else does that in the specific design constraints I put forth.) However, that technology has not been used in a passenger car application or most truck applications for at least 15 years.

While the constant advances made in the "old school" technology benefit engine builders like myself and other racers and enthusiasts, it has ceased to have any "trickle-down" effect on the general consumer. Yet they still call them stock cars. Most of the technological improvements in our passenger cars come from information and data gathered in roadracing from Formula 1 to the showroom stock classes of the SCCA - racing improves the breed. Ultimately, most of the really cool technology is handed down from the aerospace industry to the racing community and then to the consumer.

But why do they just turn left? Like most cultural inventions, racing is based on what is available in the area. One of the first things people did with cars was race them. Since we raced horses in a circle going counterclockwise, it just seemed to make sense to do the same with cars. Many of the first tracks were made of wood, with steep banking in the corners to allow the cars to maintain more speed through them:

"Atlantic City Speedway (1926-1928) was 1.5 miles long with 45-degree turns. It was the fastest of the wood tracks with a top speed recorded at 147.727 mph."

In the South, many roads were still dirt, and early racers like Junior Johnson were old moonshine runners who had varying degrees of sucess outrunning the cops on old backwoods dirt roads. This gave rise to racing on dirt ovals in the South and across the mid-West. Today many forms of racing are still run on dirt ovals, turning left.

Also, America is wide-open, with lots of long stretches of straight roads, then and today even more so with our interstate system, and it could be argued that the infinity of going round in a circle is some sort of semiotic relationship to our surroundings. Road racing developed primarily in Europe and other places like New Zealand where tight, twisty roads are more the norm than not, so it's no wonder why both car and motorcycle roadracing has been dominated by racers and manufacturers from overseas.

But my main gripe with turning left is just that: turning LEFT. If you're going to turn one way or the other, turn RIGHT!