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Comment by brookside | Hacker News Reader

Nascar, to me, is a celebration of pointless CO2 emissions.

It is literally people driving around in a circle in last-century technology, mainly as an advertising platform for selling inefficient non-race vehicles.

We can do better in 2019, and I'd personally be ok if the whole sport shuttered, not just one team.

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> driving around in a circle in last-century technology

As a criticism I think this lacks perspective. Presumably you want them to be driving electric cars in a circle. Electric cars are 19th century technology:

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/electric-car-timeline.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-02/the-history-birth-dea...

Formula E is good. It's improving year by year and the Gen2 car is a clear improvement over the Gen1 car. You can watch past races on their YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/FIAFormulaE

But let's not kid ourselves. Formula E is not yet at the level of Formula 1.

I think GP means to say, it's not about the technology's past, but about its future. ICE is last century because its future is diminishing as this century unfolds. Electrics are on the rise and presumably will be the replacement to ICE. Thus they're not a last-century technology even if they were invented in the 19th.

I know electric cars are the future, but they're just boring compared to a smoking, snorting, shaking, thundering ICE engine.

I quit watching hydro races when they switched from Allison V-12s to jet engines. Maybe if they added afterburners, it would make it fun again :-)

No surprise I love steam locomotives, too. Diesel-electric, sorry.

The engineering and technical prowess of a NASCAR team would absolutely astonish you, it is hardly as you describe. I work closely with people in racing and am constantly amazed at what they are doing.

The entertainment provided per amount of CO2 is probably better than lots of other forms of entertainment, since there's thousands watching only dozens of cars. Like I'm sure skydiving or going on a cruise is worse for the environment per person.

Since we live in the future, I propose different shapes than a circle.

I think we could drive in a figure eight (turn left AND right), or better yet create a Mobius race course.

An amazing innovation of 1970 was the Chaparral 2J race car which used a secondary engine and fans to generate up to 1.5G of downforce.

I'm sure (49 years later) we could come up with some interesting techniques to keep the cars "up on the road" if we go to 3 dimensions.

Its called F1

> Nascar, to me, is a celebration of pointless CO2 emissions.

Doesn’t have to be. It could be a celebration of pointless conversion of electric energy into mechanical energy!

> last-century technology

I imagine you don't like Polo much either, but I still find this to be a bit of an odd critique - some sporting events go back thousands of years. In my experience, the intersection of sports and modern technology tends to be controversy - performance enhancing drugs, swimsuits, and the like. What sports do you watch that showcase modern technology?

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