Nascar driver caught wearing an amphibious-like glove in a cheating violation | Hacker News Reader

Nascar driver caught wearing an amphibious-like glove in a cheating violation

wflx.com

34 pointsbrk57 comments

If I understand this correctly, the glove was engineered so that it would slow him down when he put his hand out the window (the webbing in the glove would add drag to his vehicle).

I need an ELI5 on this.

How does using equipment that is designed to make you SLOWER constitute cheating? I truly don't understand it, so if my comment seems off-base or facetious it isn't. Please correct me.

Seconded.

In addition I also struggle to see how any effect would be large enough. A person isn't strong enough to measurably slow down a high speed car with one arm by pushing again the car, so how would they be strong enough to do the same by pushing against the air?

It might have been enough. He was .033 seconds faster than the next position.

He was faster by pushing against air? How does that work?

It's not known if the glove made him faster, but... maybe. They'll sometimes put their hand up in a certain spot to redirect some air so that there's slightly less drag. The webbed glove would theoretically help that effect. How much it helps (or hurts) is unclear but with that little margin, it's a nice thought.

See other comments. The window has a non-glass mesh cover over it which lets air in. That increases drag. He's putting his hand against that mesh and thus blocking air from coming into the car. This reduces drag.

Small clarification but there’s a gap between the chassis and the mesh that is just open (almost forms a triangular hole opening).

He’s blocking the gap between the mesh and the car, not against the mesh itself. If you google “nascar window net” you can see what I mean

For the same reason that bigger brakes can make you faster around a track. If you can stay on the gas longer and reduce the amount of time that you're slowing down for turns, you will have a higher average speed.

Game used to be about driving everyday civilian cars fast.

Now its about who can parse the rules the finest.

It isn't "organizing" things that spoils them, its the organizers.

Eh, there has always been an amount of bending rules or capitalizing on design gaps in racing. NASCAR and Formula 1 have always had people adding things they shouldn't, from extra long, curly fuel pipes which can hold nearly an extra gallon in NASCAR to Ferrari using a secondary oil tank to add extra power by burning oil in F1. Or their special fuel pump which moved the regulated amount of fuel during the 32 times a second a sensor was verifying flow rate, but running it at max flow rate when the sensor wasn't polling.

I don't like it anymore than you do, but it's not exactly a new issue.

I saw Rush the other week (film about James Hunt and Nikki Lauda) and that reminded me that F1 used to have cars with 6 wheels to which I thought "take me back" even though that was before I was born. As an example in contrast today you have tires made as poorly as possible. Why shouldn't you have a gas guzzler if you think you can justify the weight of fuel, or the extra time cost of refueling? Refueling, do you remember that? I don't watch anymore after seeing how the sausage is made.

I'm too young to have seen any refueling races by the time I could watch F1, but I can agree with you that over-regulation seem to stifle innovation. Even if the innovation it stifles is "we put a w16 engine in a car just to see if it would work" (it didn't) it made for races you weren't totally sure who would even take part since there were more teams than grid slots, and qualifying actually had more excitement than just seeing who had pole. Did that quirky team with the experimental aero package make it into the race, or did the team with the heavier engine and worse braking make it?

Regarding tires, the lack of refueling means they have to make some kind of choice to add strategic opportunity and forcing at least one tire change per race is about the only thing they can do. It's a lot more interesting to watch something like IMSA where a damaged car is put into the pit, a mechanic jumps on the bent hood to squash it back down, and then they put some sturdy duct tape on it to hold it down for the rest of the race. In F1 any damage means you won't get into the top 10, so you won't get points, so you may as well not even finish the race.

Racing still needs to be a spectacle at some point, and I can only imagine being a fan who watched Senna in the wet back in the day, engine screaming, passes made with skill, and comparing it to a modern race where the engines are quiet and they had to add push to pass systems like DRS and the "add 160 horsepower" electric motors just to try to allow drivers to pass in the first place because the cars are so much larger than they used to be. I'll always be a motorsport fan but F1 kind of seems like a shell of what it could have been.

I suppose this is where it "gets political" but the F1 regulations are also attempting to reduce the carbon footprint of the sport. A lofty and worthy goal, but I don't think the cars themselves make up the bulk of the carbon footprint - transporting the cars all around the world does. So how about we make the cars fun to watch again? Improve the carbon footprint of the transport, and don't restrict the cars to try to offset it. Just let the cars be cars! It feels like artificially limiting the amount of food you can feed a champion race horse just to say "We reduced grain dependence across the whole sport!"

The problem is that car racing is very boring if you allow engineers to go wild. For example using airflow to increase grip at some point gives advantage to the car in front. Pair that with powerful engine and there won't be any passing ever once that car is in front.

Making fast, unpassable car is just to easy. Regulations are about crippling them enough to make racing interesting. If you have to do it anyway then why not add other lofty goals like driver's safety, efficiency, disallowing solutions that would drain everyone's budget etc.

That’s like saying once Usain Bolt was born, there’s no point in running any more. There may be a team always in front, but the simpler rule would be: once you make it, you are out for a season or two. That drives incentive to not be over-the-top winning unless you want a guaranteed one-and-done team.

>The problem is that car racing is very boring if you allow engineers to go wild.

Or ridiculously dangerous. The cars are much less fast than they could be.

I always thought some innovations in F1 are going back into the consumer market. So it would make sense to push for emission efficiency on the engineering side, regardless of the emissions due to the whole event logistics.

With your horse analogy, imagine mixing in the champion's genes back into work horses. Probably a net win.

>So how about we make the cars fun to watch again?

F1 can be very boring, the guys that were starting first were finishing first, I would watch it to see overtakes and piloting skills and the problem is that without limits the company with the big money will win. This is not fun, it does not make money and rules change to limit costs so all the teams can compete using a similar budget.

I stopped watching 2 decades ago, I stopped also watching or reading the summaries, it got to boring for me but I suppose that there are soem that want to see that kind of sport where the teams have no limit and you just watch the cars running around in circles and admire them.

I think there are only a few engines providers anyway , so I am not sure on what they are optimizing on this days, maybe aerodynamics and fuel strategy.

The fun part of F1 races nowadays is watching Ferrari repeatedly kick itself in the balls by fucking up the strategies of their drivers in the most creative ways possible, despite having a great car, great drivers and more money than God.

My favorite example of this off the top of my head is when they sent out Vettel to qualify with intermediates when there was basically no rain actually happening and the standing water on the track was minimal. As a Ferrari fan myself it's comical how badly they can call things sometimes lol

> So how about we make the cars fun to watch again?

Since you mentioned you are too young to even have watched the refueling era of F1, you need to understand: F1 could always be boring to watch.

During Schumacher's era you'd see P1 and P2 lapping over P4 or even P3 sometimes. Reliability was a mess, engines exploding, some races had barely 8-10 cars finishing; richest teams could run 3-5 engines in a single weekend while the non-competitive teams couldn't simply because they didn't have the budget.

The races now are much more competitive, even though RBR has been dominating, and previously Mercedes, the difference in lap time nowadays is much more competitive and entertaining to watch the midfield than it ever was in the 90s/2000s.

This. Reliability in F1 20+ or so years ago was appalling, even though cars back then had the complexity of a toaster compared to the hybrid cars of today with their split turbos with energy recovery. Advancements in CAD/CAE simulations really made an impact since manufacturing tolerances were never an issue.

F1 has had lots of interesting things over the years - my favourite being the 1.5l 600HP V16 from the 1950s. Didn't work terribly well but worth listening to a recording of one because it sounded awesome - there are still a few running examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Racing_Motors_V16

Edit: BRM are sometimes referred to as "British Racing Misery"

>in contrast today you have tires made as poorly as possible

That's not entirely true. F1 tires today are vastly grippier and stronger than they were in the James Hunt Nikki Lauda era because the downforces they need to withstand are also much stronger.

Sure, by F1 regulations, Pirelli needs to intentionally make the upper layer of their tires have a short lifespan in order to make the race more exiting by forcing the team strategy to come to the pits more often when their tires wear out, instead of staying out the entire race on one set of tires, but you can't say the tires are made as poorly as possible.

In fact the innovations in them are quite remarkable. They're intentionally not as hard wearing as the Michelins of the Michel Schumacher era but they're way grippier.

It feels like the rule-bending used to be more obvious (to the naked eye), like strapping a massive fan to the back of the car. Now it's extending some bodywork by a few millimetres, etc. It's still impressive, but there's less for the layman to see.

Or even the more boring stuff like "F1 team Racing Point's brake ducts look suspiciously similar to the brake ducts of the previous year Mercedes, which won the constructor cup..." because Mercedes was kind of the parent team to Racing Point and "shared" the design. I also remember Ferrari trying a new way to attach mirrors, which was deemed illegal, but it shows how tiny the gains they chase are.

What is the rule violation with the brakes? Is it not allowed to reuse designs from elsewhere?

Some components of the car can be shared, others have to be shared, but break ducts IIRC are in the third category where you have to design them yourself.

> there has always been an amount of bending rules or capitalizing on design gaps in racing.

The America’s Cup, (yacht racing) is another good example of this. Half the competition is in the court room, which isn’t that interesting from my point of view.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Cup

Welcome to racing. It never was simply about "driving civilian cars fast", it was about skirting rules, in this case, alcohol prohibition.

They were always modified to be faster and to hide booze.

From day one.

Racing predates prohibition, and even cars. Ever since humans could move on two feet there have been contests to see who can go faster. Hell, the origin of racing even predates humans, where the deer that could run faster than the wolf got to survive. Thus young animals race just to develop survival skills. Car racing then, is as old as cars, the first of which came out in 1885, by Mr. Benz. The first recognized car race was in 1890's France, before gangsters were racing cops during prohibition, which started in 1919. Nascar got its start where you state, but racing is bigger and started earlier than Nascar.

Why is that relevant 100 years after prohibition ended?

It's not really, except historically. The early stock car racing drivers in the USA were often bootleggers who transported illegal liquor so had fast cars to run from the police. Eventually they organized and that led to the forming of NASCAR.

Folk racing has an interesting rule:

> Anyone can place a fixed-price bid on any car, and the buyer is then chosen by draw. The fixed price in Finland is €2,000 (≈US$1,650) or 8,000 SEK (≈US$1,000) in Sweden. Refusing to sell is grounds for having one's competition licence revoked

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkrace

24 hours of LeMons has (had?) a similar rule. All cars must cost $500, and to help enforce that, they have a claiming rule, where after a race, organizers can buy any car from a team for $500.

The claiming rule won't enforce the racing rule. All it does is limit the value of the car to "the value of winning the race, plus $500".

The value of winning LeMons is zero, so...

In that case, there's no need to enforce any rules! The cost of cheating already exceeds any potential benefits.

> BS Factor: To prevent cheating, all cars will be inspected by a panel appointed by the Organizers. At that time, all teams will be given an opportunity to describe the car’s purchase and prep. If the panel believes the limit set out in Rule 4.1 has been exceeded, it will assign a Bullshit Factor (BSF) equal to one BSF per $10 above the limit. The entry will be docked one lap for each BSF assigned. (Ten dollars = one BSF = one lap.) Entrants are very, very, exceedingly strongly encouraged to bring pre-race-prep photographs, verifiable receipts, notarized testimonials, plus any and all other supporting evidence to Tech/BS Inspection. Or at least make up plausible-sounding stories in advance.

https://24hoursoflemons.com/prices-rules/#vehicle-price

€2,000≈US$2175

seems like the original article is extremely outdated. USD/EUR never came close to that exchange rate in the last 10 years according to xe.com.

Actually, it's just sloppy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Folkrace&diff=pre...

The EUR value has been updated without updating the USD value.

Thanks for pointing that out. I updated it to reflect today's prices ($2,200; $800).

Many argue the same principle is being applied to professional cycling.

I remember reading that even in early Tours de France riders would surreptitiously jump into a car to get ahead in the race.

This is one reason why I like keirin, Japanese bicycle racing. Everyone has to use the same old steel frame bikes, there is no contact with the outside world (for riders) before races, and the uniform colors are randomly selected.

The funny part is that keirin is one of the few sports in Japan that people can bet on (with large prizes for winners, too), so the mere inclusion of gambling doesn't necessarily mean bad outcomes.

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

"used to be"? When is that? There are lots of very interesting old stories about rule bending in Nascar. Actually, it apparently started from the very first official Nascar race [1].

If you want racing series about driving civilian cars fast, they do exist. Nascar just isn't one of them. The only one I really heard about is "Stock Miata" racing, but I'm sure there are other series using stock street cars, or at least having the exact same cars for all competitors.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/commutin...

> Game used to be about driving everyday civilian cars fast.

Everyday civilian cars aren't anywhere near as safe as NASCAR race cars but some are likely faster and/or handle better.

> used to block air when a driver puts his hand out the window during qualifying.

I'm not a NASCAR enthusiast. Can someone who is, explain this?

NASCAR vehicles don't have windows, so according to this article[1] it's an attempt to reduce drag by reducing air trying to come into the window. In this context, a glove with mesh between the fingers could make for a better "plug" and block more of the window compared to a standard glove.

1. https://fansided.com/2018/02/11/nascar-daytona-500-qualifyin...

but wouldn't they need to keep both hands on the wheel? And the wheel is bit removed from the window?

I guess they are looking at differences in the hundredths of decimal points.

From that link:

"He was for all intents and purposes driving with one hand on the wheel, which you probably can only do when you’re as talented and as experienced as Rowdy."

If you watch at the beginning of his pole lap, you can see he is driving almost entirely one-handed for the first part of the lap: https://x.com/NASCARONFOX/status/1757963422874906969?s=20

Also, the margins at super speedways are really small and this opening is the least aerodynamic piece of the car so altering that opening can definitely come with benefits that could make a difference.

Had some difficulty parsing this. What I understood is that they do have a window opening, which cannot be closed.

Yes, no glass on the driver's side for safety (nothing to break? ease of pulling them out in case of fire?) according to GP's link.

That makes much more sense, OP confused me by calling it aerodynamic, I was thinking maybe I could understand that making a significant difference (or at least the desire to try) on a motorbike, but...

>NASCAR vehicles don't have windows

Did they already switch to Linux? Impressive.

> explain this

I also struggled to understand how it worked, but the article does eventually explain it.

“As you can see, the entire glove is webbed. The reason for that is you can obviously block more air, the drivers do put their hand up against the (window) opening”.

This is a good series of short videos that explain how teams and crews "bend" the rules in NASCAR. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdxIcYiHE95ysl-GO7yYCU4KR...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DHJV8DQ8tw (This is about the window net)

The window net is square where the window has a little triangle opening at the A pillar. Redirecting the air near that triangle opening could make the car handle differently.

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