Here’s NASCAR’s idea for a fully electric stock car
The prototype is here to gauge interest and promote NASCAR's sustainability push.
@arstechnica Here's an idea: get rid of the left turns.
@trcwm so, all right turns? Only straightaways?
@mikethefifth you assume I’ve thought this through..
@trcwm seeing as how they introduced the car at their street race in Chicago, I know that you haven’t.
@arstechnica
#cars are so 20th Century
they need to go the way of spats and monocles
@arstechnica It's like they've never met their core audience. No way will NASCAR fans do anything other than lose their marbles over this.
@arstechnica The rules matter - electric has a large acceleration advantage and so the right set of rules mean an okay EV driver will beat the best ICE driver. However racing is mostly about rules and there are a lot of options to design rules that make an EV lose every time. Winning a race is often about understanding how to cheat without breaking any rules and smart teams will look for loopholes and if they won't exploit them get them closed so other teams cannot.
The obvious area is the pit stop: In a 13 second pit stop you can completely refill a gas tank - I don't know of any battery that can be recharged that fast. A battery swap could happen that fast (just like a tire swap), but the rules need to allow that.
@arstechnica Here's an idea: get rid of pointless, wasteful auto racing completely. We need to go beyond this garbage. You wanna play with your toy cars, play Forza or Gran Turismo or something similar.
@arstechnica I'm always happy to see innovations in motorsports. New tech will make it's way down to general vehicles over time so it's good to see them trying more sustainable materials. I think it'll be a while before we see #EV tech in the current #NASCAR series. The article specifically calls out superspeedways for the lack of regeneration, but regen alone won't get the cars through a full 300+ mile race.