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Happy greatest day in motorsports! :-)
In just a couple of hours, the lights will go out (and away we'll go) at Monaco. It's a very old street race run mostly through the streets of Monte Carlo in quite possibly the most spectacular setting in all of motorsports (apologies to Singapore). Many of you probably associate me mostly with NASCAR, but the first race I ever watched was an old Monaco Grand Prix.
Monaco almost wasn't on the Formula 1 schedule this year because of a dispute with the Automobile Club of Monaco about negotiating a new contract for the race. I can't imagine an F1 schedule without Monaco on the schedule, a race that predates F1 and was first run in 1929.
This is a race that's not the most entertaining for fans because the race cars have become wider over time, and overtaking is extremely difficult in the narrow streets. For the drivers, it's a very fun track because the close proximity of the barriers around the track makes it a very technical circuit. Racing at Monaco is usually best in the rain, where it's much easier to overtake at several points around the circuit. You know that it's a classic circuit when all of the turns have unique names like Sainte Devote, Beau Rivage, Massenet, and many others. Sainte Devote is named for a small chapel near the first turn named for Saint Devota, the patron saint of Monaco. Many of the other turns have interesting stories to them, too.
By the way, for anyone who says Monaco is boring, that means you missed the qualifying session on Saturday. I can't think of a track in motorsports where qualifying is more important, and Q3 was as good as it gets.
A couple of hours after Monaco is the 107th running of the Indianapolis 500. It's run on a 2.5 mile "oval" that's really a rectangle with rounded corners and used to be covered entirely with bricks. Despite being known as the brickyard, almost none of the original bricks remain, with the exception of the start/finish line. Although F1 doesn't run on ovals in the present day, the Indy 500 was an F1 points race from 1950 to 1960.
Many modern NASCAR ovals have turns 1-4 even though there are really only two distinct turns, one at each end of the track. Indianapolis Motor Speedway is partly to blame for this, and it really does have four distinct turns. Darlington Raceway was built a few decades later and wanted to be the Indianapolis of the South, including copying the terminology of turns 1-4. Darlington is more of a typical NASCAR oval with two distinct turns, one at each end, but after copying Indy, the use of turns 1-4 became standard throughout NASCAR.
The Indy 500 is one of two races that calls itself the Great American Race, the other being the Daytona 500. It's a classic race, even older than Monaco, changing over the decades as the bricks were paved over and the cars became much faster. It's a test of drivers' endurance, with 200 laps run at incredibly high speeds. Ever wonder why the cars snake all over the backstretch and frontstretch? The draft is powerful at Indy, so the cars swerve through the straights to try to break the draft for the cars behind them. Not only do the drivers have to negotiate the track, but they have to pay careful attention to any cars behind them that might be in their slipstream. At the end of the 200 laps, the winner gets their face added to the Borg-Warner Trophy and receives a bottle of milk.
In the evening, the Coca-Cola 600 is NASCAR's longest race, run on the 1.5 mile oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway. There's rain in the forecast for most of the Carolinas today, so there's a pretty good chance this race will be postponed to Monday afternoon and evening. It's a test of endurance, with 400 laps around the oval, starting late in the afternoon and finishing up well into the night. The changing track conditions present quite a challenge, because cars that run well when the track is hot may not be the best cars as the track cools during the evening. It might look like any other 1.5 mile oval, but the rough surface of the track and the bumps make this track quite challenging for the drivers. Last year's race was a true test of endurance with many cautions due to tire issues and a couple of big wrecks.
I'm not betting on the Coca-Cola 600 running today because there's an extratropical low spinning along the coast of the Carolinas and producing quite a lot of rain across much of North Carolina. I remain hopeful that the weather will clear long enough to dry the track and get in 400 laps of racing this evening, but I sure wouldn't bet on it. More likely than not, the Xfinity series race will be run Monday afternoon and the Coca-Cola 600 will be Monday evening. If only we could send the rain from Charlotte to Monaco, it would be perfect.
Anyway, there's a lot more I could say about these three classic races, but I'd never get it finsihed before the lights go out at Monaco. If you're going to watch all three races like I am, I'll just strongly encourage you to... reach up there and pull those belts tight one more time!
(Score: 2, Informative) by dalek on Sunday May 28, @10:08PM
Race tracks are weird. :-)
I don't think there's any consistent definition of what is a turn and what isn't, except that you can't call a straight a turn. I'll explain as much as I can, but let's begin with a list of NASCAR tracks with diagrams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASCAR_tracks [wikipedia.org].
The Indy 500 runs on the oval configuration of Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It's not really an oval, but really more of a rectangle with four rounded corners. It's a very old race track and has influenced many other tracks.
There are a few true ovals, places like Dover, New Hampshire, and Homestead-Miami. The frontstretch and backstretch are straight, with turns at both ends of the track. If you look at the diagrams for those tracks, it's almost like there are two straights with two half-circles at the end. Instead of calling one end of the track turn 1 and the other end turn 2, we split each into two turns. They don't look like Indianapolis, and instead really have two distinct turns. However, the turn at one end of the track is split into turns 1 and 2, but the turns at the other end of the track are split into turns 3 and 4.
Homestead-Miami is a 1.5 mile oval, but it wasn't always configured like the diagram you see. When it originally opened, it was built like a mini-Indianapolis, still 1.5 miles in length but with a rounded rectangle shape and four distinct corners. I believe that safety concerns were a significant factor in reconfiguring the track to a true oval.
Darlington is a very old track and also adopted Indy's approach of saying there were turns 1, 2, 3, and 4 even though there aren't really four distinct turns. Unlike the other ovals, Darlington as asymmetrical, meaning that one end of the track has a tighter radius than the other. It's a 1.366 mile egg-shaped oval, built that way because Harold Brasington purchased the land to build the track, he promised the previous owner that he wouldn't disturb a nearby minnow pond. That's why Darlington has its unique shape. Darlington copied Indy in designating turns 1, 2, 3, and 4, despite really only having two distinct turns. Because Darlington did this, it became normal for pretty much every other oval since then.
Gateway (Worldwide Technology Raceway) is a 1.25 mile egg-shaped oval, though I don't actually know why this track was built that way. With a similar configuration and distance, you might think the racing is similar at Darlington and Gateway. It's not. The turns at Darlington have relatively large radii, and cars tend to run near the wall to minimize turning the steering wheel. This helps to keep momentum up, and running right next to the wall is the fastest line around Darlington. Gateway is a lot more elongated, almost like it has two drag strips with much tighter turns at each end. The turns also have much lower banking. In some ways, it's a lot more like a big version of Martinsville, and there are some similarities in how to race those tracks. The fastest line around Gateway is around the bottom of the turns, and it's much more important to have good acceleration out of the turns than to maintain momentum.
Daytona and Talladega are both described as having four turns, and the tri-oval isn't counted as a turn. The tri-oval is the apex where the frontstretch almost has a pointed shape. Tonight's Coca-Cola 600 runs at Charlotte, which has a quad-oval shape. Instead of coming to a point, there are two separate kinks in the frontstretch, neither of which is counted as a turn. The reason the frontstretch isn't actually straight is because the tri-oval or quad-oval shapes provide better sight lines for fans sitting in the stands along the strongstretch.
Then there's Phoenix, which has two turns that are almost half-circles, and they're counted as turns 1, 2, 3, and 4. But there's also another kink in the track, which is referred to as the dogleg. The dogleg isn't referred to as turn 5, but it certainly looks like a fifth turn on the track diagram. When NASCAR runs at Phoenix, drivers can actually choose if they want to run the track with four or five turns. What I mean by that is there are no areas at Phoenix that are out of bounds. Drivers are allowed to cut the dogleg and go straight through there because there's no wall preventing them from doing so. But the transition from the banked track to the flat apron inside the dogleg is a bit rough on the cars, so if drivers cut the dogleg too often, they might damage some of the aerodynamic components on the underside of their cars.
Pocono Raceway is unique in that it only has turns 1, 2, and 3. It's a 2.5 mile track known as the tricky triangle. After turn 3, the text "WHAT TURN 4?" is printed on the SAFER barrier. It's a unique track that has a very fast and wide frontstretch and three distinct turns with different radii and banking. In some respects, Pocono actually races like a road course instead of an oval. Pocono also a neat grandstand, which has similar architecture to Churchill Downs.
Finally, I should mention Chicagoland Speedway, which NASCAR hasn't raced at since 2019. It's unique in that it's a tri-oval with a curved backstretch. I've read that when this track was designed, there were plans that grandstands could be built around the entirety of the track should the sport grow that much. That never happened, but NASCAR had some wild ideas when the sport was booming during the 1990s. I don't know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if the curved backstretch was to allow better sight lines if stands were ever built at that end of the track, much like why a lot of tracks are tri-ovals or quad-ovals instead of true ovals. Despite the backstretch being curved, it was not considered a turn, and the track just had the normal turns 1, 2, 3, and 4.
That's probably way more than you or anyone else ever wanted to know about NASCAR ovals. They're weird, and I don't think anyone has a good definition of what actually constitutes a turn.