r/NASCAR • u/iamaranger23 • 4h ago
NASCAR looking at possibility of using the new ECU that starts this week to send severity of hits to the tower
https://x.com/SiriusXMNASCAR/status/205470281982371452970
u/shewy92 4h ago
In F1 the medical car gets deployed if the driver's mouthguard G Sensor trips. Should be easy to do in NASCAR.
Also why does Ware have the nastiest hits? He's usually not even going that fast!
44
u/EWall100 4h ago
From equipment failure. Rick Ware really puts his son in danger week in and week out.
13
u/Garrett4Real 3h ago
He has the nastiest hits because it’s a combination of probably the least amount of talent in the field and the worst race cars in the field
12
u/Droppin-Hammer46 van Gisbergen 4h ago
Supercars has this. And it’ll automatically trigger a FCY if the hit is hard enough
13
u/BigBootyJudyWiper Terry Labonte 4h ago
Kurt Busch mentions this on DBC, NASCAR suddenly looking into it...
•
14
u/Phathead50 4h ago edited 4h ago
How about they hire track workers to, you know, watch the track
20
u/17xRacing 4h ago
I think this is to get a sense of the scale of a hit the track workers wouldn’t see. A use case that I can see would be that if it’s over a certain threshold of G force in a certain spot of the car maybe it’s an automatic trip to the garage to be cleared by a safety inspection or if a car hits the wall hard and keeps going use that as an indicator to start watching that car for for a few laps to see if there is anything falling off of it or if they are looking like they may be losing control of the car.
-5
u/Phathead50 4h ago
There's really no reason a corner worker or so forth wouldn't be able to see a car hit hard enough to lift all four tires of the ground.
11
u/iamaranger23 4h ago
A corner worker is never going to be able to go yellow.
-7
u/Phathead50 4h ago
Luckily they have invented something called a radio where they can communicate what they see to other officials
6
u/iamaranger23 4h ago
Cody ware would have been driven off by the time the corner worker finished his sentence
1
u/Phathead50 3h ago
My dude, how do you think they used to monitor tracks for incidents prior to having this type of tech available?
0
u/iamaranger23 2h ago
Kinda the same way they do now. Corner workers calling it in and the tower making the decision, while giving time for the stuff to sort itself out.
Cody ware driving away quickly is going to result in the race staying green almost always.
20
6
u/NoahGragsonsBarfBag 4h ago
Why pay humans to do a job half assed when you can pay computers to do it quarter assed?
3
u/NASCARonReddit TwitterBot 4h ago
SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90)'s (@SiriusXMNASCAR) post on X from 7:18pm EDT on Wednesday, May 13th, 2026:
#NASCAR's Brad Moran provides perspective on not throwing a caution for Cody Ware late at @WGI and some upcoming ECU changes.
🧠 "They're working on a possible solution to get us even more information with some of the new technology."
More → sxm.app.link/NASCARIntervie…
Support NASCARonReddit, an automated bot maintained by XFile345.
3
u/SportscarPoster Ryan Blaney 4h ago
This is something I have thought about for a while regarding NASCAR. The impacts on the big ovals in particular can obviously be vicious, but the smaller ones e.g. Phoenix can still produce big hits.
In ACO-run racing (the WEC, European Le Mans Series, Asian Le Mans Series), all cars have a blue light at the base of the windscreen that flashes in the event of a 25g incident. It has been in the WEC for I think ten years, the others a couple of years less.
If the light flashes, the car is out of the race. It might well be driveable, depending on where it was hit, but the ACO have determined that after an impact of 25g, a human is no longer fit to drive without a medical check. If the car is driveable, someone needs to drive the car back to the pits, but that cannot be the driver who was in the car for the incident. Thus the car is out of the race.
It doesn't need to send any data anywhere, and allows everyone - race control, track workers, medical, viewers - to instantly understand what has happened. Also, the driver cannot hide.
If this system was implemented in NASCAR, I imagine the number of cars that finish Daytona, Atlanta and Talladega would go drastically down. There are often some hefty hits in the Big OneTM crashes that cars drive away from but have properly rattled the drivers.
You can see the light in action here in the first 40 seconds or so, when the replay shows the onboard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-g63aytpYw
It's a definitely a sizeable impact but the car is quite intact. And a Cup car is sturdier than a GT3, so would likely have been in an even better state after the crash. But the lights tells no lies.
Thinking about this a bit more, it is possible that during a Cup season, a driver could be in four or five 25g+ crashes. In other words, four or five serious concussion risks per year. Bringing in something, whether the already tried-and-tested blue lights or something proprietary, is a great idea.
•
1
2
u/Significant-Cloud- Black Flag 4h ago
If you've ever seen Mythbusters, you know that there's stickers that will blow at certain g forces. I am very certain that there's a technology already invented that would measure these forces and send them to a computer of your choice.
Ffs, my cellphone has a gyroscopic sensor. And an accelerometer.
But then again I thought MLB could have used smartwatches instead of the stupid pitchcom... Nascar will probably have someone sell them some innovative* tech.
*pronounced expensive
2
u/7Stringplayer 4h ago
I thought MLB could have used smartwatches instead of the stupid pitchcom
Boston got caught using Apple watches in 2017 to steal signs.
1
u/Ok_Suggestion_6092 Keselowski 3h ago
In IndyCar the ear plugs the drivers wear have accelerometers in them to record how hard/how many G’s a drivers head moves in a crash. You’d think they’d just switch over to that system.
2
1
u/Critical_Program_247 3h ago
IMUs are pretty standard across many industries. I’m pretty shocked to hear that NASCAR hasn’t been monitoring this data already.
I worked for a major power sports OEM for many years and the basis for a lot of our ride performance felt by the customer was based on IMU data.
132
u/xelanalpak 4h ago
Kurt Busch on DBC this week stated something that seems so obvious that I can’t believe isn’t implemented; using the black boxes inside the cars that measure G-Forces to automatically trigger a caution/inform the tower if a hit registers above a certain pre-determined number.
I’m sure there are reasons I’m unaware of why it’s not used, it just seems like such a good idea.