I’ve seen Nascar crashes where a car going 180 goes sideways into a wall, and then gets t-boned by other cars that were also going 180 mph and yet no rollover and the cars barely look damaged and everyone walks away unscathed. Meanwhile normal passenger cars go sideways doing 50mph and they roll over 6 times, gets demolished, and kills the driver. What is it about Nascar cars that make them so crash resistant/resilient?
In: Engineering
Others have commented on some of the design aspects that make them tough. But as to WHY they are built so tough comapred to other types of similarly-fast race cars (F1, indy/cart racing, etc) its their origin as actual stock-based cars.
Stock Car racing really started in the prohibition era. The guys who went around trasnporting illegally-made liquor were called moonshiners or moonshine runners. To keep off the radar of law enforcement, they would typically do this in normal-looking everyday sedan cars. But under the bodywork these cars were souped-up with high perofrmance motors (to escape from cops), beefy susepnsions so they handled better and could take the abuse of driving fast down back-country roads, and handle the load of several hundred pounds of liquor and bottles. As often happens with men (especially rednecks), eventually this turned into unofficial competitions to see who had the fastest car. Even after prohibition ended, this style of racing (driving cars with stock-looking bodywork but tricked out motors, chasses, suspensions etc) stayed popular in the south. Eventually this would go on to become what we now call NASCAR (Nat’l Association for **Stock Car** Automotive RAcing). In the 50s and 60s this really blew up, as the major US auto manufacturers found that a racing series that had car that looked JUST LIKE the cars in their showrooms was great marketing, especially as the perofmrance “muscle car” era took off. The expression was “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” (most NASCAR races are held on Sundays). OVer time the cars bcame more and more race-car-like, and bore less and less resemblance to their actual stock cars. Where now we’ve got “Stock car” races where none of the cars look like actual stock cars being offered for sale, and many of them are “models” of cars that arent even sold anymore.
However, those roots in “stock car” racing still influence the overall type of car built. They aren’t “open wheel” cars like F1 or Indy/CART racing (where the wheels are totally exposed, not contained inside the bodywork). This alone makes the cars a lot more tolerant of crashes and slight bumps during the race (the tires and suspension are protected from a lot of impacts). They also tend to be a LOT heavier, since they have to maintain a vaguely-stock-ish appearance (full bodywork). A lot of little things like that baked into the car requirements leftover from their roots as stock cars, that make the cars inherently heavier, beefier and a bit tougher than other top-tier (and somewhat faster as a result) racing series.
End result is that NASCAR has a lot more incidental contact during a race (“rubbing is racing” is a common expression), little bumps and minor collisions and wall-scrapes that would compeltely disable an F1 car and possibly kill the driver happen doens of times in a race. Hell, even the agressiveness of the race series is impacted. A lower-tier NASCAR driver might pass more vehicles in a single race that the F1 driver who wins the awards for the most passes during an entire SEASON. Passing in F1 is a lot more fraught, andy contact could spell disaster. Not so much NASCAR
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