Should NASCAR Review Speedometer Policies?
Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Show your support.
Buzz this article up.
Imagine you fly off on vacation, get your reserved car from the car rental facility, only to find out the speedometer isn’t working.
No big deal, you say to yourself, you’re good at estimating speeds. So, you carry on, pull onto the nearest freeway and immediately get pulled over by a cop for speeding.
“But I didn’t know how fast I was going because the speedometer isn’t working,” you plead your case to the cop, who’s having nothing of it, continuing to write a ticket despite your best objections.
That’s kind of the situation drivers in NASCAR have faced for decades. Instead of allowing speedometers to show speeds on-track, as well as coming onto and off pit road, NASCAR uses an antiquated system where drivers must judge their speed based upon the engine revolutions being shown on their car’s tachometer, as well as an electronics system using sensors within the car tied into the scoring and timing system, plus external radar at the entrance and exit to pit road.
NASCAR has said it doesn’t want to use speedometers because, at the very least, they can be doctored. At the other end of the spectrum, even if there are no doctored speedometers, there still could be an appreciable difference in speedo readings from one car to another, depending upon manufacturer, etc.
I can understand that logic. NASCAR officials don’t want any hanky panky when it comes to having drivers and officials know the real speed a car is doing at any one point on the racetrack.
But in light of what happened to Juan Pablo Montoya in Sunday’s Allstate 400 at the Brickyard – by the way, Allstate announced Monday that its sponsorship of the race has ended, and the event will likely return to its original name of the Brickyard 400 – maybe its time to reexamine the whole issue of having speedometers in cars.
If we can have black box data recorders in NASCAR race cars and trucks, not to mention the most up-to-date safety equipment possible, would it really be that difficult to include some type of speedometer in every car that would be unable to be doctored and would provide speed readings with pinpoint accuracy?
With the exception of maybe bicycles, farm tractors and forklifts, virtually every mode of transportation and conveyance I know of has a speedometer in the dash, be it a car, airplane, motorcycle, train or boat.
NASCAR currently gives teams rear wings, restrictor plates and tires in each race to assure that everyone has a level playing field. You mean to tell me there’s no way to install a sealed, self-contained, easy to install (and remove) speedometer unit in each car before a race weekend to give drivers an exact reference point to how fast they’re going?
And then the speedos are removed after each race, sent back to NASCAR’s Research and Development Center in Concord, N.C.
If Montoya had a speedometer in Sunday’s race, he would likely have gone on to win it, rather than being slapped with a speeding onto pit road violation that brought about a pass-through penalty and an eventual 11th-place finish, a disappointing far cry from the domination Montoya showed in the race up to the point of the violation.
Reporters aren’t supposed to pull for one driver over the other, but I second what Montoya said over his team radio: that he got screwed.
He wound up being 5.11 mph over the so-called “speed limit” on pit road, with the first five mph over the limit being forgiven. Ergo, he was penalized for being just .11 mph in excess.
I challenge anyone who can tell me if they’re going slightly over 5 mph and realize it. For example, without looking down at your dashboard, can you accurately tell if you’re driving 55 or 61 mph? I can’t, and I doubt there’s very few others that can.
So why must NASCAR think its drivers can do something that is virtually humanly impossible to do?
