As the 2024 season rolls to a finish, I leave you with a few facts that didn’t make it into stories this year.
Weights and Measures
- A NASCAR race car weighs roughly the same as eight reindeer. I don’t see Santa switching from hoof stock to stock cars to pull his sleigh, however.
- The weight of a full NASCAR field — cars and drivers — is roughly equal to about 11 African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) or 24 African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclones).
- The breadth of a New Hampshire moose’s antlers is approximately one Austin Cindric. One Austin Cindric is about 15.4 Martinsville hog dogs.
Banking
- The banking at Talladega is so steep that, even if the turns were ice covered and had no friction, a race car could still turn at 100 mph.
- Las Vegas’ steepest banking (20 degrees) isn’t even half the banking of the Luxor hotel’s pyramid (about 50.6 degrees)
Distances
- A Cup Series driver who completed the entire 2024 schedule would have driven 12,733 miles. That’s equivalent to:
- About half the distance around the world at the equator.
- 1.6 trillion Martinsville hot dogs laid end to end
- 23,733.5 laps around Martinsville
- 3,734 laps around COTA. Given that it took 163 minutes to run 68 laps last March, running the entire season at COTA in one race would take about 6.2 days of 24/7 racing.
MARTINSVILLE, VA - APRIL 01: Martinsville Slider hot dogs are prepared in a concession stand prior to the start of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Goody’s Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway on April 1, 2012 in Martinsville, Virginia. (Photo by Tyler Barrick/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Getty Images for NASCAR
Energy and Power
- A Cup Series car traveling at 190 mph has the same energy as is stored in 2.2 pounds of TNT.
- In one hour, a 670-horsepower engine puts out the same energy as is contained in 1,696 jelly doughnuts.
- Consider a jelly doughnut that has 250 Calories. Calories are one unit for measuring energy. The energy in food is no different from the energy contained in other types of fuel.
- In round numbers, one jelly doughnut contains 1.05 million joules worth of energy.
- Since the output of a 670 horsepower engine is 1.77 trillion joules, you need 1969 donuts to represent the same energy as the hourly engine output.
Time
- Excluding the six races that ended under caution, the total margin of victory from all 30 races in the 2024 season is 38.721 seconds.
- The margin of victory at Kansas was one one-thousandth of a second — roughly the time it takes for one neuron in your brain to fire and relax again.
The margin of victory at Atlanta was 0.003 seconds — the amount of time it takes for a housefly to flap its wings once. The 0.006 second margin of victory at the second Talladega race is about the wing-flap time of a honeybee.
- A race car moving at 204 miles per hour will cover one football field each second. A car going 60 mph would need 3.4 seconds to cover the same distance.
Miscellaneous
- Because sound travels faster through solids and liquids than through air, you can ‘hear’ the sound of the a field of cars coming to the start-finish line through your bones.
- Austin Cindric wears a bow tie because he played the tuba in school. When you’re dealing with a giant piece of metal containing numerous tubes and springs, the absolute last thing you want is to have your tie get caught on your instrument and go out like Isadora Duncan.
