Bristol, Tennessee

Its the big one - the NASCAR race I look forward to the most. And I don't even live in the country, I may not even watch all of it live!

For the uninitiated, the race I'm talking about is the Irwin Tools Night Race, previously known as the Sharpie 500. As the title suggests, its a night race of 500 laps, which comes to around a 266.5 mile race length. The compact and close nature of Bristol Speedway means that the action here is close, fast and verging on dangerous. In the Nationwide race recently, Kahne ended up driving on the concrete wall after being forced up due to the narrow nature of Bristol.

See y'all at the race!

In Defense of Touring Cars

Today I have decided to do something extraordinary - a post that is actually motor sport-related. I also write out of growing anger for those who attack all forms of touring cars in motor-sports, accusing them of being slow (an average of 100mph is slow?), outdated (again, how?), and even out of touch with the modern world, something which I vehemently disagree with.

Firstly, entertainment value. I struggle, really I do, to think of a single other form of motor-sport that is as fun to watch as Touring Cars. Drifting is pretty cool to watch, NASCAR is good to watch for close finishes, and F1...well, F1 isn't really watched for entertainment purposes.

Touring Cars have everything - they have overtaking. They have bold and bright liveries, and they even have crashes for those who like to watch crashes in motor-sports, and lets be honest here, although most of use wince and grimace at horrific crashes such as Mark Webber's "Gives You Wings" accident, crashes do add interest to what we're watching.

Secondly, speed. Lets compare average speeds between F1 and the BTCC, my personal favourite touring car series, both at high speed venues. Silverstone is regarded as being a reasonably fast circuit. The new Arena layout measure 5.891 km, with the new laptime record for 2010 being a 1:30.874. Doing the maths means that this comes out to give an average lap speed of 144 mph. Looking at Thruxton, a high-speed BTCC circuit, this circuit measures 3.793km, with the BTCC lap record being 1:16.369. This works out at an average speed of about 111mph.

So the speed difference between the multi-million dollar-sucking F1, and the so-called cheap and "pathetic" BTCC, on similar circuits in terms of how quick they are compared to other circuits on their respective calendars, is 33mph. Slow? Right...

And then when we look at the slowest circuits on the two calendars, the difference really does get rather sparse. In F1, the slowest circuit is arguably Monaco, with a length of 3.41 km, and a laptime of 1:14.439, which is a record nigh-on 6 years old. Laptimes now are now a little slower. This means an average speed of 100mph. Comparing this to the BTCC's slowest circuit, Brands Hatch Indy, the length is 1.22 miles, with a lap record of 48.857 seconds. This is an average speed of 91.5 mph. The difference is under 10mph. That's a bicycles-worth in speed.

So, they're arguably not that slow, and we now come on to the last point, which is how relevant they are to the modern world. To be fair, this isn't a comment that is made often, but I have seen it posted on the internet when people refer to its entertainment value, and label it "Boy-racerish".

Again, lets compare the two. F1 is a multi-million dollar business, with tickets costing a ridiculous amount, to see cars that have as much resemblance to your street car as a detached house. By comparison, the BTCC is all about racing cars that you can see and recognise on the street today. In terms of relevance, F1 doesn't even come close.

And I haven't even started on other forms of motorsport...

(Of course, the best way to compare would be to put both on the same track, but unfortunately the only way we can do that is in a video game like rFactor. This is something which I'll do in a later post)