Our faculty experts have always been able to find the extraordinary in the everyday.

Throughout this week, thousands of NASCAR fans will flock to our fair city for race weekend at Richmond International Raceway (RIR). During the excitement, fans likely aren’t thinking about the science behind the track, but Christine Helms, assistant professor of physics, sees beyond the cars, drivers, and crashes.

When it comes to increasing speed, Helms explains that cars can go faster in bigger curves. At RIR, that would be turns 1 and 4. Banking, or the steepness built into the track, at RIR allows cars to go approximately 1.3 times faster than they could go without banking.

“Having no turns would allow a driver to go faster, but that wouldn’t be much fun as a spectator,” Helms says. “The turns on the track are what provide the excitement."

Christine Helms

“Cars naturally want to keep going in the direction they are originally going so to maneuver a turn, a force must be applied,” she explains. “Banking of turns — 14 degrees at RIR — allow the force of the road pushing up on the car (normal force) to assist the friction of the tires. Both supply a force toward the center of the track.”

Helms estimates that a driver rounding turns 2 and 3 at RIR can feel accelerations up to approximately 4gs (g-force, pull of gravity). But if banking is a driver’s best friend, collisions are his or her worst enemy.

Collisions can lead to decelerations of 80gs or more, and the walls on a track are meant to absorb energy and extend the time of a collision to reduce impact.

“Any way to prolong the length of time of the collision reduces the force and usually dissipates the energy elsewhere, for example to the deformation of the walls or to sound production. When you double the time of a collision you halve the average force of impact.”

Even more fascinating? Racecar drivers age less than the rest of us on race day.

According to special relativity, Helms explains that moving through space faster slows down time. So, after one race traveling 200 mph for 3.5 hours a driver is 0.5 nanoseconds younger than the rest of us. If a driver raced nonstop at 200 mph for the next 50 years, he would be 70 microseconds younger.

But maybe don’t take up racing just to age slower.

“For relativity to have a large effect, you must be moving close to the speed of light — 670 million mph,” Helms says.