Bob Barnard Track Engineering

I had a lazy day yesterday after being up watching the F1 race from Melbourne, and what a good race it was. So, I tuned in to the NASCAR race from Bristol.

Now I should tell you that in US sport folklore there are two stadiums where you cannot buy a seat, you have to wait till someone dies. These are Green Bay in the NFL, and Bristol. Well there must have been an epidemic in Tennessee as to me it looked two thirds empty! Shocked is the only word to describe my reaction. As you will know if you read my blog recently about the death of spectator racing this is how most race tracks look, and NASCAR has been struggling, but this was something different. If you cannot fill more than a third of the seats at Bristol then you are in real trouble. It seems you can tinker with the way the cars look, and I do prefer the current crop, but if there is something inherently wrong then that is not going to fix it. You cannot keep on blaming the economy, it is slowly recovering, and there is a great crop of good young drivers, so what is going on here?

Spectator motorsport in the US is dying, and I suspect that Europe is not far behind. OK, NASCAR can still fill half the stands, which is still a big crowd, but it is not what it was. Look at the Nationwide and Truck series and see who turns up. And then there is the Daytona 24 hour, arguably the best field of drivers put together for a race in the US, and it used to be a serious world wide event. I couldn't be bothered to watch most of it, and even less spectators turned up despite the best efforts of the SPEED Team to beat it up. So what happened? ALMS/Grand-Am combined is not going to change the series from a "back gate" supported basis, i.e. those that race pay entry fees to go race. Rich boys toys. IndyCar is going nowhere, and let's not even talk about motorcycle road racing. Supercross and Monster Trucks are what people seem to want to watch.

We saw the announcement today that the once mighty British F3 series, what was THE proving ground for young talent, is down to 4 rounds this year for lack of entries. The Italian F3 is cancelled altogether. Marussia let Timo Glock go because they have no money to pay him, they need a driver to pay them. How long can they go on?  So Glock is off to the DTM, which seems to have a clue how to make this work. Perhaps it is the three manufacturers paying for it? The Australian V8Supercars also seemed to have a formula for success, but now a venture capital firm owns it watch out. They are off the bill in Abu Dhabi, and the entry of Nissan and Mercedes will not please the Holden/Ford faithful, especially if they win!

Bernie for once is faced with a less than full calendar due to promoters and Governments not willing or able to meet his price. Are the cracks in the business model starting to show?

So what's wrong? Motorsport is expensive. It costs a lot more than a tennis racket and a pair of shoes to go play. Would be professionals, their families or sponsors, have to spend millions to get anywhere near the top and make money. Even at the top, F1, very few drivers are earning and not paying. Compare this with the three major, and successful sports here in the US. Football, Basketball and Baseball. All have systems in place to develop talent, either through colleges or minor leagues, knowing that their success depends totally upon new players coming in to keep filling the seats. Players get there on merit, not money. Motorsport, apart from a few schemes, has no such succession planning in place, not even for Bernie! The money gets sucked out, and nothing is going back to make people want to watch.

Now this is somewhat simplistic, as there are other social and generational factors going on, but that is the point. The game is changing and no one in charge is doing anything to make sure motor sport survives, and electric racing is not the solution.

Our patience usually. Here we are with withdrawal symptoms from a cold and dark winter with no racing and needing something to stir the blood. What do we get? Testing. Just to show how irrelevant testing is, yesterday Hulkenburg in the Force India is fastest, and Senna in the Williams is among the slowest. Today Maldanado sets the fastest time of the week, in the Williams, and Di Resta in the Force India is way off the pace!

While testing does not show us who is really quick, it does throw up who is in trouble. HRT are not here at all and Marussia are running last year's car. Nothing much changing there. Lotus have a real problem with their chassis design and called off this week's test after seven laps when Grosjean said the car felt strange. Back to the factory. Ferrari are not on the pace and Alonso is saying the car is hard to understand. Sound familiar?

Indycar is testing the "Car of Today", the DW12, on ovals, and the drivers believe the problems have been solved with the handling. Pity there will not be many ovals left for them to drive on.

Over in Jerez di Puniet on the Aprilia powered CRT is putting in some good times, about 0.3 secs a lap off the Ducatti of Hector Barbera, which is better than the 5 seconds Colin Edwards managed, but it is a Ducatti and not the Honda, so let's not get too excited. The Duke is better this year by the sound of it, but still not on the pace of the Hondas.

World Superbike kicks off its season at Phillip Island, and testing there has seen a fair share of injuries. Leon Haslam for one has had surgery and may not start. Let's wait and see if Checa can keep it going from last year. He has been quick in testing so far.

NASCAR has its Dual 125's today, so I guess you can say the season has started.

30 days to go for the F1 season to start, and Australia loses its major sponsor, DHL! Of course good old QANTAS will step in, for a lot less I bet, but the CEO says sponsorship, corporate, ticket sales are all up! And they forecast to only lose $56m this year! But it is better value for money than the tennis.

Bahrain continues to be a political "bun fight" with British politicians and peers of the realm taking opposing sides of "should we go or not." Joe Saward has booked his ticket so it sounds as though it is on. Bernie had better be right "that it is only a couple of kids in trouble with the police." Nice one as always Bernie.  Like the guys in Sao Paulo just wanting to sell Jenson Button a hat. 

Sir Jackie Stewart says he is very concerned at the lack of information coming out of Austin, as well he might. Meanwhile, was anyone else shocked at the amount of empty seats at the NASCAR race in Texas last weekend? With the "Chase" nearly over and two main guys duking it out for the title you still cannot sell tickets! NASCAR is in big trouble.

Another who is looking more in trouble is Bernie. The German court activity has at last woken the sleeping giant, the British tax man, to have a look at what Bernie has been doing and why. This should be interesting.

Great to see Alex Zanardi winning the hand bicycle class in the New York Marathon, you cannot keep a competitor down. On to the Olympics!

Just as you can't stop Kimi from racing it seems. Talks have been confirmed for him to come back to F1 with Williams.

Sorry for the gap in blogs, been on the road to check out our new home in Raleigh, NC. Still, it is quietening down with the seasons ending. I am surprised at the lack of comment my previous blog provoked, but we will fix this one way or another.

The events of the last couple of weeks have given me pause to reflect on how life and death are flip sides of the same coin, and how often whether people survive or die an incident is based on how the flip of that coin goes. We are mortal and will die, although I have seen too many people in racing who think they are immortal!

We see Dan Wheldon die in an accident we have seen many times before with results ranging from drivers walking away to fatalities. Mike Conway's accident at Indy kept him out of racing for a year, but he recovered from what looked a similar incident. Indeed, I think 15 cars were involved at Las Vegas, and most of the drivers walked. Talking of the number of cars, much has been made of 34 cars on a 1.5 mile track. Tune in this weekend to watch NASCAR run 43 cars on a half mile paper clip oval. Any comment Jimmie Johnson?

We see Marco Simoncelli die in a simple get off that he and many others have had over the years. Kevin Schwantz at Phillip Island two years in a row! Marco was just in the wrong place this time, as was the Moto2 rider a year or so ago.

While we were mourning these two great competitors three others from off-road racing died in a plane crash. How many times have we seen this with sportsmen, especially motorsport, rushing from one event to another? Rick Hendrick's great loss of a few years ago, Graham Hill, former F1 Champion killed after he stopped racing, and David Coulthard walking away from a fatal crash where the pilots died. I see a great friend, Skip Jackson, Australian Sprint Car Champion and Knoxville fan favorite, be diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer at the age of 42, after a purely fortuitous blood test, and survive. Chance. Then there is that great Austrlian driver, Peter "Perfect" Brock who died after retiring in a fun rally driving a replica Cobra Coupe built by his American namesake. What were the odds of that?

So where does falibility come in. Everything we do involves us humans, and we are all falible. When I see a fatal crash I think of the tracks I've built or approved and think "there but for the grace of God go I." As I have said in presentations on track design, we are becoming over-reliant on simulation and computers, and too clever for our own good as a result. As it happens I received my monthly copy of the Engineers Australia magazine yesterday, and there are three articles related to this. One is from a forensic accident investigator who writes, "No matter how hard we try to prevent these events, they will still happen because we are all human and errors will occur despite our best efforts." He goes on to say "New processes and materials are constantly arriving on the market, and the uses to which they are put constantly changes. What doesn't change seems to be the human factor. Insurance records historically show that about 50% of all accidents are directly related to human error and that figure has hardly changed over the years."

In the same magazine is a report of the brand new grandstand in Wollongong, yes there is such a place, being damage by high winds. This is the structure we are talking of, not the roof panels. How does that happen in this day of computer analysis? At college in the mid-sixties we had to analyse by hand and slide rule the new cantilever grandstand roof at the Sheffield Wednesday soccer ground. This obviously had been originally designed a few years earlier just the same way, but still stands to this day without incident.

So to sum up. I have been known to say that track design is more art than science. One of my favorite engineering sayings is "it's more art than science, but at least we are doing the art more scientifically these days." The following quote is also from the Engineers magazine, and I wish I had know it earlier. It is a 1960's definition of structural engineering, but I think you will see the message."Structural Engineering is the art of moulding materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyse, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the community at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." Touche.