racing

A pit crew swarms around an open-wheel racecar, but instead of hoisting a fuel-fill tank they hot-swap its battery packs and send the driver back into the race. That could be the scene at next year's TTXGP -- an all-electric motorcycle race set for its inaugural running this Friday on the UK's Isle of Man. The event's organizers announced this week they were seeking to include four-wheeled vehicles for 2010.

The National Science Foundation and NASCAR have teamed up for a new video series that explains the science of car racing in depth (trailer above). "The Science of Speed" videos go straight to the track to show all the tricks racers use to get the most velocity out of a hunk of metal on four wheels.

The run-up to the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race is always a nail-biting enterprise for race teams. Naturally, techs are most concerned with assuring cars' ability to sustain the day-night race, which is the ultimate test for GT cars and sportscar prototypes that will wind through the Circuit of the Sarthe -- on a combination of racetrack and public roads -- in Le Mans, Sarthe, France. This year there's an added kink keeping teams up nights. It appears the gods of aerodynamics have been sending LeMans prototype-class racecars into the ether with a cosmic finger flick.

Back in 1946, Mechanix Illustrated writer "Uncle" Tom McCahill began measuring cars' performance by how quickly he could launch them from a standing start to 60 miles per hour. That measure, evocative in its simplicity, quickly became the standard for judging a passenger car's performance, and a perfect proxy for advertisers to capture the excitement of driving in a single phrase. Zero to 60 in a scorching 5.5 seconds!

Making Formula One racing "greener" may be as much a marketing decision as a policy of corporate responsibility. But according to F1 officials, there's another reason to do so. The series has been moving further out of sync with the technical direction of the passenger car industry, which increasingly has fuel economy on the brain. F1 was always intended to be a bellwether, not a rogue element. That's one reason why, beginning in 2009 Formula One racing will introduce a hybrid-drive system into the series. If you want a sneak preview of how a hybrid setup might work in a racing application, keep an eye on how well one oddly named race car performs in next month's 24 Hours of Nürburgring endurance challenge in Germany next month.