Traction Control & NASCAR

Traction control: Rumors out of control, NASCAR says
By DAVID POOLE
The Charlotte Observer

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - NASCAR officials spent an hour Saturday explaining why they believe, contrary to rampant rumors in the garage, that electronic traction control is not being used in Winston Cup, Grand National and Truck series racing.
"We cannot say anything for sure. But we can say it's very highly unlikely that anybody has run it," said Gary Nelson, NASCAR's managing director of competition. "If they did, they're pretty slick. Any car that we've looked at it hasn't had anything like that. We would react if we found it."

Nelson, Winston Cup director John Darby and Winston Cup technical director Steve Peterson said the key reason NASCAR believes it can police its rule against traction control is that no electronic processors are allowed in its racing vehicles.

"The ignition systems we have in our cars are all strictly analog," Peterson said. "... With digital controls, you can reprogram something or try to design in a program. With analog controls you cannot. You have to physically change components. You have to change a resistor or a component on a circuit board. So with analog controls in our controls, it's easy for us to compare the ignition box we have, which is an approved box from the manufacturer, to what the team has.

"We can compare and see that all of the circuitry is the same and there's not something hidden inside. Because there's not a controller or processor imbedded in those boxes, there's nothing that can be reprogrammed, retimed or retuned."

Electronic traction control systems, in a matter of milliseconds, monitor the car's systems and adjust the power being delivered to the wheels so that the wheels don't spin, losing traction.

"One of the things that analog controls have to have is a wire from point A to point B," Darby said. "If a processor is somehow installed into that system and the engine is required to make a change, we're real confident in the fact that it has to be done from a wire somewhere, somehow.

"Specifically, it needs to be a wire somewhere that's responsible for part of an ignition control. All of our approved ignition boxes are required to have a certain number of wires both in and out."

Darby and Nelson said NASCAR inspectors frequently disassemble wiring systems to trace each of the wires that are allowed to make sure no other signals are being introduced. Connections are sealed by NASCAR inspectors so that a processor could not be installed surreptitiously after inspection but before the race begins.

"We're trying to educate the media not to get snowed by a guy who had a bad race," Nelson said, addressing the persistent rumors in the garage. "When you look at our racing, if there are 43 guys on the track, only one wins.

"If the others are on their way home and you catch them going out the gate, they may tell you there's some magic formula that caused them to get beat."

Nelson reiterated that no team has been caught with such a device in NASCAR's three top series since a 1995 incident in the Truck series.

Darby said anyone caught using electronic control in competition would likely face penalties "way above" a monetary fine.

[Walrus_3]

Whadda think HS,
Are they really keepin' it under control? That was a convincing sounding piece.

[kat2220]

Thanks HS. I needed the education but I'll bet you'll get a lot of :argue:

I appreciate the info. PURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I don't know yet Walrus. There is a lot of info to process here.

First let me post the entire transcript from the press conference. I haven't finished reading it all yet myself and may not have the technical expertise to make a sound judgement.

There are things here that I did not know and things are probably left unanswered.

Warning this is very long !!!!

Transcript of traction control discussion
ThatsRacin.com Report

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - NASCAR president Mike Helton along with series officials Gary Nelson, John Darby and Steve Peterson met with the media Saturday afternoon at Daytona International Speedway to discuss electronic traction control and their rumored use in NASCAR's top series. Here is a partial transcript of that session and the questions and answers that followed:

MIKE HELTON: We wanted to give you the opportunity to pick our brains a little bit and kind of clear the air. In the drivers' meeting at Martinsville when we held up a couple of pieces that we had purchased, trying to stay up with the car owners and the crew chiefs in the garage area and understanding traction control and the technology advances that have gotten traction control where it is.

The fact is that at least for today the rule for NASCAR racing is no traction control. We don't know what the future holds, but that is the rule today. We're here to police it and be sure that if there's a rule that says no traction control that we do everything we can to be sure there's not.

We feel like we've been doing that. Behind the scenes during the week we pretend like we're crew chiefs and car owners and we search out opportunities and track down myths and rumors that this is what I can do for you, that they can't find to try to stay ahead of the game. That brought us to the Martinsville drivers' meeting where we held up a couple of pieces that we knew were out there and knew they would work. But we knew how they had to work.

It seems like ever since then there has been some debate. So we thought we would take today and first of all explain to you and remind you about the inspection process being out in the open before and after the race and the detail of the inspection process, particularly after the race is over with. Some of you have wandered around during the inspection process and you've seen the parts and pieces laying out there - the wiring harnesses and all the different components we do after the race is over.

We also wanted to take an opportunity to address some of the issues that we've heard of and read about and some of the myths and rumors that go on in the garage area about traction control. Gary, I will let you start explaining the process.


GARY NELSON: When you think about traction control, a driver has the processor in his head. He determines how much to push on the throttle pedal to control his traction. The driver right now controls traction by stepping on the gas pedal. His sensors are the seat of his pants, the G-forces and all of the different signals he gets through his vehicle to his brain, which processes those signals and tells him how much to step on the gas pedal.

Along come electronic processors, computers. Inside a little box there is a processor that takes information from a sensor. The particular one I have here hooks to the tachometer of the car. It takes the signal from the tachometer and compares it to an internal clock. When the tachometer is picking up RPMs too quickly, it says we must be spinning the wheels so let's back off on the ignition timing through the ignition system and back off the horsepower to get the tires to connect back to the race track.

When you really think about it, the human processor is a pretty efficient thing. The drivers who are out there winning races have very efficient processors. That's what makes them good drivers. They process the data in their heads and it tells their right foot how much to step on the gas to control traction.

Computers are able to process information more quickly than the human brain. It happens in milliseconds. The tire begins to spin, the driver without a traction control device other than his own internal processor controls it by the old term of driving the car like there's an egg between your foot and the gas pedal. These things (electronic traction control devices) can adjust the engine and the driver can just hold his foot to the floor and the traction is controlled through the processor inside the electronic system.

The idea these things can be controlled by somebody in the grandstands with a cell phone or through a GPS system or somebody in the motorhome in the infield, all of that is really way out there when you think about it. How could somebody in the grandstands with a device, number one, figure out in a millisecond that he needs to make an adjustment to the engine and, number two, whether the wheels are spinning? With all of the electronic stuff available in the world, how can somebody figure something like that out?

We're looking. We haven't said it's crazy, it's foolish or it's impossible. But we haven't found any experts anywhere in the country who will tell us you can do it without wiring into your car. The only way we can look at it is, through inspections, equipment like this had to be wired up in the processor. There is not a processor anywhere in any of this equipment today that is approved for a car.

In the past few years, we've taken a microphonics listening device that measures sound in a range - you know we've all heard the story where a dog can hear a whistle a human can't? - humans don't hear. We've stood down in the corners at a lot of race tracks along with the inventor of this equipment and listened to engines.

One thing that's interesting about listening to engines in the corners is that we've heard engines that sound right and later those cars have had failures. But we have not heard an engine being controlled by a processor that is causing the engine to lose power coming off the corners.

Steve, I will let you describe a little bit how the listening device works.


STEVE PETERSON: It listens in a range above 41,000 Khz, which is way out of the normal range of humans. Hearing a difference in the signal and matching that to some known quantities - if you have 40 cars going by, they don't all have traction control in them so you could pick out one, two, five or even 10 that sound different from the rest.

We're doing high-speed comparisons with this device. We also have the ability to take the same information and not only listen to it on the headphones, but put it on a computer graph and compare it at a later date. We have done that.

That would lead us toward some targets, and we would obviously have those cars in inspection and look more diligently at those than the ones we did not hear something from. We have taken cars completely apart in terms of the electronic system, traced every wire from point A to point B and whatever junctions it might make. We continue to do that every week, sometimes as many as 10 cars.


GARY NELSON: Steve, could you take a minute and explain the difference between analog and digital and how a system that is in a Winston Cup, Grand National or Truck vehicle is all analog?


STEVE PETERSON: The ignition systems that are the approved ignition amplifiers and distributors we have in our cars are all strictly analog signals.

Analog signals mean they sense through a sensor, in case the distributor when it goes by certain timing point that will turn the amplifier on and shoot some power to the coil. The coil will then fire a sparkplug. It's not something that's digitally controlled like your watch or camera or computer. The technology for analog electronics goes back in time and really stopped developing probably in the 1970s when computers and digital elements came along.

With digital controls, you can reprogram something or try to design in a program. From a laptop you send a program somewhere. With analog controls you cannot. You have to physically change components. You have to change a resistor or a component on a circuit board. So with analog controls in our controls, it's easy for us to compare the ignition box we have, which is an approved box from the manufacturer, to what the team has. We can compare and see that all of the circuitry is the same and there's not something hidden inside. Because there's not a controller or processor imbedded in those boxes now, there's nothing that can be reprogrammed, retimed or retuned from the stock box.


GARY NELSON: It's a digital world we live in, but fortunately we've kept that out of our cars. There is nothing digital that operates an engine on a NASCAR car. All of the other series in the world, Formula 1 in particular, that have decided to give up on what they call the war on traction control because they couldn't find it, they already had processors in their cars.

If you go to any of those kinds of races, all you see is downloading of information - data coming from the car to the technicians, who take that data and adjust the processors for fuel management. Even pit road speed is controlled on those cars by a processor. It takes a digital signal and makes decisions. That's what a processor, or a microprocessor, does. It makes decisions. It says OK, if this is happening, do this. An analog system cannot do that. All it can do is say this many volts in, this many volts out. It doesn't make decisions, it's just dumb.

We've been able to keep processors out of our cars and keep them analog. The tachometers are analog, everything is.

So, if I am a competitor and I want traction control in my car, I have to connect a processor to my car, I have to physically connect something that is smart, that is digital and that can make a decision quicker than I can as a driver.

That's where our inspection process comes in. John Darby has a great staff of guys and Steve has helped train them. John has come up with inspection processes that are open where we've completely disassembled cars. Many races this year we've heard grumbling from crew chiefs about how thorough the inspection was. It's all a part of it.

John, can you talk about how we look at those wiring harnesses and pull them apart?


JOHN DARBY: To look at Gary's and Steve's explanations of analog vs. digital controls, one of the things that analog controls have to have is a wire from point A to point B. If a processor is somehow installed into that system and the engine is required to make a change, we're real confident in the fact that it has to be done from a wire somewhere, somehow. Specifically, it needs to be a wire somewhere that's responsible for part of an ignition control.

All of our approved ignition boxes are required to have a certain number of wires both in and out. The connectors are very well described as to what they can and can't use in the rulebook. The distributors and all the rest of the ignition components are pretty well defined in the rulebook.

With the analog controls and lack of processors in our race cars today, it becomes a much easier function for an inspection purpose that if we trace each individual wire from point A to point B and reference it to what it actually does and ensure that there isn't somewhere midstream in that wiring harness than an additional signal is being allowed to enter, we're fairly confident everything is working like it should be.

We're accused many times of sometimes being a little antiquated in our rules, a little prehistoric. We're asked many times why we used normally aspirated mechanical carburetors vs. fuel injection. We get asked why we still use distributors instead of the new crank-triggered ignition systems. With all of those components we're secure in the fact they can work on their own independently. They don't need an additional control to help make them work. Fuel injection is completely controlled by a processor unit. The more advanced ignition systems are all required to have an electronic brain to make them function.

The more we can focus in our rulebook and in our inspection procedures in staying with the good old mechanical-actuated pieces, that eliminates the need for a processors. That keeps us in the analog world. Knowing nothing is controlled by processors makes the inspection process much easier to interpret and lay out in front of everybody in an open environment.

In stepping up our program, a lot of the critical ignition connectors that could be unplugged and reconnected by a driver or crew member in a last-minute mode, we now use lead wire seals to seal them together to ensure that if somebody was to disconnect to insert a piece like Gary was showing, the seal would be broken at the end of the race and somebody would have to explain how it got broken. We do that with a number of connectors all through the cars. We have different sealing tapes that we use for some of the smaller components that can be changed easily. That whole package together pretty much ensures us that the ignition system in the race cars that we look at today stay intact.


GARY NELSON: You hear competitors talk about traction control and we're starting to read stories and hear comments that so-and-so has got it and has been running it for five years. Our job is not only to write rules, but enforce the rules, and we feel that we've been out there enforcing the rules well and we feel we've done a great job on traction control. We'd say it's close to impossible, but we're going to step it up just a little bit more in our goal to make it impossible. We've got a fuel rules that we're working on to even take it to another level of security.

If we hear the comments and go look and we know 100 percent that we didn't find anything and there was nothing there, we still have to convince the garage there was nothing there. ... We go the extra yard to make sure the perception can't develop that there's something going on. We want to take that same theory to our ignition systems. You will hear some things in the near future about us moving things more out in the open, making them more visible to attain our goal of not only eliminating any possibility that somebody is breaking the rules, but eliminating the perception that somebody is. Sometimes that's even a harder challenge.

OK, Let's go to questions.


QUESTION: Clearly there are processors in telemetry boxes used for the television broadcasts and in the incident data recorders in these cars. How does that play into the equation considering your goal is keeping the microprocessors completely away from the cars?


GARY NELSON: That's real simple. Last summer when we were talking about the incident data recorders we had a very strict requirement goes from one wire to the car. There are no connections to anything in the car that make it operate. We have been very strict in any conversations we've had with the data recorder people, the telemetry box people and the television camera people. They don't hook one wire into the car's systems.


STEVE PETERSON: I think the important part is control. We control the TV boxes and telemetery boxes. They're put on when the cars come to the track and removed when the car leaves. They're inspected at least visually and many times beyond that by the people who work on them or our own inspectors. The black box data recorders are installed by NASCAR officials and removed by them. We're in control of those parts so someone can't attempt to take those components and modify them for their own use. We check the components we take out of cars on a random basis to make sure somebody hasn't made any attempt to reprogram or modify them. We also monitor signals coming out of those boxes. So we would know very quickly if someone tried to modify it.


QUESTION: Just to be clear, are you saying that the telemetry box that gives RPM and such back to the television broadcast is not connected to the car in any way?


STEVE PETERSON: What it has is a simple wire sensor that is just tie-wrapped onto a sparkplug wire or a coil wire. It's a tie wrap, but it's not hard-wired into the ignition system. We did that so the competitors would not have a concern that we could short out their ignition or cause them to miss out on the race track.

The sensor will sense an impulse. It doesn't have to connect into the wire itself, it can just be within a couple of inches of it. That's a good sensor to receive a signal, but you can't do anything with it until you take a signal, put it back into the telemetry box, process it and go on. It's kind of like a timing light. Exactly the same principle is used.


QUESTION: How big of a hammer are you guys holding over somebody who might get caught with this? What would happen?


JOHN DARBY: At the time that we did discover an unapproved electronic component in a car, obviously there's a group of us who would convene and ultimately issue a penalty. We don't have a catalog that we flip open and look up a number for a penalty that carries a predetermined sanction. But as Mike Helton in Martinsville did let everybody now, it would probably be one of the largest NASCAR has ever levied.


QUESTION: There are people in the Winston Cup garage who say they think they've been beaten by traction control devices. Can you speak to that perception? You're convinced it's not out there.


JOHN DARBY: Perception's a huge word and it's something we deal with. Many times perception starts to become reality.

A lot of times that comes from our teams go testing, and when a team goes for a private test it uses a lot of electronic components and processors and recorders and telemetry on their cars that they're not permitted to use once they come to an event and enter their car.

A new training device that many of the teams are using is traction control. Along with their telemetry in testing that reads how much a shock travels and what the throttle angle is, a new component is to actually install traction control in their cars to help train their drivers. A driver will go out and run 50 laps with the traction control device installed so he feels that feeling of having the egg between his foot and the accelerator. He understands how the car feels in the corner and how the traction is controlled. So he comes back in the garage and the crew chief removes the system from the car, he can train his human processor to try to match what they electronic processor was doing on the track. In talking to our drivers and crew chiefs, that's been a big benefit.

But it there are 10 teams over at Lakeland, Fla., testing all together some day and two of them are openly using one of those systems. If another team hears that or walks by and sees it laying on the dash or plugged in, they leave the track curious as to why it was there as well as whether they're bringing to the event. That's where a lot of it starts.


QUESTION: You're investing a lot of time and effort into keeping this stuff out of NASCAR. Has there been thought to just giving up and allowing people to use it?


GARY NELSON: We debate that internally, but is it the tip of the iceberg? It may be only a few thousand dollars to put this on your car, but it's really a threshold. Do we allow processors?

Formula 1 allowed processors years ago and they started doing more and more things with those internal processors. Formula 1 was trying to find the codes inside these processors and make sure nothing funny was going on, and they finally gave up. The codes could be hidden with all these clicks of switches to trigger a processor to do something they couldn't find.

So the question is really whether NASCAR should allow processors on board the race cars. If we do, where is the sport going from there? It would be easy for us to tell the teams to go ahead and put processors on, we're tired of looking for them. We're not going to roll over that easy.

I understand that if we allowed processors on the cars then every car owner would start a department. There might be one guy at a desk today who manages it, but if you go to the Formula 1 garage area you will see a wall where the car sits and on the other side of that wall you don't see one guy managing their processor. You see a wall of computers and a line of guys in little white coats who're programming those processors that are making that car go.

Should we allow processors on board? What are we allowing if we do that?


QUESTION: You hand out restrictor plates at Daytona and other series hand out other parts. Why not just hand out the ignition systems to the teams for your races?


GARY NELSON: It's more difficult when you work with a car's electrical system. ... If you ever go to an electronics store you see signs that say no refunds on electronic items. That's because they can fail. They've become very good, but in every race somebody drops out with ignition problems. If I were the one who handed them the box, and he was racing for the championship, it would open us up to a lot of scrutiny. It's better for us to write and refine the rules and get the rules to the point where we're not handing you the part but your part needs to follow these rules.


QUESTION: In penalizing someone for a violation along these lines, would you go further than monetary fines?


JOHN DARBY: The rulebook allows us to go beyond monetary penalties. Of late, we've had discussions in the garage area with drivers and crew chiefs as a reminder that the rulebook doesn't confine us to fines. We have the leverage to move that pendulum in any direction we choose. I feel pretty confident in saying that if a traction control device were discovered in competition it would be way above a monetary fine.


QUESTION: Is the purpose of your coming here today an intention to use the media to send a message to the garage area that you guys mean business about this?


GARY NELSON: We're trying to educate the media not to get snowed by a guy who had a bad race. When you look at our racing, if there are 43 guys on the track only one wins. If the others are on their way home and you catch them going out the gate, they may tell you there's some magic formula that caused them to get beat.

Everybody has a bad day, but drivers are the last to admit those kind of things. We want the media not to get snowed by all of this. There are basic things that have to take place for traction control to be part of a race car.


QUESTION: You have not caught anybody?


GARY NELSON: We have not. We have looked very hard. We've always had the philosophy that we don't want to hide in the bushes and sneak out and catch people breaking the rules. What we want to do is convince them not to break the rules because they will get caught. Our staff looks all the time and we continue to come up with new ways to look.


QUESTION: Do you think traction control has never been used on a Winston Cup car in a race.


GARY NELSON: We cannot say anything for sure. But we can say it's very highly unlikely that anybody has run it. If they did, they're pretty slick. Any car that we've looked at it hasn't had anything like that. We would react if we found it.


QUESTION: What changes are you considering in the inspection process that would relate to this?


GARY NELSON: We could get the wiring out from under the dash and up into a visible place to where crew chiefs can look at other cars at any time and convince himself there's nothing funny going on. It's about wiring, about connecting something into a system after inspection or concealing a wire, those kinds of things. Our thought is to expose all of the wires for everybody to see.

[Walrus_3]

Yeah HS,
That is one big goob of information, thanks for sharing it. I t does sound like some good steps in the right direction. I know a lot of rumors get started by the things you don't see, someone makes an assumption or just starts a rumor to bring pressure and scrutiny. There's a whole lot that's just B.S. When I was involved with NHRA, many teams have 4 or 5 rags covering top secret items or areas, some might be something and some were just decoys. I would have to agree with getting things in the open to clear that as an option.

ohhhhh, don't get me started on traction control, every one probably read my rant the last time this was brought up, so i wont bother posting it again..

[97forever]

Anyway,thank you H.S for the good info.

Interesting article HardScrabble. I'm gald to be ensured that NASCAR isn't throwing in the towel on TC and was glad to see Gary Nelson identify ignition retard as the "power killer" in these "hidden" systems. There have been a lot of stories about the use of ignition interupts like your MSD 2 or 3 step or even the less noticable Crane "HI" systems. This approach would be way to easy to detect.

It's funny that I ran across an article in an old Circle Track (November 95) while researching info for another posters question, that first introduced the approach to me. I was impressed by the ignition retard approach then as I am today. So simple and would not upset or get in the way of the actions of an unwitting driver.

That early device did infact rely on hidden digital processor from a programmable hand held calulator AND was mounted external to the MSD 6T ignition box. The "wires" included that "flat tape" you might see following the print cartridges in your ink jet printer and covered by something like bondo, with rpm sensors in the rear end and left front rotor...a crude system by todays standards, but proved the point. AND that "wires" can take many forms.

Now, with all that said I'd like to throw a couple things out on e table, just for mulling over:

1. Gary Nelson (or whoever) is wrong with the claim that analog processor technology died in the 70s (did I understand him correctly?) Recent years have seen a re-birth of this technology in support of artificial inteligence at some technical Universities. Some fairly amazing A.I. "creatures" have been put together using a few bucks worth of transistors like you or I can buy at the local "Radio Shack". These thigs can be programmed and can overcome obstacles in order to achieve there progam goals. The point being, the goal for one of these things could be to keep rear tire slip on a race car to a minmum. Easier aid than done? Yeah, but where there is a will, there is a way...NASCAR needs to keep the vigil.

2. If, Nelson knows that ignition interuptions are not the "power killer" in these illegal TC systems, I'm curious to what "they" are listening for when looking for TC?..especially when an un-witting driver is involved...any idea what they would be listening for? The guys gonna be pedaling the trottle while the ignition timing is pulled back. All cylinders will still fire in normal sequence...if they had a way to monitor etgs...no, that wouldn't work either because the egts will go all over the map while the driver pedals???? Thoughts?

3. It's interesting that some of the latest A.I. technology is analog based...just like us! I hope we're not some A.I. experiment somewhere...

Windsor

[NateDogg]

1. True, but they would still have to be pretty sneaky about hiding such a device

2. Egts are a good idea, they already keep data for throttle %, I am sure they can monitor etgs. That would defintely tell a lot if they could base it to previous information, sure they go all over but that would work in my opinion, good thinkin windsor:thumbsup:

3. I hope we arn't either

Interesting questions.

The analog deal is one area I felt unqualified to comment on. Gary's point is that analog systems were pretty much abandoned in the "70's with the advent of the more versatile digital systems. No one could argue the general validity of that statement, however as Windsor says, specialty applications may be progressing analog technology outside the mainstream view.

The sound deal, as I understand it, is not that they are listening for a specific sound, but looking at the data on a comparative basis between all the cars on the track. If you can record 43 cars, then run the tapes through a computer graphing program and analyze the differences off a base line you end up with a pointer. That pointer is then utilized to more closelsy examine the cars outside of given variable range.

Windsor, if you get a chance I made a reply on the "All NASCAR has to do" ,or something like that, thread last night. In it i referred to some of your inputs on HP reduction programs as a component of a plate eliminition scenario. SInce I seem to have killed the thread at that point I would appreciate if you could elaborate on the ideas I've seen you put forth with reduced CI engines and why that is more effective than plates.