Just looking at the NASCAR Research & Development Center is enough to make you believe that serious work is going on inside. The building sits majestically on a corner lot just across the street from the entrance to the Concord (NC) Regional Airport, and it dominates the industrial park that is rising up behind it.
When NASCAR gets religion, it gets it in a big way, and the R&D Center is sort of a temple to that religion. Safety, which was always a concern but became a much bigger issue in 2000 and 2001 when a rash of driver deaths hit the sport, is that religion, and the high priest of NASCAR's efforts toward improving it is none other than former Cup Series Director Gary Nelson.
Nelson, who carries the lofty title of managing director of research and development for NASCAR, directs a staff of 45 people at the center, which is housed in a 61,000-square-foot building on 16 acres at the corner of Odell School Road and West Winds Boulevard in Concord.
The front half of the building is the office area, housing the offices of the series directors for NASCAR's three biggest series-Nextel Cup, the Busch Series, and the Craftsman Truck Series, as well as various other NASCAR personnel.
Behind the office space is where the really interesting stuff goes on. There's a template room, where the cars used to design the templates for all manufacturers' cars are housed alongside their production counterparts. Just off the template room is the locked office containing all of NASCAR's restrictor plates. There are only three keys to the room, and it is kept locked at all times. A Superflow machine is housed with the templates to make sure all the templates are identical.
Go through another door and you're in the primary workshop space, which is a two-story affair resembling the majority of the NASCAR team shops in the area. A recent addition to the facility is a dyno room, where technicians can test-bed any product submitted to NASCAR for approval.
Above the shop floor on the second level are caged rooms containing submitted and approved parts as well as those confiscated by NASCAR. Hanging above the shelves full of confiscated parts is the body off the No. 20 Home Depot Chevrolet that was seized at Texas Motor Speedway last year. The rest of the car was returned to Joe Gibbs Racing, but NASCAR kept the body.
Just down the stairs on the lower level is NASCAR's crash sled, sometimes referred to as a bogie. The staff uses the crash sled to test crushable materials, new bumper configurations, and other aspects of energy absorption associated with easing impact injuries a driver might suffer in a crash.
There is a complete testing area outside in the parking lot with video towers, power outlets for the recording devices on the crash sled, and guide holes for tracks to simulate various angles of impact into the massive concrete wall block. The crash-test area is littered with the carcasses of cars that have been mounted on the sled and then analyzed.
Back toward the offices, it's time for a trip to the engineering spaces. Several engineers work on various products via computer, and they have the capacity to send those workups to the CNC machinery, housed directly outside their offices, to be machined. Fabricators can attach whatever comes off the CNC machines to existing structures for testing.