Suzuki Samurai was Re: [geeks] SPARC proprietary (waaaay

[Phil Stracchino]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 06:29:46PM -0500, doctor obnox son of a bitch wrote:
> How can we get NASCAR to start refining new and possibly useful technologies?

No idea.  Sacrifice three black goats to the shade of Nikola Tesla?  

Realistically, it's not going to happen.  If NASCAR started moving
toward them effete newfangled technologies, they'd piss off the hardcore
bubba brigade and lose half their audience.  There's a *reason* NASCAR
and F1 have different and mostly-disjoint fan bases.

> Hydrogen? Fuel cells? Stirlings?

I don't expect to see any of these three become viable for racing in at
least the next ten to twenty years, if ever.  Stirling-cycle engines
have possibly the best thermodynamic efficiency of any heat engine yet
invented, but they're much better suited to slow-and-steady power
delivery than to a racetrack.  Hydrogen-fueled internal combustion
engines run head-on into the bulk storage problem, and fuel cells don't
have a high enough power delivery rate yet.  In addition, the current
fuel cell technology requires fairly pure hydrogen and oxygen feeds, and
fuel cell systems incorporating their own ethanol/methanol reformers are
atill in the early development stage.


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