#V8 supercars

[flmboyz]

Ford 427 SOHC

[unknownaster]

As an Australian I felt obligated to draw Oscar as a Supercars driver after drawing him as a motogp rider

[coimbrabertone]

So Can NASCAR Drivers Turn Right or Not?

So in the past couple of weeks, I've watched a couple of races and a couple of things crossed my timeline that had to do with the following question: just how good are NASCAR drivers at turning right?

I don't mean this in like the Formula One fan newbie kinda way, I mean this as like a legitimate discussion as to the quality of the NASCAR field and the fact that road course ringers have seemingly returned to the series.

So, first things first, Shane van Gisbergen. Love him, New Zealander race car driver that went over to Australia, won three Supercars championships and three Bathurst 1000s. SVG then came over to America last year, won the NASCAR Chicago Street Race to be the first guy to win in his first attempt since 1963, and impressed so much that Trackhouse partnered with Kaulig Racing in the Xfinity Series to give Shane a full-time campaign in American stock car racing.

Well, last week he won the Pacific Office Automation 147 at Portland International Raceway, and this week he won the Zip Buy Now, Pay Later 250 at Sonoma. Which brings two things to mind:

One: Gee Xfinity races have some crappy ass names, don't they?

Two: Wow, he went back-to-back on road courses...that is really impressive, but also kinda sad.

Like two weeks in a row now the Xfinity field got beat by a thirty-five-year-old rookie on road courses. This is supposed to be the most road course heavy era of NASCAR, in the past five years the top three NASCAR series have gone to the likes of Mosport, Road America, Mid-Ohio, the Daytona Sports Car Course, the Charlotte Roval, the aforementioned Chicago Street Race, Circuit of the Americas, and NASCAR's traditional road courses in the form of Sonoma and Watkins Glen.

NASCAR drivers turn right a lot, they're not the oval only meme that F1 fans like to present it as, so what is going on?

Well, I think the simplest answer is that Shane van Gisbergen is a damn good race car driver. Supercars have long been compared to NASCARs and that's even truer in the Next Gen era, plus he's gotten a lot of support and advice from Marcos Ambrose, someone who I'll talk about more shortly. Plus, there's also Scott McLaughlin.

SVG and Scotty Mac are quite possibly the two best drivers to ever come out of Supercars, and we've seen Scott be successful in Indycar for a number of years now. Just this last weekend he was competing for the win at Road America with his Penske teammates. So it's not that NASCAR drivers are bad at turning right, it's that they've been unlucky enough to come up against a once in a generation talent.

To support this, there were another two Supercars drivers in Sonoma this past weekend. Cam Waters in the #60 RFK Mustang and Will Brown in the #33 RCR Camaro, and quite frankly, both of them had weekends full of bad luck that didn't amount to much of anything. Will was third in one of the practice sessions, and that's as close as he got to pulling off an SVG-esque performance in the Cup race.

And even in the Xfinity race, Ty Gibbs and Austin Hill both presented very real threats to SVG during the race, before Gibbs got caught up in a wreck and spun around into his own teammate trying to get going again, and Austin Hill got pushed into the grass after trying to slam the door shut on SVG in turn two.

It wasn't a cake walk.

Hell, Boris Said, long considered to be the archetypal NASCAR road course ringer, has been around the series since the mid to late 90s...he's never won a Cup race. He has one truck win at Sonoma and one Xfinity (then Nationwide) win at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve to his name.

So even way back when, NASCAR drivers could handle themselves on the road courses.

There are three road course ringers that have had a lot of success in the modern era, and I think all of them subvert the idea that it's as simple as being able to turn right.

The first is the great Juan Pablo Montoya, who famously got sick of F1 mid-2006, quit McLaren, and decided to become a NASCAR driver instead. Well, come 2007, and JPM is driving the #42 Dodge for Chip Ganassi Racing, and he won at Sonoma in his first attempt. He would only win one more NASCAR race, the 2010 Watkins Glen race. Despite this, I would argue his best season was 2009, when he finished eighth in the points after running as high as third in the season.

The high point was six top five finishes in eight races towards the end of the season, all of which were on ovals. One of which, Fontana, he was well acquainted with from his CART days!

The second is Marcos Ambrose, who in 2011 and 2012, had two consecutive duels with Brad Keselowski at Watkins Glen and came out on top both times. Those two races are badass, and I recommend you watch them, because it's just two big giant stock cars fighting tooth and nail without a care in the world for track limits. It's freaking glorious.

But after that 2012 Watkins Glen win? Well, Marcos then took two straight fifth placed finishes, at Michigan and Bristol, two ovals, and two very different ovals, no less. The third is AJ Allmendinger, who is still in NASCAR and still doing well. With wins on road courses in Cup and the old Champ Car series, and wins on both road courses and ovals in Xfinity. His story continues, most recently as SVG's Kaulig teammate.

So, the moral of the story? Being a good road course racer isn't enough to win NASCAR road races, you need to be a pretty damn good race car driver, and you need to learn stock cars. That means you'll have good showings on the ovals as well as the road courses.

To that end, in addition to SVG's back-to-back Xfinity wins, he also finished third at Atlanta earlier in the season and managed to finish on the lead lap in a Cup race at Talladega this year as well. In fact, I remember in that Talladega race SVG did well in the draft and worked his way to the front, only to fall back when the uppermost line collapsed behind him, and he was left all alone a lane above the drafting pack.

Something that could happen to anyone in a restrictor plate race in NASCAR.

So...NASCAR drivers are good at turning right, the top "road course ringers" in the form of JPM, Marcos Ambrose, and Shane van Gisbergen just happen to, you know, be pretty damn good drivers, and Xfinity races have some crappy ass names.

They let the crappiest name of them all die though.

So please, let's pour one out for the Beef. It's What's for Dinner. 300, the NASCAR Xfinity season opener at Daytona International Speedway.

RIP, 2021-2023. Your name was so bad that it was actually great.

[pennanbrae]

Going Mach 1. An early 1970s Ford Mustang strikes a pose along the sidewalk.

[oversteeeer]

at sandown this morning and it’s so wet!!! enjoying the cars but jesus christ i’m gonna freeze

[histonics]

The Monstrous 18 litre V8 Ford GAA: The Biggest Petrol V8 Ever Built That Powered The Sherman Tank The Ford GAA engine is an American all-aluminum 32-valve DOHC 60-degree liquid-cooled V8 internal combustion engine with a flat-plane crank designed and produced by the Ford Motor Company before and during World War II. It displaces 1,100 cu in (18 L) and puts out well over 1,000 pound-feet (1,400 N⋅m) of torque from idle to 2,200 rpm. The factory-rated net output was 500 hp (370 kW) at 2,600 rpm.

[josematalobos]

GOOD YEAR

For you...

[crowcaws]

Okay I'm going to bore the fuck out of everyone with car talk for a second to lose my mind over Shane Van Gisbergen winning Chicago NASCAR in a car he's never raced in before, in the rain, against professional NASCAR drivers.

This is the guy who won like 6 Supercars races in a row with a broken collarbone.

This man is like on the level of Schumacher and Brock and Hamilton and we're about to see it on a world stage because teams will be BATTLING to sign him internationally. Its just crazy to me. This guy from NZ is cleaning up.

[udonli]

broc feeney art but speedrun edition

i think u guys should all watch the repco supercars series ‼️‼️‼️(please please please please please)

this was actually the second render LOL the first render looked like this:

[rissahs]

spongebob racecar

spongebob racecar

[stanjames-world-3]

[coimbrabertone]

What is the Greatest Team in Motorsports?

So last weekend, Team Penske swept the three-wide front row for the 2024 Indianapolis 500, marking only the second time that a team has locked out the front row. The first time? Penske in 1988. Oh, and just to add a cherry on top of that, Penske won the NASCAR All-Star race at North Wilkesboro with Joey Logano.

This comes on the heels of Penske winning the 2021 Daytona 500 with Austin Cindric, the 2022 Indycar championship with Will Power, the 2022 NASCAR championship with Joey Logano, the 2023 Indianapolis 500 with Josef Newgarden, the 2023 NASCAR championship with Ryan Blaney, and the 2024 24 Hours of Daytona with Dane Cameron, Matt Campbell, Felipe Nasr, and Josef Newgarden. Yeah...they're on a run and a half, aren't they?

Beyond that, Penske has been everywhere and done everything.

Formula One? Won the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix with John Watson.

Sports Cars? Well in addition to the aforementioned Daytona 24 win, their Porsche-Penske RS Spyder dominated LMP2 racing in the 2000s - you know how everyone talks about how dominant the Diesel Audi LMP1s of the 2000s were? Well at the 2008 12 Hours of Sebring, the Porsche-Penske RS Spyder LMP2 beat the Audi R10 TDI LMP1. Penske won, a privateer RS Spyder finished second, and the Audi had to settle for third. Damn.

That's not even to mention how the Penske Porsche 917-30 with its 5.4L Twin Turbo Flat-12 was so dominant in 1973 that it killed Can Am.

Three Daytona 500s, nineteen Indianapolis 500s, four NASCAR championships plus two in the Xfinity series, seventeen Indycar championships across USAC, CART, and Indycar, and a grand total of over 500 race wins makes for a pretty compelling case.

Pretty much the only major feather messing in Roger Penske's cap is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and, well, the Penske-Porsche partnership is at it again. The #6 Penske Porsche driven by Kevin Estre, Andre Lotterer, and Laurens Vanthoor has gone first-second-second in the first three WEC races of the season. That kind of form, plus some of the historic context I established for the Porsche-Penske partnership...are you really going to write them off ahead of Le Mans this year?

So yeah, Penske is a powerhouse of a team and they've been everywhere.

Including Australian Supercars of all things. Scott McLaughlin in the DJR Team Penske Ford took forty-eight wins across four years and won three championships in a row from 2018 to 2020, including the 2019 Bathurst 1000. He then went on to race in Indycar, has taken five wins so far, and just set a 233.220 four-lap average to take that pole position for the Indy 500.

Running the same classic Pennzoil yellow submarine livery as Rick Mears did in 1988. In the race itself, he'll wear a retro red and yellow suit of overalls modeled on the ones that Rick Mears wore in the 80s. If the stars align and Scott repeats what Rick did in 1988 and wins the Indy 500, then he'll have done something truly remarkable. He'll have cut his teeth in Australian supercars and come out of it one of the best Indycar drivers of the modern era.

Of course, his teammates will challenge him.

Will Power, who has more poles in Indycar than anyone else in history.

Josef Newgarden who won last year and has turned into a dominant force on ovals in Indycar.

Not to mention thirty other cars that want to wipe the smile off of Team Penske's face.

There is a lot of talk about Kyle Larson doing the double this year, racing the Indy 500 for Arrow McLaren and then racing the Coke 600 in Charlotte for Hendrick Motorsports, and he'll start fifth. That legitimately gives him one of the best chances of anyone to attempt the double. That being said, last year...Team Penske did the double as a team.

Josef Newgarden won the Indy 500, then Ryan Blaney won the Coke 600. Both of them went into the crowds to celebrate. If Kyle Larson wants to win the double, he'll be up against the mammoth that is Team Penske. Perhaps one of the greatest teams in all of motorsports, and they'll be facing him in both Indianapolis and Charlotte.

Let the games begin.

Sunday, May 26th, 2024 is going to be Motorsports Christmas. The Catalan Motorcycle Grand Prix, the Monaco Grand Prix, the Indianapolis 500, and the Coke 600. Two triple crown events, one of NASCAR's crown jewel, and the home race for about half of the MotoGP field, all in one day.

It's going to be a damn good day.

[the-heel-and-toe]

[futurisims]

Ford Falcon FG

[csmtimothy]

kerb. kerb. kerb. youre all kerb. none of you are within track limits

[josematalobos]

LUFTWAGEN I

BOSCH Service

https://www.behance.net/matalobos