How McDonald's, a Lear jet and Darlington saved lives of drivers

I talked to Gary Nelson today for a future story. You might recall the name. He's a former crew chief who was known for his creative ways of making cars go fast before NASCAR hired him to be its Cup series director, a position he held from 1991-2001 before moving to and R&D type role.

 

Nelson holds the U.S. patent as the inventor of the roof flaps when he was working at NASCAR. Certainly those devices have played a key role in limiting the number of cars that have gotten airborne at such places as Talladega, where the series races this weekend. Anyway, Nelson told me the story from the early 1990s on how the roof flaps were developed. It involved a Lear jet, a runway surrounded by farmland near Darlington and McDonald's. 

 

We'll start the story with NASCAR, after meeting with aerospace experts, auto manufacturers and other experts on flight, coming up with the idea of if they left the pins out of the trunk lid, it would pop up and that would help keep the cars on the ground. But how to test it?

 

I'll let Gary continue the story. Enjoy.

 

"None of the wind tunnel folks would let us having anything moving in the wind tunnel, so Bill France Jr. came up with this one. He said we've got a Lear jet, take it to the Darlington County airport where nobody is there, it's out the middle of a peanut field. I think it was acually peas or beans or something. We spent a day there with these decklids.

 

"We'd run the jet engine. We'd back the car up to the jet airplane and run the engines at full speed while the pilot held the brakes  and when we got a 190 mph wind going, we'd pull the pins out of the decklid with a long rope and the trunklid would pop up. Man, the first one went a couple of hundred yards. It just was not working. I was sick. They say necessity is the mother of invention. I felt like I was going to be looking for a job the next day because all of this effort that we had done just was not working.

 

"Bill Jr., it was getting lunchtime, he sent some guys out to McDonald's to bring us all hamburgers while we surveyed all the damage we had done. Somebody had to tell the farmer we were sorry for tearing up his crops and all the other things. They come back with these cheeseburgers and fries and stuff in this little kind of gray cardboard carrying box. Just small ... like a cutoff shoebox that they would send food out to go in from McDonald's.

 

"I looked at that when the guy was carrying it and I got some scissors and I grabbed a couple of the guys, the aerodynamic guys and I stuck that flat on the roof of the car and put a piece of tape on it like a hinge and said, "What if we had a door right here instead of this trunklid thing?' All of a sudden all these guys, yeah, you could do this or that or whatever. And that's how it happened. It was that simple. I was thinking what I was going to do for a career.''

 

So explain the airplane and car setup again?

 

Nelson: "The Lear jet was sitting on an unused runway. They flew it in and landed it there. We actually had I think four race cars, A Ford, a Chevy, Pontiac ... maybe Oldsmobile. Might have just been three cars. So if you can picutre two jet engines on the back of an airplane, turn them on and you get a lot of wind behind it when you rev them up (essentially creating a man-made wind tunnel). Bill France did. He came up with that idea. We backed the car up to the back of the airplane, maybe 50 feet back and turned on those engines. We (secured) the wheels and held the brakes and the airplane didn't move. Just revved it up and more and more wind came out of the back of those engines until we got to the speed we wanted. We had a little air speed indicator. Everybody had to stand back.

 

"We did the same thing later on the hoods. We came up with hood teethers. Same thing. Bill France Jr. again. We would pull the car up to the back of the plane so that air was coming out of the back of the jet engines and hitting the nose of the car. When we got to the speed we wanted, we would pull the hood pins and the hood was supposed to stay with the car and not fly off. Same thing. Those things would break off and go flying. Bill says, we want the parts to stay with our cars when they crash, you understand me Gary? Yes sir.

 

"I told Bill, it broke the cables. Hardware store cables we were clamping into the car, they would break and we were getting bigger and bigger cables and they kept breaking. I told Bill, I said, Bill we can't get cables big enough that it won't break when the hood flies off. The hoods keep coming off these cars. We haven't found anything that keeps the hood on the car when it crashes. I said I don't know if we're going to be able to do this. Bill said to me, I'll always remember, "I've got some cable down there at Talladega in the fence that goes through the fence, I'll bring you some of that, maybe that won't break.' That's like 2 inches around. He and I both knew that  would not work. The message he gave me was keep working on it.

 

"This guy came with this rope-looking stuff. It's called Vectran, it looks like a piece of rope. He said try this and I laughed. We're breaking steel cables, that rope isn't going to do anything. He said try it. I laughed some more and we broke some more cables. Steve Peterson (former safety expert for NASCAR who has since passed away) was actually the guy that found this guy. Steve kept pulling me aside and saying, "Gary, that cable keeps breaking, this guy says that rope is stronger than that cable.' I said, "Steve that's ski rope. That's what they use to pull skiers behind boats.' The guy was in the marine business. Finally, toward the end of the day, after everything else had failed, I said, all right, put your rope on there, let's do it. And it worked. It was the first thinig that didn't break. Now that is on every car. It's on the decklid, on the hood, on the front spindles, on the wings, it's on all the cars, that rope.''

 

 

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