She holds a doctorate in condensed matter physics, has written a book about the science of NASCAR and is the author of the widely acclaimed Stock Car Science blog. And yet Diandra Leslie-Pelecky admits she can't wait to find something new and intriguing about the sport.

"Every time I go to the track, I learn something," Leslie-Pelecky said.

“

Physics is the basic laws of motion that control when you get in your car and go to the grocery store. It's the exact same laws of physics that apply to Jeff Gordon.

”

-- DIANDRA LESLIE-PELECKY

While most NASCAR fans are more than entertained by watching the cars hurtle around the track in a race to see who wins, Leslie-Pelecky sees science applications -- specifically the fundamental laws of physics -- at work. Centrifugal force, the coefficient of drag, fluid dynamics -- to Leslie-Pelecky, they all may play perhaps as big a role in who wins and loses on a week-to-week basis as the driver, crew chief and pit crew.

Sir Isaac Newton in the driver's seat? You bet. Science is not just for nerds, you know.

"What science is, is figuring out stuff you don't understand," Leslie-Pelecky said. "It's not memorizing things. It's not knowing the definition of mitosis versus meiosis. Einstein once said, 'Never memorize anything you can look up.' And in today's day and age, with my phone, I can get on it and within two minutes, I can tell you what the definition is.

"Anybody can do that. But what you are doing with that knowledge? What we've got to be teaching kids is how do you synthesize knowledge? How do you determine good data from bad data? How do you make decisions in a rational way? And that's what NASCAR's all about. Winning means the crew chief is taking all this data, assimilating it in real time, making decisions based on hypothesis, sending the car out there and seeing if it works."

Science comes naturally to Leslie-Pelecky, who earned undergraduate degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of North Texas and a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Michigan State University. She was a faculty member in the Department of Physics at the University of Nebraska from 1994 until 2008. Author of The Physics of NASCAR, The Science Behind The Speed, she's currently the chief technical officer for Trivalent Productions, a Texas company specializing in science educational materials and multimedia.

"I was one of those kids who was always going, 'Why?' You know, the ones who drive the teacher nuts," Leslie-Pelecky said. "And it just always seemed to me, when things, they have to happen for a reason. And it's that fascination -- when you see something that happens around you, and you can't explain it -- that makes you a scientist."

"I wanted to go into medicine, but it turns out I get sick to my stomach with squishy, yucky stuff, like frogs and yecch," Leslie-Pelecky said. "It's actually funny because I do biomedical research now, so I'm back to doing it."

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has taken her scientific interest in NASCAR and filmed a series of educational videos.

More than meets the eye

Leslie-Pelecky's five-year love affair with NASCAR was purely a happy accident, so to speak.

"I was never interested in racing before," Leslie-Pelecky said. "I grew up in Milwaukee and never even knew there was a race track there. I was sitting there, watching television and clicking through the channels, and happened upon a NASCAR race. Normally, I would have gone right past it, but I happened to click on it at the time when there were a bunch of cars going around a corner and one of them went right into the wall.

"This is one of those things that makes you a scientist. I looked at that and thought, 'Why would a car just go into the wall, for no reason?' They played the replay, and I'm watching, thinking, 'Did a tire blow out? Did another car hit him? Was it just a dumb driver?' I couldn't tell what had happened. I said, 'Heck, I'll go look it up on the Internet' because I thought it was going to be a 20-minute project. Here it is [five years later] and it's sort of taken over a lot of my life."

As a physics professor, Leslie-Pelecky has an understanding of what motivates a student to learn. And in her opinion, the current process isn't grabbing the interest of potential scientists.

"Personally, I think we teach physics all wrong," Leslie-Pelecky said. "We don't teach the physics that most students are actually going to use. This is a big joke around the engineers. I asked somebody at one of the teams, 'Do you have anybody with a degree in physics, as opposed to engineering?' And they said, 'No, you guys think everything that's interesting is negligible.' And it's true.

"Every physics problem you look says, 'Ignore friction and air resistance.' And if you think about, racing is all friction and air resistance. And when in your life do you ever get to ignore friction and air resistance? So we tell kids, all things fall at the same rate -- but only in a vacuum. And we don't live our lives in a vacuum. So I am all for using things in the real world -- things you use every day -- to explain science. Because science is relevant. Just not the way we teach it, unfortunately."

"This is the ultimate in scientific method. You listen to a team dialing in a car? That is the scientific method. We've got to communicate that to kids, that this is really what science is about, not the boring stuff you have to memorize but the process of figuring something out."

The interesting thing, according to Leslie-Pelecky, is that her colleagues have taken an interest in how much science is involved in a sport like NASCAR. In this case, the stereotype no longer fits the reality.

"I get asked to give talks all around the country," Leslie-Pelecky said. "So I'll get a call from somewhere like Ohio State or Notre Dame about giving a talk, and I'll think, 'Well, it's about my research.' And no, they want to hear about NASCAR. So I've gone to these really big-name physics departments and they want to hear about NASCAR. And they're totally fascinated by it and surprised by how high-tech it is."

How high-tech?

"I was talking to the aerodynamicist for Joe Gibbs Racing, and he has a Ph.D. from Stanford," Leslie-Pelecky said. "I think he was the one who said, 'If you look at the cars, they're rather low-tech. But if you look at everything surrounding the sport, it's really high-tech.' I mean, look at the seven-post shaker rigs, wind tunnels, aerodynamic simulations they use are the exact same simulations you'd use on a rocket. So it's a really interesting dichotomy."

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Where there's a crew chief and a driver, an engineer should be close at hand. Here, Scott Maxim of Hendrick Motorsports shares data with Darian Grubb and Tony Stewart.

A big push for small gains

So many teams have hired some of the country's best and brightest engineers, because a tiny gain in performance can pay huge dividends on the track, and in the pocketbook.

"They're really pushing for small gains," Leslie-Pelecky said. "If somebody went into one of the lower-running teams, they could probably bring them up to a certain point pretty quickly. Anybody can get in a race car and go 150 mph. You can go to one of these driving experiences and do that. But going 160 is a little harder, and 170 is even harder. As you get there, each little bit of gain is a bigger and bigger challenge. And that's why you have all these really smart people working on race teams."

But with NASCAR's current rule book, making those gains can be a matter of great secrecy, as Leslie-Pelecky has found out while doing research.

"Sometimes I'll get to that point where I start asking questions and someone on a team will give me that smile and say, 'I can't really say anything more about that,'" Leslie-Pelecky said. "You know you're onto something when you hit that. One of the challenges with NASCAR are the rules. They're sort of artificial. When I'm trying to solve things in physics, Mother Nature is my sanctioning body. I can do anything as long as I don't try to violate the rules of nature.

"In NASCAR, you've got this really limited box in which you can work. And that makes it quite a challenge for the engineers. There are things they could do if they were allowed to go outside that box. What they have to do is figure out how to do it without going outside the box. And the gains are so small. If they're onto something, they're not going to say anything."

And one of the ways NASCAR keeps the teams inside the box is by controlling the materials that can be legally used.

"NASCAR has been trying really hard not to let costs get out of control," Leslie-Pelecky said. "For example, roll cages. They're limited to using stainless steel. They could be using titanium aluminide, which is a much stronger, lighter material. But No. 1, it's expensive. No. 2, it's really hard to weld. And so the minute you open the door to [exotic metals], you open the door to all kinds of costs.

"But then they've gone out and found materials like what the splitters are made of, which is called tegris, which comes from the Latin word meaning 'protected.' And it's the material they're using for tanks in the battlefield, because it's so strong but it's also lightweight."

In addition, the new chassis -- with its front splitter -- changed some of the aerodynamic qualities of the car.

"It used to be, you were getting most of the downforce primarily on the front, from the front fenders and top part of the front-bumper cover," Leslie-Pelecky said. "If you look at it now, most of the downforce is coming from the splitter, which you can change fairly easily in and out. It was the same thing with the wing or spoiler. They wanted to change the primary force from being all over the bodywork to being on the appendage, so you can easily change the appendage."

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NASCAR has been concerned with airborne cars, and so has Diandra Leslie-Pelecky.

A scientific blog ... for the layman

So how does Leslie-Pelecky come up with ideas for her blog entries?

"Usually, it's one of two things," Leslie-Pelecky said. "It's either something that I see while I'm sitting and go, "Gosh, I wonder why that is' and have to go figure it out. There's this great quote by [Isaac] Asimov: 'Science is not punctuated by "Eureka!" It's punctuated by, "Hmm, that's odd." That really is it. You look at things.

"Kids are natural scientists. They look at everything and wonder why the world is the way it is. So it's something I've seen that I'm curious about or something that somebody writes to me about. And I love those questions because we all look at the world a different way."

Fast science

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky educates on the physics and science of NASCAR through her blog.

• Stock Car Science

“

Every time I go to the track, I learn something.

”

-- DIANDRA LESLIE-PELECKY

And perhaps Leslie-Pelecky's greatest attribute is her ability to describe complicated scientific principles in layman's terms.

"We have this image of science being quarks and black holes and cosmology and things," Leslie-Pelecky said. "But it's not. Physics is the basic laws of motion that control when you get in your car and go to the grocery store. It's the exact same laws of physics that apply to Jeff Gordon.

"The thing I've had the hardest time with is aerodynamics, because you can't see air. Actually, you can. If you do computational fluid dynamics, you can see the patterns of the air. But it's one of those things where your intuition tells you something should happen, and you go out and try it, and the exact opposite happens. So much of aerodynamics is counterintuitive. You think, 'If I do A, then B should happen.' But when you go out and do A, not only does B not happen, something totally surprising happens."

The spate of cars getting airborne in accidents is something that has caught the eye of Leslie-Pelecky, because it's all based on scientific principles.

"We've seen a number of cars in the last couple of years take off in unusual accidents," Leslie-Pelecky said. "All of the teams have been modeling cars by themselves or drafting. But these cars are so sensitive and such at the limit of grip, that when you get two of them next to each other, they start influencing each other in ways you might not expect. Again, modeling two cars is not twice as hard as modeling one. It's a lot harder.

"Aerodynamics is a good example of the square law. The drag force goes like the square of the speed. If you go at 90 mph compared to 180 mph, 180 is twice 90 but the drag force doesn't increase by a factor of two. It increases by a factor of four. Same thing with downforce and same thing with the force as you go around the corner. That force is proportional to your speed."

As far as crew chiefs are concerned, just because you have an engineering degree, Leslie-Pelecky said that doesn't equate to success on the pit box. If anything, being a great communicator is the best skill to have.

"For a while, we had this trend of hiring engineers as crew chiefs," Leslie-Pelecky said. "But if you look at the current group of crew chiefs right now, there's not so many people who were formally trained as engineers. Bob Osborne comes to mind. But look at the Chad Knauses, the Steve Letartes, the Greg Zipadellis. These are not people with formal engineering training. But they know how to talk to engineers.

"The thing you really need on a race team is communication. And that's especially important among the scientists and engineers, because we tend to talk about things in a different language than your typical race car driver. So translating, doing that communication between the driver and engineer, that communication link is the absolute most critical thing on a race team. So you can have all the most brilliant engineers in the world on your team, but if the driver can't give you feedback -- and understand what that feedback means -- you can't do anything."

And just like the drivers on the track, Leslie-Pelecky said the Ph.D.'s with the laptops, calculators and the pocket protectors also have something to prove every weekend.

"They're so competitive," Leslie-Pelecky said. "The engineers are just as competitive as the drivers. You don't hear them calling each other names in the press, but they do. They want to be the guy who knows more than anybody else in the garage. I love the sense of competitiveness and I love the sense of 'I am going to figure this out.' These are engineers on a mission."

Related:
• Leslie-Pelecky teaches science of speed through videos
• Leslie-Pelecky book explains the science of NASCAR