Diandra Leslie-Pelecky

The author hangs around with a NASCAR race team and uses stories from that experience as starting points to explain the physics behind all sorts of phenomena involved with NASCAR. The level of explanation is high school physics. It doesn't require high school physics - this book really teaches a fair amount of what is covered in high school physics. Well, I graduated from high school close to 50 years ago, so my judgment here is not really to be trusted! On the other hand, I went on to a Masters degree in physics, so its not groundless, either! The various explanations here are all pretty reasonable. I guess my biggest complaint would be that the book is pretty haphazard. For sure it's all NASCAR. But it's a bit like shooting a shotgun at the side of a barn. The book goes into quite a bit of detail about paint. Sure, racing cars get painted.

Anyway, the book would have been better if it had more focus. Sometimes less is more. I wanted to learn about tires. A book about shock absorbers could work pretty well!… (meer)