I notice there’s not a lot of heavyset or downright obese racecar drivers. Most of them look rather trim.
100 pounds is extremely light, even for a woman. You can’t even get into the Army if you weigh less than 110 pounds, and even the tiniest grown women I know usually weigh no less than 115 pounds. 140 pounds is probably an average weight for healthy, adult women who are in good shape.
Danica Patrick isn’t at an advantage because she’s female, she’s at an advantage because she’s beyond tiny.
Really, if this weight advantage turns out to be that friggin’ wonderful, it ought to lead to tinier men joining the ranks of NASCAR drivers. Is there something wrong with that?
The whole issue just reeks of men getting upset because they’ve done their level best to make sure that the only sports and events that are given any attention are the sports that men excel at due to their higher center of gravity, proportionally larger hearts and lungs, and superior upper-body strength, and now here’s a woman sneaking in the back door, having an advantage because she’s miniscule.
Cite? AFAIK, neither Formula 1 nor Champ Car (the two series most similar to IRL) add ballast to make up for driver weight. At least I’ve never heard any mention of the fact and I’ve been watching both for almost 20 years. I believe that all three series have minimum weights for the empty car, but that’s it.
I haven’t heard comparable numbers for IRL, but ISTR commentators in the F1 broadcasts saying (in the context of fuel loads) that a weight difference of 10 kilos equals a tenth of a second per lap. F1 cars are more powerful than IRL cars, so the difference would be less in an IRL car. But still at least potentially significant. And yet the sanctioning body has chosen not to address it in the rules. I have no big problem with this.
And I believe that Danica will win one this season. I think she has the talent.
She won doubles tournaments. She was one of the 20 best female tennis players on the planet. Calling her a failure because of some standards that you, or people like you, have cooked up are completely unfair and silly.
I’d like to see what female tennis players have never won a tournament that have been ranked in the top twenty at one point in their careers. I still think that you’ll find out that it’s not nearly as uncommon as you make it to be.
Sure. But I have yet to hear a good reason as to why it’s an unfair advantage. Nothing unfair about it.
I’m not a big sports fan, and certainly not a racing fan. But I do wonder what you think is unfair.
I understand that some racing types have different rules as regards driver weight, but Danica Patrick isn’t competing in those races. She’s competing in Indy, which has it’s own rules. It’s not like they’ve got one rule for her and a different rule for other drivers. Your steroid comparison is analogous to Danica jumping into NASCAR and having them decide, just for her, to ignore weight. The metaphor doesn’t seem to have any meaning within the one driving sport under discussion
Every Indy race team could, if they wanted to take advantage of this rule, field a smaller driver. It’s perfectly fair. They could have been doing this years ago, since the rules are the same as they were before Danica joined the sport. Again perfectly fair.
What would be unfair would be to change the rules just because Danica’s driving now. That would be an unfair disadvantage that seems to target specific competitors.
Danica Shows She Deserved Hype
She’s a great driver. She doesn’t deserve the snark.
For a woman with a small frame and height of 5’2", the suggested weight range is 108-121 lbs, so it looks like she is underweight by a bit, if she is only 100 lbs.
It doesn’t affect NASCAR because NASCAR weighs the cars as raced, which includes the driver. Because IRL doesn’t, you do indeed see an army of tiny men competing.
Champ Car and IRL use the same rules, since they are the two leagues that formed from the CART split. (I don’t know the details, and I’m probably wrong that the former unified league was named CART, but Wikipedia’s expanation wasn’t very clear to me.) As far as other leagues:
The Official Formula 1 Website
World Touring Car Championship
I could go on, but half of the sites crash my crappy dial-up modem, which means I have to reboot to get back online. I trust this sampling is enough.
A screw up not under her control. A great number of the articles/features I saw this weekend mentioned the interest in seeing how she did with Andretti Green with the implication that they are/were a much better organization than her old team of Rahal Letterman.
Ellis Dee: Thanks for all your research. I did a little of my own and found this:
Although I knew that many series did factor in driver weight, I did not know that F1 cars were all so far below the minimum weight that they have to be ballasted up to that min, or that the driver’s weight was included.
You’re mistaken about their using the same rules. When they split eleven years ago*, IRL set up its own spec that has changed over the years but remains distinct from Champ Car’s.
However, I was able to find this interesting note on Wikipedia:
I had no idea they were averaging the weight of all the drivers. (If this source can be trusted. I’m slightly skeptical.)
So thanks for fighting my ignorance on these two points.
*FYI, here’s my take on the CART/IRL split.
That’s a fair point. I withdraw that criticism of Danica.
Thanks for the corrections/additional info, commasense. I too am skeptical of the average weight thing, since my numerous searches turned up nothing. Several sites mentioned Champ Car while explicitly stating “without driver,” and all articles I found gave a 100 pound range for the minimum weight as raced. I concluded from this that, like IRL, they do not factor in the driver weight.
But I never did manage to dig up a concrete cite either way.
I’m wondering how many people know just how tiny an IRL/Champ Car really is. On a whole, the average driver for IRL and Champ Car is much smaller than your average person just because the car’s so much smaller - Joe Average simply wouldn’t fit in there. NASCAR drivers are much more representative of the average (though fit) guy simply because as supposedly “stock” cars they’ve got a ton more room. The cockpit of a Champ Car is massively cramped - have you seen the drivers squeeze themselves in there?
The very tallest IRL/Champ Car driver would just brush 6’; most are 5’6" - 5’8". Many weigh less than I do, and I’m an average woman (5’6", 145 lbs). Christiano da Matta (5’4") maybe weighs 120 pounds in full gear and sopping wet. And while it’s true that a few were calling for extra weights in da Matta’s car, these people were decidedly in the minority. It’s interesting that while these voices were pretty quiet in the guy’s case, they’ve swelled and become hugely loud for on the gal’s side (and their weights are pretty comparable - da Matta outweighs Patrick by what, 5 or 10 pounds?). The whole weight argument is pretty much bunk, in my opinion.
But hey, nice one for Dario, no? I really love what the IRL’s become (as opposed to what it set out to be. As a CART gal, it makes me laugh.)
It’s my understanding that it takes quite a lot of strength to hold the cars on line–I’d assume whatever Danica or other lightweight drivers gain in weight advantage for being tiny, they probably give up in strength to actually do their job. I can’t imagine there isn’t a significant balancing factor there.
The voices of dissent had been pretty consistent long before Danica joined the circuit. The only difference is that the press picked up on the “battle of the sexes” angle and ran with it.
There is no law of physics that dictates that a stronger driver makes the car go faster.
Good job on missing my point entirely.
Do elaborate then.
It isn’t really strength per se, as much as general fitness and stamina. The G forces that drivers endure are quite extreme (up to 5 Gs), cockpit temps are often over 100 degrees F, and the drivers’ heart rates run well over 150 bpm for long periods of time. (And if you were thinking that they get to relax in the pit stops, think again. Heart rates are highest in the pits – up to 180 bpm – because everything has to go perfectly in the ten seconds or less that it takes to service the car.)
I’ve long said that driving a race car in a top pro series (including NASCAR) is probably the most demanding and difficult athletic activity short of the Tour de France. Far, far more difficult than any ball sports, including soccer. And I would argue that the TDF is not as intellectually challenging to the participant as auto racing, and a hell of a lot safer.
But as Ellis Dee said, being stronger doesn’t make a driver faster, all other things being equal. So I don’t think Danica pays a significant penalty for (perhaps) not having as much upper body strength as some male drivers. And I do think there is probably a measurable benefit to her being lighter than other drivers. If she were to run laps with and without 50 lbs of ballast, I think the lighter laps would be faster by a couple of tenths, which, over the course of a two-hour race, could make a significant difference. If IRL wanted to change the rules to factor in driver weight, I would have no problem with that. But I’m not overly concerned about the absence of such a rule, either.