NASCAR isn’t typically known as a winter sport but they’ve decided to use their tools in order to help Team USA go faster at the Winter Olympics. The NASCAR research and development team is building virtual models of Olympic athletes and creating life size 3D printed versions of them in order to do wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) testing in order to find tweaks to help the athletes go faster.
The relationship between NASCAR and the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) was established based on an introduction from TotalSim which is an engineering firm that works with NASCAR on various CFD analysis projects. NASCAR Vice President of Vehicle Performance, Dr. Eric Jacuzzi shared that TotalSim asked to bring some Olympic athletes and officials for a tour of the NASCAR R&D facility in North Carolina and during that tour Dr. Jacuzzi ran into an acquaintance who was working for the Olympic committee.
