Ross Chastain pulled off the unthinkable at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday when he hugged the wall and slingshot his car around the top lane of the 0.526-mile short track to pass five cars in a handful of seconds.
Sports fans everywhere were in absolute awe by Chastain’s video game move, which advanced him to NASCAR’s championship race Sunday at Phoenix Raceway.
“My brain could not comprehend, my bandwidth was shot,” Chastain said in his post-race press conference. “When I entered Turn 3 and I grabbed fifth gear, everything went blurry.”
Not only was Chastain’s last lap faster than the Kyle Larson’s top qualifying time, but it also broke the 75-year-old track’s record for the fastest lap in a stock car at 18.845 seconds. And, as the Associated Press noted, “he was hurtling at between 50 and 70 mph faster than the cars he was sailing past as the wall guided him.”
UNBELIEVABLE!@RossChastain floors it along the wall to go from 10th to 5th and advance to the CHAMPIONSHIP! #NASCARPlayoffs pic.twitter.com/9qX3eq7T6h
— NASCAR on NBC (@NASCARonNBC) October 30, 2022
To be honest, we still can’t really comprehend how he did it either, and perhaps the No. 1 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet driver feels similarly, even if he executed the move perfectly.
“I have questions; how did that work?” Chastain joked in his post-race press conference.
Same. So we asked a physicist to break it down.
Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky is a former physics professor with a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D on the subject. She also has a penchant for motor sports — using NASCAR to promote science education and working as a contributor for NBC Sports — and wrote the 2008 book, The Physics of NASCAR.
And she explained how and why Chastain’s move worked with a perfect analogy.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What was your immediate reaction to seeing Ross Chastain's Martinsville move while watching Sunday's race?
It was disbelief. You’re watching it and just seeing him go vroooom right around. So my first reaction was, “What the heck?!” I thought he had been in an accident or something. And then, as the broadcasters figured it out, it was like, “Ohhh, that was friggin’ brilliant! I can’t believe he did that!”
Watching this on repeat. Speechless 😳
— Trackhouse Racing (@TeamTrackhouse) October 30, 2022
Can you explain the physics behind what he did in the simplest terms to someone who has never taken a physics class?
Imagine you tie a tennis ball or whiffle ball to a string, and you take that string and you whirl it around your head in a circle. So now you’ve got a ball going around your head in a circle. The only reason it’s going in a circle is because of the string, right? So that string is providing a force that makes the ball turn. Anything that moves in a circle does the same thing.
Now, here’s the big difference: With stock cars, we don’t have strings, obviously. So all that turning force has to be created by those four little patches of rubber on the tires that are in contact with the track. And at a track like Martinsville, when you’re turning a corner at, let’s say, 80 miles an hour, you’re talking about needing four tons of force to turn a NASCAR stock car. They’re pretty heavy, right? So if you just think about something rolling straight, and you have to smack it so it’ll turn, four tons is what you would need to smack it with to get a car to turn. …
THE MOVE THAT SENDS ROSS CHASTAIN TO THE #CHAMPIONSHIP4! pic.twitter.com/67Ku712XZf
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) October 30, 2022
This is a principle known as centripetal force, and every science teacher should download that video and use it in their physics course, because this is just a great way to show kids that the science you learn is applicable everywhere, especially places you probably least expect it.
Did Chastain shifting into fifth gear intensify that?
No, the gearing really didn’t make a difference. Because that turning force comes from the tires, that means that you’re limited by how much grip your tires have. So as Chastain was coming around Turn 2, he’s looking at the two cars he has to pass, and he knows for a fact it is impossible for his tires to generate enough grip that he can get to those two cars.
So there’s not enough turning force left in his car to get there. And, in fact, there wouldn’t have been with perfectly good tires. So he slides into Turn 3 and guns it and uses the track to make him turn. It’s very much like a pinball would do. So now the force for him turning is not just coming from his tires; it’s also coming from the force of the wall on the car.
So with your analogy, the tires and wall are functioning like the string around a tennis ball?
Exactly. And usually, it’s just the tires that are creating that force. But in this case, he had the tires plus the wall. And that wall, it’s not going to move. So that wall was actually creating enough turning force for him to just out-speed the entire rest of the field.
This is the best thing of 2022 in motor racing !
We all did this on video games with damage disable. Never thought this could become reality 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 https://t.co/UOsfyxox7E— Fernando Alonso (@alo_oficial) October 31, 2022
That was going to be my next question — how was he able to keep his speed that high running against the wall. But you're saying the wall actually helped him go faster?
Yeah. Now, there are some negatives. There is friction between the car and the wall. But we’re at Martinsville, right? It’s a short track. He floors the accelerator, which you could do for maybe a few seconds every lap at Martinsville. He keeps it floored all the way through the turn. So he’s got more than enough horsepower there to overcome the additional friction between the wall and the car that would be slowing him down.
Can you guess what today’s #1 play was on @SportsCenter?!@RossChastain’s move put the entire sports world on notice 👏 pic.twitter.com/HeTYQWUFAM
— Trackhouse Racing (@TeamTrackhouse) October 31, 2022
We've seen drivers like Carl Edwards at Kansas Speedway and Kyle Larson at Darlington Raceway attempt to pull this move off to no avail. Does this work best at a smaller track or could it work anywhere?
This is one of those things you can do exactly once in a race only at the very last lap, and it won’t work at most race tracks.
It’s going work better at a smaller track because you’ve got excess engine power, meaning if you’re at Daytona [International Speedway] or Talladega [Superspeedway], you’re already full on the throttle all the time anyways, right?
Everyone’s concern is, “Well, is someone going to try this at Phoenix?” Well, if you look at Phoenix, the shortest way around the track is to shortcut the dogleg, right? So trying to go around the edge and ride the wall is not going to get you an advantage at Phoenix.
So this was really a perfect storm. Everything lined up for Chastain to successfully pull this off at Martinsville, NASCAR's shortest track?
Oh, yeah. You had the right track, you had the right situation and you had the right driver, because not every driver is going to do that.
One of the guys back when the NASCAR R&D Center was just getting going told me, “When you put a bunch of guys between the ages of 18 and 30 in cars like this, there’s only so safe you can make it.” Ross is just one of those drivers who’s ready to throw the Hail Mary pass. A lot of other drivers — I don’t think it would occur to them to try it, and even if it did, I’m not sure they would.
This doesn’t even look real 😳
Ross fan, @caleb_matthew21 captured it perfectly…we all had the same reaction!
— Trackhouse Racing (@TeamTrackhouse) October 31, 2022
Does the Next Gen car play a role in this perfect moment for Chastain?
Yeah, the old car — he probably would have peeled the body off of the car like a sardines can, and then something would have stuck in his tire, he would have blown a tire, he would have spun out and probably crashed half the field. So that’s another piece of the perfect storm; it was the right car.
It’s made out of this polymer composite. And the nice thing about it is that it doesn’t shred like metal does.
