Why is nascar hard

Early on, I was able to get by mostly on talent. I had sort of a natural feel for racing. They understand cars and racing on a deep level and will do whatever it takes to get the finish line one millisecond before you.

I wish that was true. The climb to a championship is a thorny mountain. I start preparing for my next race pretty much as soon as the last one ends.

I keep a lot of notes on every track on the schedule because each one has its own nuances. Imagine if basketball players had to play on a different-shaped court with different basket heights every game. The perfect example — early on in my career, I used to struggle a lot at Loudon, in New Hampshire. We could always go fast in practice and qualify well there, but I struggled with the car during the race.

I had trouble figuring out how to manage my tires and generally where and how to pass people at the right times. But we worked at it, tinkered with my strategy, and two years ago we won there. Today I feel confident heading to any track, but only because I went through the process of feeling uncomfortable for a little while.

Success comes in pieces. You find something that works one week and apply it to the next. Eventually, all the pieces come together and make a great picture.

In football terms, a driver is essentially the quarterback of a race team. For the most part, just like a football team, we only win if everyone is on the same page.

There are just over employees at the Team Penske shop, the source of a lot of our success. Our team is constantly evaluating and re-evaluating how we build the car.

I work closely with a lot of smart engineers and my crew chief to determine what the car will do on the racetrack. My job as a driver is to get a sense of what the car feels like and feed the team my input. In our sport, that can be the difference between first and 20th.

Faster than the blink of a eye. The construction of the car is one aspect of the operation, but practice is also key.

All of this is based on feel, so the challenge comes down to articulating things in very specific terms. You have to understand each other.

Let me give some love to the road crews, who might be the most underappreciated people in our sport. They travel as much as anyone — maybe outside of the guys that drive our haulers to each and every race — and they are a crucial component of any success you might experience.

To be on a road crew takes a tremendous amount of talent because you have to able to change such tiny and specific things very quickly. They are all skilled mechanics who have worked for years to hone their specific areas of expertise, be it shocks, tires, engines or whatever.

The rules package Keselowski refers to was implemented before the season. NASCAR increased Cup cars' spoiler height, splitter length and radiator pan width, and for bigger oval tracks, a smaller tapered spacer would limit horsepower to the range rather than plus.

Aero ducts at certain tracks also would increase drag and downforce. Totally different race car in 25th than it is in 15th, and totally different in fifth than it is in 15th. That part was a big adjustment, and it still is. Kenseth agreed with Keselowski's assertation that Cup cars are easier to drive than ever, adding the caveat that they still present a lot of challenges: "Obviously you take power away, add downforce, add side force, add all that stuff, that creates grip.

Obviously that makes the car easier to drive. Faster through the corners, slower through the straightaways. As drivers go around the track, the elevation, offset, and other components of the circuit play a crucial role in how the driver manipulates the throttle, clutch, and brakes. To add to that, the mechanics behind the scenes need to fine-tune their car for every race; setting up the camber, suspension stiffness, toe, etc.

All the prep means nothing, though, if you can't setup a winning strategy. What looks like driving in circles is, actually, an intense chess match taking place in excess of mph. As you can see, there's a lot more working behind the curtain than anybody would anticipate at first. Thanks in part to the growing prominence of sim-racing, it's become way easier for upcoming drivers to understand the factors mentioned above. What sim-racing can't prepare you for, however, is the sheer power inside these incredibly fast, lightweight race cars.

In upcoming years, for instance, NASCAR plans to add a boost function using hybrid engines; granting the driver an extra hp than it already had. Just think about that: a car that's almost 1,horsepower, has no driver assists, and is very uncomfortable. Yet, some will still think that taming such a beast would be no issue?

To us, the opposite seems to fall under Occam's razor. If it didn't, then driving one of these to the finish line wouldn't require years of practice and experience.