NASCAR moving to fuel injected engines? Whoa hold up, lets not be too hasty, fuel injection was only adopted by other racing series’ mere decades ago. It’s becoming a reality, NASCAR is moving out of the dark ages and this weekend’s Kentucky Speedway race will be the first test of fuel injection systems for the Sprint Cup cars. The shift to EFI will be completed for the 2012 season with all Sprint Cup cars using the technology.

Why has it taken this long? Well there has been plenty of opposition against fuel injection, since carburetors are fairly simple mechanical devices that don’t allow for easy manipulation of the rules. Fuel injection systems are much more complex and are easier to adjust both mechanically and electronically. The bottom line is that NASCAR has been avoiding fuel injection mainly to stop teams from cheating, or bending the rules to gain a slight advantage.

The fuel injection system components for NASCAR will be built by two suppliers, Freescale Semiconductor and McLaren Electronic Systems, and are built to identical specifications. (more…)

In news that is set to shock readers the NASCAR race series in the States is set to get some new technology – fuel injection. Well, it’s not really a new technology and every car sold in the past couple of decades has had it, but good for NASCAR on updating their engines and improving fuel economy.

For the first time since the series began back in 1947, the stock cars that travel full-throttle around tracks all across America will abandon their carburetors in favor of an Engine Control Unit sourced from McLaren and a computer processor from Freescale. The tag-team of McLaren and Freescale reportedly beat out eight rival bids for the contract.

Always looking for a positive spin NASCAR Vice President of Competition Robin Pemberton said, “This is a positive step that will provide greater fuel efficiency and a greener footprint while maintaining the same great competition that we have seen on the race track.”

It’s not just fuel economy that will improve, horsepower will also go up with the shift. Competitors like Ford and Toyota are very happy with the change and feel that its important that the race cars are as closely related to production cars as possible, with fuel injection being a big step in that process. (more…)

You’ve either got it, or you haven’t (fuel injection, that is)

Shows how fuel injection works and why it is better