Leawood911:
Americans can take corners and have also always been expert at drag racing. It is Europeans who are the one trick pony and can’t appreciate drag racing (although 0-60 or 0-200 times still seem to be very interesting to all). Don’t even get me started on ovals. They are not so easy
Let me tell you this for certain. I have been to many types of live racing. Countless F1 events etc. In each case I would love to jump into the car and try it. No problem - except for drag racing. Go watch Top Fuel once in your life live and then let me know if going straight fast is something you dare to do!! I would not want to go 0-325 mph in 4 seconds for all the money in the world. Fucking insane. Pardon me.
You know, you just proved my point.
Drag racing is born from accelerating and going fast in a STRAIGHT LINE. Between stop lights a stuff, there is no cornering involved.
Those 0-something times are just a reflection of a car's mechanical grip in a straight line, the horsepower being put down, the the aero drag. No driver skill involved. The only driver skill needed is to keep the car going in a straight line. That's it.
Oval racing, it's from NASCAR, and NASCAR was born from bootleggers trying to out run police in a straight line too. Simplest of the oval tracks is basically 2 straights linked by 2 giant 180 turns that let them keep the speed as fast as possible. But those NASCAR guys do have great car control skills, not easy to go around a turn at such speed. And there are plenty of footage of them saving a loose car from the wall too.
Circuit racing never quite caught on with the American crowd. The skills of carving corners got lost on them. They simply cannot equate. Most American roads are long and straight, grid like. Not too many curvy winding roads, apart from the mountainous states on either side of the continent.
For rest of the world where their country is not flat, negotiating curves, up and down hills and mountains are a fact of life, people can equate that better with circuit racing. Don't forget, circuits are corners linked by straights, so racing on straights are still being tested, with the added challenge to put down power when the car is not even straighten out yet.
A non-flat circuit time will be more relevant than a drag strip time, simply because a circuit basically exercise all of a car's performance parameters, not just horsepower.
Rings time gaining importance is exactly this reason. It is better than say a modern flat F1 circuit simply because the car has to negotiate inclines, on and off camber moments.
1/4 mile racing is big in American simply because a lot of intersections are spaced appropriately for those drag racing moments.
The 0-something time, or say 60-200km/hr or anything involving higher straight line speed is of relevance to the autobahn, either for passing speed or merging speed from onramps.
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