Many of the fans in NASCAR land get really excited about Talladega, as the race is so action packed. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a snoozefest from an engineering point of view. The body rules are so tight that there is little room for development of an awesome low drag package. There are surely gains to be made by making adjustments to the underbody, but these are really hard to measure. One way that the well funded teams try to find these gains is by straight line testing. The install a bunch of sensors on the car and tow it to a big, long, flat stretch of road. Then they run the car up and down the road all day long, trying different peices or configurations, and try to assess drag decreases from the sensors. Obviously this is about as boring as it gets, but not every part of Cup racing is 100% exciting.

Ganassi has taken this concept to a higher level and they actually use an abandoned highway tunnel in rural Pennsylvania to do their straightline testing. This helps to keep the air conditions the same between runs, which is crucial when trying to decide what runs or peices are better. Testing in the middle of the desert is fine, but cross winds and temperature changes muddle the results.

The race event is usually pretty boring for the team guys too. You show up super early to get all of the superspeedway tech line stuff done, which takes ages. Then in practice you get like 2-3 runs and that is it. Then on Saturday, you go to the track for 12 hours just to do your 2 laps of qualifying. Historically RG's strategy has been to hang out in the back for the first half of the race, so qualifying is completely a waste of time. Then, for the race on Sunday, you hope you don't get wrecked and you wait for the last 100 miles for everyone to start racing. So..yeah...alot of down time, followed by 3 hours of nervousness.

Fortunately the infield is usually something special.