Too Much Tech In Racecars?

#4 Corvette at the Sebring 24 Hours, courtesy of Motor Trend

If you watched the 2013 Sebring 12 Hour race, you already know that Corvette won.  If you didn’t watch the 2013 Sebring 12 Hour race, the vibrant, yellow Corvettes with the brutal and grunty V8 engines won the 61st edition of the 12 hour endurance race held in Florida every year.  However, if you watched the race, you also know that in order to win, Corvette Racing had to endure some nerve-wrecking technical difficulties rather early on in the event that forced the #3 Corvette Racing car to retire.  Luckily, the #4 team was able to look past the problems of their sister car and provide an exhilarating final few hours on their march to victory while ‘Vette Racing lovers slowly but surely recovered from their mini heart attacks.

It also, however, caused me to think a bit about the growing change in the complexity of racing cars.  And unfortunately, not all teams have been able to overcome non-driver-error technical difficulties like Corvette Racing did, resulting in disappointment among the team’s fans and racing lovers alike (let alone the team itself).  With that being said, I asked myself: ‘Is there too much technology in today’s racing cars?’

Read the rest of this entry »