Update: It's Thanksgiving week in the US, and many Ars staffers are currently sleeping off all yesterday's tryptophan (or : It's Thanksgiving week in the US, and many Ars staffers are currently sleeping off all yesterday's tryptophan (or Soylent , we guess). So with a new racing season soon upon us , we're resurfacing a piece that looks at one of our favorite aspects of the sport—the fact that its bleeding-edge tech eventually makes it into our driveways. This story originally ran on January 27, 2015, and it appears unchanged below.

Why do car companies go racing? First and foremost, they do it for marketing. Almost as soon as the first cars turned a wheel, they were being raced against each other to show the world—and all those potential customers—who built the fastest and most reliable motor car. Bob Tasca, a Ford dealer and leading figure in drag racing, articulated it best. "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday."

Whether that still holds true 50 years later in an age of far greater competition for our interest isn't clear, but today salesmanship certainly isn't the only reason to race. Take another quote, this time from Soichiro Honda, founder of the Japanese auto giant that bears his name: "Racing improves the breed."

The Goldilocks zone

Considering the source, maybe that's just post-hoc marketing justification. Or... perhaps racing really makes our cars, our day-to-day vehicles, better.

If you want to actually win on Sunday, you have to design, engineer, and build a car that’s better—for the given set of rules—than everybody else who turns up. And in the course of doing that you can learn or test things that can improve the cars you sell, particularly if the rulebook encourages this kind of innovation. Not every racing series does this, however. In some cases, the cars must be so specialized for the task in hand that any lessons learned aren’t transferable. There’s not much on a Formula 1 car, for instance, that’s relevant to what we drive on the road. Other times, the rules are so tightly controlled that much of the equipment is identical across competitors, leaving less to be learned. Every IndyCar IR12 on the grid uses the same chassis, NASCAR Generation 6 stock cars all use an identical chassis, and the same is true for the German (DTM), Australian (V8 Supercars), and Japanese (Super GT) equivalents.

This insistence on standardized parts often stems from a goal to keep costs in check. When car companies go racing, the desire to win sometimes manifests as a willingness to open one’s wallet more than the next factory. But big racing budgets are less justifiable to shareholders or a board of directors when they don’t bring results on track, and each race only has a single victor. And more than one racing series has found out the hard way that a spending arms race can make for bad entertainment if one team becomes especially dominant. Races where the results are a foregone conclusion just aren’t as exciting for the fans to watch, and previously diverse pools of competitors soon evaporate.

Eric Bangeman

Eric Bangeman

However, rulebooks can be written that hit a sweet spot—overlapping sets on a Venn diagram where there’s room to innovate but not so much that everyone else gives up and goes home. Under such circumstances, technologies can be developed with real-world relevance. Since the turn of the century, one rulebook more than any other exists in this Goldilocks zone, and it’s being used to good effect in series like the Tudor United SportsCar Championship (TUSC) and the World Endurance Championship (WEC). Automakers are spending tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars on racing programs, often paying for it from R&D budgets as well as (the more traditional) marketing.

The results have been showing up in road cars generally as more power, greater efficiency, and improved reliability, leading to what is arguably a current golden age for road-relevant technology transferring from track to street. That’s a view shared by John Hindaugh, a broadcaster and commentator with a long background in the sport. Hindaugh is the voice of Radio Le Mans (you may also recognize him from commercials for both Forza and Gran Turismo), and he's been watching this era evolve right before him. "In pure engineering terms, making that technology transfer has always been difficult. You could argue it’s been a long time since anything useful directly has come from a race car to a road car." But, he told us, "it’s been an amazing turnaround over the last 15 to 16 years."

Hindaugh in particular noted the resurgence of endurance racing as a big instigator in modern tech transfer. "It's the development in pursuit of efficiency as well as power," he said. "The guys at Le Mans did as many laps as last year, at the same speeds, but with 25 percent less fuel! In motor racing we want to be fast and exciting, but bringing in the efficiency has made people think differently."

Audi has certainly led the way in this department since 1999, and Hindaugh credits them for taking a leap of faith. "They were the first people to transfer the technology that they had into road cars when the cars they were racing didn’t look like road cars," he said. "[Audi] have developed things like TFSI [direct injection] to get that virtuous triangle of power, reliability, and efficiency. Normally you can only get two out of three." Audi develops its racing engines and road car engines at the same site in Neckarsulm, Germany, and the company credits the atmosphere and culture of this combined workplace. Engineers in different programs can congregate over the coffee machine, making technology transfers an organic process.

There are different classes of cars that race (at the same time, on the same track) at Le Mans and its associated series. Audi has been competing in the fastest class, an area typically reserved for purpose-built prototypes that visually bear little resemblance to something we could buy from a showroom. Others choose to campaign what are known as GTs, racing cars that begin life as production road cars. This group includes the likes of Chevrolet, which has had a great deal of success since 1999 with its Corvette Racing team.

Listing image by Aurich Lawson