In this activity, students will investigate the two car tandem at Talladega.

Talladega Superspeedway is strictly aero, all aero, all the time. A standing joke in the engineering circles is that you can put anything (springs, shocks and chassis geometry) under a car for Talladega and it doesn't matter. It's all aero and all luck. Many teams don't even bother to run shaker rig tests on their Talladega cars. The current configuration of a NASCAR Sprint Cup car combined with restrictor plates which limit the power output of an engine results in two car tandems with the second car literally pushing the lead car of the duo. Cars paired up in this manner can run as much as 15 mph faster than a single car and 8 mph faster than a long line of cars with tiny spaces between the cars. You could call it the Talladega Pas de Deux.