The Olympic Games' NASCAR Connection

The other night I noted that Snowboard Cross was about as close as you could come to NASCAR in the Olympics - side-by-side racing, high banks, speed, wrecks - it has it all. However, there is another connection between the Olympics and NASCAR that you may not know. Our bobsleighs are built by Geoff Bodine, former NASCAR driver and car owner:

Standing near Whistler’s Thunderbird corner as American pilot John Napier roared into view, former NASCAR great Geoff Bodine neatly summed up the difference between bobsleigh racing and motorsport.

“A driver controls his speed, can shut the engine off if he don’t want to go,” Bodine told Reuters at the Winter Olympics.

“Here the engine is Mother Nature. You don’t turn her off until you get to the bottom.”

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Bodine, winner of the 1986 Daytona 500, NASCAR’s showpiece race, is well qualified to talk about the two high-speed sports, one all growling V8 engines and concrete and the other requiring brute strength, polished runners, ice and gravity.

Always fascinated by speeding machines, Bodine was sitting at home watching the 1992 Winter Olympics and observing how the American sledders were struggling to match their German and Swiss rivals.

It wrankled with Bodine, one of NASCAR’s great innovators, and stirred his patriotic instincts. After a chat with close friend and stock car chassis builder Bob Cuneo he decided bobsleigh could use a little NASCAR technology.

The Bo-Dyn (Bo for Bodine, Dyn for Chassis Dynamics) Bobsled Project was born.

‘GROUND ZERO’

Eighteen years later and Bodine, who once reached 197mph in a NASCAR race in Atlanta, is as passionate as ever about bobsleigh racing and nobody would be prouder on Saturday if Steve Holcomb’s gleaming black sled known as the Night Train ends the 62-year wait for an American men’s bobsleigh gold.

“The whole basis for this project was to provide American made equipment for American athletes,” Bodine said.

“When I first started I was ignorant about the sport.

“Bobby had never seen a bobsleigh before and I had never seen a bobsleigh before apart from on television. We started from ground zero.”

A change in the Olympic cycle meant Bodine and Cuneo had just two years to design, test and build the first sleds for the American team at the 1994 Lillehammer Games.

“I was watching the Lillehammer Games at home and when the first sled went down the run, that was my proudest moment,” he said.

“I’m proud of what these guys do every time they go down a run, but that first sled in Lillehammer, that was something.”

Well done, Geoff.