"NASCAR Vehicle Inspection using 3D Laser Scanning

3D Laser scanning services meets the tricksters

When one thinks “professional”, they often don’t think of someone who tries to cheat the system or pull the wool over someones eyes. It wouldn’t work in the medical industry. Imagine a doctor trying to fake his own qualifications skills saying that he has done surgeries that actually has never performed. That would be too serious to allow him to hold his license. Think if a professional musician lied about being able to play a certain instrument. That would be the end of a career if the truth were known. The same goes for bankers, teachers, architects, or pretty much any profession. That is, except for the world of car racing. Professional racer teams have tried to hoodwink the laser inspection of NASCAR for getting a possible edge over the competition. Fortunately, 3D laser scanning services experts at NASCAR have caught on to the trickery.

3D laser scanning services at NASCAR

First of all, it’s important to understand what happens before a race at NASCAR for inspecting. Every car the will enter the NASCAR competition must compete under certain requirements. Cars must meet specific requirements to guarantee that the playing field is level for all characters. One of the specifications is the body size of the car. The width and length of the car cannot go a very specific range. To inspect each car, NASCAR has implemented the use of 3D laser scanning services called the Optical Scanning Station. The scanning station would run two types of scans; a low-resolution and a high-resolution scan. The high-resolution scan, which is more time consuming, was used if the underneath is dark colored. If the underneath is light, then they would use a low-resolution scan, which took much less time.

A Solution to keep things fair

Some of the racing teams found the weakness of this system. They discovered that they could cheat a bit on the size of the body simply by alternating the color of the body. They found that they could add a little extra width by manipulating the scanners with colors. It seems that NASCAR has caught on to the trickery and has now added some muscle to its Optical Scanning Station. They have beefed up their scanning power with measuring points for each car exceeding 130,000. They added more lasers and installed more cameras into the works. Now they can get away with such shenanigans.

Most of us would be quick to point the finger and call all of those teams big fat cheater who need to be sent to the penalty box. Fortunately for them, the Vice President of NASCAR quite gracious about the whole incident. He did feel that anyone had cheated. His response was more about the need to make sure that the playing field lever for all competitions teams by improving their use of 3D scanning services. I guess that is the nature of professional competition. Teams will do whatever they can to get the  edge over the other competitors. Maybe this just goes to show how intense the competition really is in NASCAR racing.

Keep reading: more articles about 3D scanning

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