Stock car racing fans like to listen to “mic’d up” drivers. But how about when NASCAR drivers sport custom-made mouthpieces to pick up more than action reactions?
 
To collect real-time data on exposure to acceleration and vibrations, about half of all NASCAR drivers “put instrumented, custom-fit mouthpieces inside their mouths,” explained Joel Stitzel, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C.
 
This helps researchers collect kinematics of drivers’ experience when performing practice laps or on race day. The results were released in the paper, “Pilot Collection and Evaluation of Head Kinematics in Stock Car Racing,” published in the March 2023 issue of Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.