"What if you ignored all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was simply to get a human being around a track 200 times as fast as possible? What strategy would win?"

Randall Munroe, former NASA roboticist, creator of the popular xkcd webcomic and author of the New York Times bestselling book series "What If?," decided to answer this question for race fans everywhere by calculating how fast a vehicle could go around a race track such as, say, the Daytona International Speedway.

One stipulation: "Let's say the racer has to survive."

After a lot of calculations involving a specially designed vehicle, the answer was about 90 minutes. The current record for a Daytona 500, set in 1980, is 2:48:55.

How fast do race cars go in NASCAR?

Turns out the bottleneck is the driver. "There are lots of ways you can build your vehicle," Munroe explains in the delightful, matter-of-fact video posted to YouTube in December. "An electric car, a rocket sled or a carriage that runs along a rail like a roller coaster. But in each case, it's pretty easy to develop the design to the point where the human is the weakest part."

With humans who are not jet pilots limited to roughly 3-6 Gs of acceleration (1 G = the pull you feel under Earth's gravity), sticking with a limit of 4 Gs means the top speed at Daytona would be about 240 mph. The actual current record for top speed at Daytona is 222.971 mph, set by Colin Braun of Michael Shank Racing in 2013 during a private session on the track. The fastest winning average speed during a Daytona 500 is 177.602 mph by Buddy Baker during that 1980 race mentioned above.

To speed things up, Munroe began postulating a vehicle with the possibly screaming driver in a rotating ball that would always face the direction of acceleration. Constant 4 G acceleration gets you a race in an hour and 45 minutes, not nearly enough time for the necessary commercials. At 6 Gs, it's an hour and 20 minutes. It would still take over an hour at 10 Gs, Munroe said, and "it would also involve breaking the sound barrier on the backstretch."

After that, he dropped the "living driver" restriction and began designing even wilder, faster vehicles involving centrifuges, magnetic fields and diamond ball bearings because it's not science until something goes boom. The video is an adaptation of the chapter "No Rules NASCAR" from "What If 2," published in 2022.

Randall Munroe of xkcd answers your questions, to a disturbing degree

Munroe, who started answering bizarre reader-submitted questions on his blog years ago with serious, detailed, math and physics-based responses (and his trademark stick-figure drawings) has filled his books with queries like what would happen if the sun turned off one day? (Bad things).

What if the solar system was made out of soup? What would happen if all the people in the world got together and jumped up and down? Could you cool the atmosphere if everyone opened their freezer doors at the same time? What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

The answers don't always work out for any humans involved. In the baseball example, the ball hitting air molecules that fast would turn the air in the baseball stadium into "an exploding bubble of incandescent plasma," Munroe said, which would ultimately level everything within about a mile of the park and destroy a significant amount of the city.

And he shows his work.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Randall Munroe's 'What If?' video postulates a "no rules" NASCAR race