0 To 100 kph in 1 second [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The reason F1 cars do not do this is because suction is limited in F1 for very specific reasons and it goes back to the fatal crash of Ayrton Senna. Basically, a car that relies too much on suction is unsafe to drive because any failure can throw the car out of track with fatal consequences.
Suction is sensitive to distance between the car and the track. It is also sensitive to chasis being in good shape. If a car goes over some object on the track that unsticks the car from the ground and/or damages chasis, the car will instantly lose the suction and also any chance of stopping.
Another problem with suction is that it poses enormous force on shock absorbers keeping them hard and compressed.
Once you allow unlimited suction the next real limitation for acceleration is ability for the human driver to withstand acceleration.
Edit: I read up some more and it seems that noone really knows why he lost control. My previous impression was that the steering column broke mid-corner causing him to crash into the wall.
This is from an interview with Adrian Newey who designed the car: Newey admits that he has considered the causes of the crash repeatedly over the past 17 years. "If you look at the camera shots, especially from Michael Schumacher's following car, the car didn't understeer off the track. It oversteered which is not consistent with a steering column failure. The rear of the car stepped out and all the data suggests that happened. Ayrton then corrected that by going to 50% throttle which would be consistent with trying to reduce the rear stepping out and then, half-a-second later, he went hard on the brakes. The question then is why did the rear step out? The car bottomed much harder on that second lap which again appears to be unusual because the tyre pressure should have come up by then – which leaves you expecting that the right rear tyre probably picked up a puncture from debris on the track. If I was pushed into picking out a single most likely cause that would be it."
The halo, wheel tethers, and probably a few other modern things would have improved his odds.
to my knowledge banning ground effect devices and geometries has been a decades long game of cat and mouse which at virtually no point has resulted in an on the track reality of equal footing due to a complete absence of positive traction from active or passive ground effect features on all cars
just about every race I've ever watched has featured that year's aero controversy front and center in the commentary
F1 has been as much about engineers racing the rules as drivers racing the cars as long as I've been watching
A good driver can get closer to the limit of the car than a worse one, that's right. However if the limit of another car is 1 second better, even with an average driver that faster car is going to win against the slower one with the good driver.
So to win titles: build a very good car, hire a good driver (which will be more than happy to come), possibly win driving with one arm like Schumacher, Hamilton and Verstappen did in many of the last 20 years. But even without a star you're going to win anyway if the car is good enough. Williams won with Damon Hill, Ferrari almost won with Irvine in 1999 when Schumacher missed many races for injury.
Ground effect in general has been in use since the F1 cars first changed shape, and is used everywhere, not only on race cars.
Grandstands etc would need to be extra secure though due to the higher speeds.
So maybe then also get rid of spectators?
Edit to add: you also need a lot more than multi axis simulators for acceleration. A centrifuge providing multiple Gs, for example, is a very different feeling from from being tilted backwards in a simulator.
If risk was the point, people wouldn't be expending so much effort to make racing safer.
And trust me, most drivers do not have a death wish. It is all about figuring out how to learn to drive as close to limits of traction as possible without crossing it.
I appreciate people trying to make it safer, but if they ever make it safe I’ll probably take up bullfighting.
$ python3 compute_probabilities.py
$ Winner: Max Verstappen
Thank you for joining this F1 season, what an exciting year this was for the sport.
They're just a super expensive video-game.
Every sport uses “dry practice “ anyway. So you argue like punching bag is useless because it does not punch back boxers still do that.
Hamilton was very outspoken that he dislikes the sim that it doesn't really make you a better F1 driver.
F1 drivers are good at motorsport because they've been driving in motorsport since they were 5 years old so they built decades of muscle memory on the real deal learning to feel the car with their butts, not because they play the sim all day, otherwise every Gran Turismo fan would be driving in F1.
I really like Hamilton and somewhat dislike Verstappen but I think Hamilton is wrong here. Of course physical practice is better, but surely there are some worthy drivers with access to sims but not karting at a competitive level that may be found by sim racing. Plus one can do both, and plenty of F1 drivers claim sims make them better.
I bet nobody will watch it, when I was watching F1 it was already boring and many rules were added to reduce speeds and make it easier to over take, otherwise the order they start will be the order they will finish.
Or if you point the fan backwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuJz5zkIiUQ
https://www.formulanerds.com/features/the-story-and-conspira...
There's still debate on this.
For more info on “vacuum cars” check: https://motorsportexplained.com/ground-effect-f1/
That's just completely wrong.
You seem to be saying that the down pressure causes the suspension to be compressed, but the basic design must cope with that, either by fitting heavier springs, or using a self-leveling system.
Interesting watch.
And deposits grit and gravel into the windscreen of the car behind
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46
From the entry:
> Brabham's lead driver, Niki Lauda, realised he had to adjust his driving style, mostly for cornering. He found that if he accelerated around corners, the car would "stick" to the road as if it were on rails. This had the side effect of exposing the driver to very high lateral acceleration...
0.956 s in that car from ETH Zurich.
The electric motors can accelerate over and over again, and the whole car is smaller than a dragster engine.
P.S. You could always stop by the pits and ask them to re-torque the bolts :-D
That’s because electric motors can be as high as 98-99% efficient at converting electric power into work while small internal combustion engines peak out at about 35% and that’s generous. 20% is more typical. Then for ICE you have additional losses in the transmission that don’t happen for electric.
The vast majority of the energy in liquid fuel heats the air around the car.
This is also why a normal sized EV powered entirely by coal fired electricity can emit less carbon per mile than an efficient ICE car or even a hybrid. A big supercritical steam turbine in a coal power plant is going to be well over twice as efficient at converting heat into useful work than a small ICE. (Few people get all their power from coal, which is the worst case for CO2 emission, so in practice EVs are pretty much always lower carbon.)
Small heat engines suck.
"only" is doing a lot of work here, current lithium batteries are under 1 MJ/kg while good ol car gasoline is at 40+ MJ/kg
top fuel dragsters run nitromethane which is 4 times less energy dense than regular gas yet the go much faster so clearly there is much more going on than just energy density, like the fact that they have to entirely rebuild their engine every other day. I don't even think energy density is a big deal, it's more about how fast you can convert it into movement, and explosions are very good at that type of large scale conversion
Top fuel engines are torn down and rebuilt between runs.
A drag racer doesn't need range, so storing a large volume of energy probably isn't the problem. But having enough batteries to supply enough amperage to get that kind of acceleration is probably adding too much weight to be competitive.
This is also the problem with battery powered aviation. The majority of the energy used in a flight is on takeoff and ascent, effectively lifting all that mass to cruising altitude.
in fact it only needs 1/4 of a mile!
https://www.dailynews.com/2013/11/09/nhra-debate-rages-on-10...
Talks about runoff space at smaller venues, tires, insurance, etc
That's an exaggeration or a misstatement. Even flying the shortest possible flight (a single takeoff and climb, followed by a descent and landing at a very nearby airport) is overwhelmingly likely to use more total energy in the taxi, cruise, descent, landing, and taxi portions. I looked through some of my datalogs from flights where I flew circuits back to the same airport and the fuel (energy) used for a takeoff and climb to pattern altitude was only rarely more than the fuel used for the rest of the circuit, and that was only when practicing emergency turnbacks from a simulated loss of thrust on takeoff.
The peak power is used on takeoff, but the majority of energy is used in cruise.
For drag, the limit is more likely to be power density rather than energy density (same reason why more energy dense gasoline isn't used in top-fuel; the limiting power factor for a typical ICE is the amount of air you can get in the cylinder and you get about double the power with nitromethane vs gasoline for a fixed amount of oxygen).
[edit]
The power you can get with nitromethane is only double if you run stochiometric; since it is partially self-oxidizing, running richer lets you get even more power (sources seem to indicate 4x). Of course running rich lowers the efficiency even more.
It was more like an explosion than a car accelerating. Suddenly a ton of noise you could feel in your chest and then it's gone.
I've seen Ford make a similarly fast electric mustang-chassis dragster, and yeah, that's a bit... unsurprising, really? You know how much force you need, ergo how much torque, translating that into a motor is not hard, translating that into a current is not hard, translating that into cabling is not hard. It's much more a set of composable sub-problems, and unlike engines, most of those sub-problems can't explode.
What about having something like tank tracks?
(100 km/h)/s = 27.7777778 m/s^2 = 2.83g
If you can't give Tom Scott additional 4:30 you'd be shocked how much I spend in the loo...
given constant acceleration (which is unlikely, first you are traction limited by the tyres, then the highest acceleration, then slow dropoff), accelerating to 100 in 1 second would mean pulling 2.8g, while for 4 seconds it would only be 0.7g.
4-6+ seconds is much more typical for a normal unit. Which is similar to normal-ish 200kW sports cars. A bit fast but not breath taking.