Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

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This video is an interesting comparison of just how fast F1 cars are:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cNqaPSHv0

IIRC some of those GT cars that look like snails compared to F1 cars are "anything goes".

However, here is a truly anything goes car (that has broken the speed barrier on land): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKQ-xj5C2m8

So yeah, an anything goes car will go much faster than an F1 car. But it's going to suck at cornering. We currently don't have anything that can hold such high average speeds as an F1 car can. Not even in any very lightly regulated sport.

For interestingness' sake, modern WRC cars reach speeds of 220kph over gravel.

Top speeds of F1 cars are around 360kph (the Bugatti Veyron can do 430kph), but F1 cares more about cornering speed than top speed.

From Wikipedia:

> The large downforce allows an F1 car to corner at amazing speeds. As an example of the extreme cornering speeds; the Blanchimont and Eau Rouge corners at Spa-Francorchamps are taken flat-out at above 300 km/h (190 mph), whereas the race-spec touring cars can only do so at 150–160 km/h (note that lateral force increases with the square of the speed). A newer and perhaps even more extreme example is the Turn 8 at the Istanbul Park circuit, a 190° relatively tight 4-apex corner, in which the cars maintain speeds between 265 and 285 km/h (165 and 177 mph) (in 2006) and experience between 4.5 g and 5.5 g for 7 seconds—the longest sustained hard cornering in Formula 1.

Anything goes does not exist in a vacuum though, there's over-the-top regulations aiming at a specific goal (here, driving research on efficiency) and there's what you want to achieve within a set of basic rules (e.g drag race, best lap, best 10 laps, max laps under 24h...).

Take for example LMP, which used to go well above 400kph, but not so much car regulations as much as track regulations made that impossible/useless (e.g old Mulsanne Straight), designing top speed out of the cars because it simply was too dangerous. Mulsanne now has a brake zone from ~320kph down to ~100kph, much more humanly manageable.

More downforce also means more drag, and for LMP's long running races this means too high a fuel consumption. Also, ground effects and closed body vs open wheels. Reliability (or lack thereof) is on the F1 side since LMP has to run hundreds of long laps, while a F1, even with "X races per engine" rules has to run continuously for a couple hours at most. Lift such a regulation and you could make a bloody efficient engine that self-destructs over a single race.

LMP have a minimum regulated weight of ~900kg, and as every fellow driver knows, "weight is the enemy of performance". Barring that, and tuned to the problem, LMP would kick the pants off a F1 because F1 is (comparatively) insanely regulated.

The beauty of F1 is that it achieves incredible performance in spite of suffering extremely limiting regulations. My bet is that lifting all regulations would quickly put the human as the sole limiting factor to performance, because the poor pilot of a guy would be on the verge of passing out at braking and inside every corner, unless they're on a balancing seat and have anti-g suits.

The real question is how fast an "anything goes" F1 car would go around a racetrack. Especially if you remove the human driver, or make the car remote-controlled.

> Especially if you remove the human driver, or make the car remote-controlled.

Now that's something I'd tune in for! A couple of high budget vehicles and sophisticated driver AIs slugging it out on a racetrack, that would definitely be interesting.

Agreed - removing the driver would make it much more interesting. Safety regulations could then be relaxed considerably so we'd see more spectacular crashes. Also a human's inability to control a vehicle during high G force cornering severely restricts the speed you can allow the cars to go.

And the driver salaries could be donated to charity ;-)

What I meant was what if an F1 team of designers didn't have to be constrained by any rules and could build their dream F1 car. For example, there was one car a couple of decades ago (I think early 80's maybe?) that used a sort of vaccum effect to keep the car sucked to the ground. It improved cornering speeds greatly, but the device was banned.

I googled some and found this: http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&t=598933&hw...

Couldn't find a link to the original article though. Pretty interesting.

> a sort of vaccum effect to keep the car sucked to the ground

Ground effect[0], thoroughly used in LMP to gain downforce without suffering as much drag as with a wing.

Here's what happens when the effect breaks down[1].

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_(cars)

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIJ4q3PD57A

Here's a BBC documentary about it from 1981: http://youtu.be/xxvcUnmBF8I?t=3m37s called Gentlemen Lift Your Skirts.

You might be referring to the Gordon Murray designed Brabham BT46 "Fan car":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46

That's the one I was thinking about, thanks!

From the Wikipedia article: "The BT46B generated an immense level of downforce by means of a fan, claimed to be for increased cooling, but which also extracted air from beneath the car. The car only raced once in this configuration in the Formula One World Championship—when Niki Lauda won the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp. To the dismay of its designer Gordon Murray, the concept was voluntarily withdrawn from racing again by Bernie Ecclestone."

I wonder how a modern day CanAm car would compare to F1 cars. At the time the CanAm cars were producing far more power (Porsche 917/30 ~1,580hp) than F1 and still had to handle.

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