I would suggest that if you are allowed a fan that sucks air from under the car then you can easily achieve pretty much any acceleration.
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.
Adrian Newey, the man who designed the car Senna was driving, gave this quote: ” The honest truth is that no one will ever know exactly what happened. There’s no doubt the steering column failed and the big question was whether it failed in the accident or did it cause the accident? It had fatigue cracks and would have failed at some point. There is no question that its design was very poor. However, all the evidence suggests the car did not go off the track as a result of steering column failure… 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.
There is a very interesting video and I think it's from the official investigation. It seems to show that the steering broke before the corner and Senna tried to turn but he just kept going streight.
Then we could just simulate the race based on the cars' and track's mathematical parameters, and then CGI the whole thing in Unreal Engine, and watch it in the Metaverse. No need for actual cars or drivers anymore.
Race car driver here: this proposal would be extremely boring. It’s amusing when there are people in the stands and it certainly can help pay the bills but we do this because it’s fun.
Which, from a spectator experience point of view would be more interesting anyway. As you could create tracks with intersections, allow aggressive driving etc. And, looking at you F1, know immediately when a car did leave the allowed bounds. Instead of hours after the race.
That could be very interesting and fun - compelling even. Many upsides. But without risk to life or limb and without a test of human (or monkey, or dog, or self aware AI, etc) emotional and psychological and spiritual and physical limits in real time, it could never be cool or sexy or glamorous or badass or epic or moving.
Then it won’t be the same mental battle, which means it won’t be the same physical battle.
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.
No, that's not true. Racing is a game of skill. It just happens it involves some risks.
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.
Take a moment and search YouTube for “neo Tokyo liquid television” if you would like to be entertained by a slight variation on your future of racing. I saw this when I was a kid and it resonated deeply. I hope you will enjoy it.
A few of the current F1 drivers already have sim setups and play driving sims as well as the official F1 video game. What you're suggesting isn't too far off.
F1 sims, as fancy as they are, are pretty useless at replicating the actual experience on the track as they don't and can't replicate the high G-forces drivers experience and which impact the deriving style required to actually perform.
But still training hand eye coordination and reflexes even if it is “dry practice” is super useful and F1 drivers do that which is also much cheaper than training on track.
Every sport uses “dry practice “ anyway. So you argue like punching bag is useless because it does not punch back boxers still do that.
Verstappen is aa bad example. He races F1 to finance his sim passion.
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.
There are a couple of examples of drivers starting in sims (though not in F1). Verstappen plans to make a GT3 team and promote good sim drivers to actual racing, so he is a good example in that his team may prove or disprove the theory.
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.
>On the other hand, absolutely unlimited performance - perhaps without a human driver - racecars would be pretty cool to watch.
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.
I guess you're right, the drama and competition is what draws viewers. An unlimited time-trial would still be pretty cool to watch, but a lot more niche.
I honestly think that no one but a programmer would ever say watching that would be cool. I have no idea what the point would even be, but then again, I don't get video game contests either.
Some form of ground effect has been in use in every single year since then. There are aerodynamic devices that channel air below the car, that keep confined there with vortices running along the car, that extract the air from behind. They even removed some limitations at the beginning of 2022 and they can run with a flat bottom now.
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
Well, they are prototypes. Every car is different so Formula 1 has always been more about the car than about the driver, despite the hype being more about drivers.
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.
No, he died because of a steering column failure, not a loss of downforce.
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."
To clarify this, active ground effect was forbidden in 1982. What is the thing the GP is talking about. The prohibition has no relation to Senna, but it was because of another accident.
Ground effect in general has been in use since the F1 cars first changed shape, and is used everywhere, not only on race cars.
You are confusing the function of springs and shock absorbers. Yes, springs can be compressed, but that is their basic function. Shock absorbers on the other hand should be configured so that they never reach the end of travel.
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.
Veritasium did a video on Micromouse competition which also got the breakthrough via similar kind of technology (fan that sucks air from under the car) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw
A variation of the Brabham BT46 Formula One car used a similar method to increase downforce and grip in lieu of implementing more advanced aerodynamics concepts, which the car's shape didn't allow.
> 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...
You are wrong on both counts. Has nothing to do with electricity. And it is pretty easy from engineering standpoint. The real reason F1 specifically bans this much suction is safety.
How do you get on the ETHZ team that does this? I would have loved to do this in my undergrad engineering degree, but nothing like this ever appeared in my curriculum.
There's some thesis displayed on their website ( https://amzracing.ch/en/about-us ). Probably you can apply when you're looking for a Bsc or Msc thesis subject.
It's much more impressive to me seeing it be done on a basically Formula Student++ budget. I'm sure the same team could make a very fast ICE car, and that would be impressive too.
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.
Growing up watching top fuel I'm exactly the same. And until battery technology achieves the same energy density as fuel (and its a long way off) we won't see the same kind of speeds with electric vehicles.
Nit pick: battery technology only needs to equal about 25-30% the raw energy density of fuel to equal the density of fuel in terms of useful work output.
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.)
> battery technology only needs to equal about 25-30% the raw energy density of fuel
"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
AFAIK the big problem with an electric drag racer is weight/mass. Batteries are heavier than fuel. Electric motors are fantastic at acceleration, but you have to feed them with enough amps to make that happen.
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.
> majority of the energy used in a flight is on takeoff and ascent
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.
superchargers (compressed air), huge sets of staged injectors, low compression ratios, stoichiometric ratio of nitromethane to air (1.7:1 instead of ~14.7:1 like normal petrol!) - as you say, it's about how fast you can convert the liquid to an explosion.
Nitromethane engines are less than 50% efficient and batteries are already about 10% as dense as nitromethane, so it's less than a factor of 5 difference.
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.
Not at real time - i'm a hobbyist photographer so have snapped the tyres digging into the track, but they're far too fast to see with a pair of eyes! really the only thing you can see is a blur then a parachute being deployed. the noise goes through you like nothing else though. I have metal plates in my arm due to an injury and was worried the vibration was going to undo the hardware :-D
Seeing, hearing and smelling a nitro fuel car is a complete sensory overload. It's an amazing experience. I know that electric or some other thing is the future, but I seriously doubt that those things will ever be the visceral experience that is an 11,000HP nitro engine.
As discussed in the other reply, friction is dependent only on the coefficient of friction and the force pushing down. Tank track are actually so large for ground pressure reasons: a wheeled 16 ton 6x6 truck will sink into the mud where a 40 ton tank will get through because the weight is spread out over so much more area. I read once about a tank whose ground pressure was so low that you could theoretically drive it over your foot without injury
While friction is invariant with the area, adhesion is proportional to the area. Tire grip is much more adhesion (think a glue-like chemical reaction) than friction, which is why race cars use such wide tires even though that ruins the air flow.
that's absolutely counterintuitive. is it because all the weight of your car is shared equally between all points of contact, so more grip area = less force per grip area?
Exactly. Of course that's assuming perfectly rigid wheels and ground. Tanks have tracks because they often encounter ground that's everything but rigid. Distributing your load over more area reduces the forces experienced by the ground, allowing it to stay put. Same idea with putting more wheels on a truck, or reducing tire pressure when driving in sand. Meanwhile race cars tend to have trouble with the tires not being rigid enough, driving them to bigger tires. But that doesn't allow you to exceed the theoretical max grip, and in that formula surface area cancels out.
Admittedly the "usual waffle" is the actually interesting part of the video. For me the most interesting tidbit is using fans for generating ground force, like the micromouses do.
there is a huge difference between accelerating to 100 km/h in 1 or in "a couple" of seconds.
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.
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.