I'm no expert on cars but according to this article it seems like a "fan car" uses fans to pull air in from under the car to create down force rather than as a primary means of propulsion. https://electrek.co/2022/06/26/watch-electric-fan-car-record...
Exactly this. One of the bigger “fans” of them — Gordon Murray — is actually producing a road legal one. The T.50, which is Gordon Murray’s attempt to “revisit” the McLaren F1 and do everything he couldn’t do (or hadn’t yet realized was possible) back in the 1990s: https://youtu.be/NT8PMXCMrsM
For those who aren’t aware, Harry Metcalfe was the founder of EVO magazine and had an outsized behind the scenes influence of Top Gear’s new format in the early 2000s. While Gordon sticks to some of his script, the two get VERY nerdy at points digging into all sorts of non-obvious minutiae and detail. 53 minutes is a lot, but by far it’s the best interview about the car by a large margin.
Harry is also a very big EV and renewable electricity nerd, and loves digging into those topics with tons of research.
that'd be lovely to drive behind -- you can see the dirt cloud that it's constantly sucking off the ground loom a few inches aft at all times during the Goodwood run.
I presume the fans must be turned off on public roads?
aside : how does one engineer a fan blade that's going to suck in rocks all day under normal use?
There is no need to run the fans at all or at least not nearly at full speed on public roads. So I would expect the dust cloud to not be there during operation on public roads.
Also the output it filtered so there are no rocks or other debris thrown into the car behind. That was already the case on the prototype raced at Goodwood.
the T.50 has a fan, and it is used for aerodynamic benefit, but it does so by helping speed up air through the under car diffuser, which allows them to use a more aggressive diffuser than would otherwise work. It all adds up to a modest downforce improvement and/or drag reduction.
The McMurtry by comparison is more like the old F1 fan car, in that it is literally sucking itself down to the road, with tons of force, with a skirt and so on.
Yep. As Gordon said about the Brabham, the McMurty is, “more of a blunt instrument.”
When I watched it do the hill climb I was thinking of all the drivers they might’ve approached, and thought that if Mark Webber hadn’t hung it up a few years ago he would’ve, “noped out” of that conversation immediately given his history of flying for Mercedes in the beginning of his career.
Plus that time when he flew his Red Bull at Valencia. Definitely the F1 driver with the most air time... so maybe the idea of a car that is actively pushing into the ground (instead of passively with wings/diffusers) would appeal.
I know that the "spacex package tesla roadster 2.0" is a running Elon hype joke, but the discussed thrusters would be revolutionary in extreme car design. Fan cars can only suck downward, but thrust vectoring would be a whole different ballgame: it can push down, directly thrust, push counter to the g force in a tight curve, brake faster.
Thrust vectoring could serve as a safety system to dynamically produce downforce in case a high speed car starts to go airborne, can counter spin-outs, etc.
While not full thrust vectoring, more like unthrust vectoring, McLaren did this:
One further famous example was the so-called “fiddle brake”, given its name much later by Ferrari technical boss Ross Brawn, but known within the team as “brake-steer,” that McLaren ran in the latter half of 1997 and into 1998. This simple concept allowed the rear brakes to operate on either the left or right side only, providing a clear benefit under acceleration in corners – and an instant lap time advantage.
Brake steering by applying different pressure left/right is not allowed.
11.1 Brake circuits and pressure distribution
11.1.1 ... all cars must be equipped with only one brake system. This system must comprise solely of two separate hydraulic circuits operated by one pedal, one circuit operating on the two front wheels and the other on the two rear wheels. ...
11.1.2 The brake system must be designed so that within each circuit, the forces applied to the brake pads are the same magnitude and act as opposing pairs on a given brake disc.
This doesn't really seem like that big of a disadvantage to me. You can just keep increasing downforce until the tires are able to give you the traction you need for any maneuver. It seems like that should scale as far as you need it to, and be way more efficient than rockets. I guess the limits would be in the tires and suspension.
Increasing downward force on a pneumatic car tire without increasing tire pressure causes the tire's contact patch to deform, and you lose grip. This can happen in driving due to weight transfer.
You would need something other than pneumatic tires, or some sort of dynamic tire pressure system.
Either one seems more practical than rockets on a car. And modifying pneumatic tires to minimize this problem might be possible, if it's something that just hasn't been prioritized because it wasn't that big of a problem before. Also, a sophisticated fan system might be able to make the downforce larger, yet less variable than natural downforce.
I think he was the one that developed the original concept for F1 racing in the '70s with Brabham, the BT46B car, I think? Supposedly to counter Lotus's lead in ground effect research on their car.
That's exactly right, the term usually refers to cars that use fans to generate vacuum for better grip rather than propulsion to go faster. Cars today can easily go super fast in a straight line, the hard bit is putting that power down in corners.
How scary would it be to be in one of those 1,400+ horsepower supercars and to hit the gas just to immediately see all four wheels start spitting smoke as they spin in place and start abrasively cutting through the asphalt?
Four wheel burnouts from a roll aren't that impressive from inside the vehicle. It's basically like being on "high traction" ice but with more noise. The vehicle mostly continues doing whatever it was already doing before you stomped on it.
> How scary would it be to be in one of those 1,400+ horsepower supercars and to hit the gas just to immediately see all four wheels start spitting smoke
Not very, unless the car suddenly gets a patch of grip and launches you into a tree.
> to hit the gas just to immediately see all four wheels start spitting smoke as they spin in place and start abrasively cutting through the asphalt?
You'd have to wear down the entire tyre first, which isn't going to happen unless you're already at the thread (though supercar tyres do wear down very quickly).
Tyre rubber is much, much softer than asphalt, and for good grip you want pretty soft rubber. By the accounts I've seen, even cold F1 tyres feel sticky. And drag tyres outright crinkle on takeoff.
Based on experiences with 72hp Suzuki SV650 all you need to do is grip the front brake and give it some gas. Digs asphalt at about 5mm/sec just fine. The tire gets totalled pretty fast too. So it's not rubber being too soft.
Apparently you've never walked on hot asphalt or been a hooligan doing donuts and/or burnouts in asphalt parking lots. The tire rubber and asphalt binders/tar basically become one and the gravel comes along for the ride caught in the crossfire.
I've seen both (as I work in civil engineering). That is all dependant on the asphalt mix. Parking lots are usually not done with a proper performance graded asphalt, so they'll deteriorate very easily under strenuous loading conditions. Roads (in well-regulated jurisdictions) use strong asphalt mixes with a lot of large granular aggregate and a lot less asphaltic content (and asphalt that's stable at higher temperatures). This makes roads a lot tougher in these loading conditions, but also tough (and therefore expensive) to put down - need to roll it fast while its still hot, with both steel drum rollers and rubber tyre rollers.
Not saying they can't be damaged, just that a parking lot is a poor comparison
It's scary enough in a 400hp/3600lbs RWD car. Even with traction control enabled, the car likes shaking it's ass any time you tap the gas and turning the wheel on anything remotely slick with power in will break the traction wheels loose.
Thanks for that. I'd taken it to mean it was propelled by fans and couldn't figure out how that could possibly work. This linked article on the road legal version confirms what you say in one of the image captions:
Gran Turismo 5 players will remember the Chaparral 2J Race Car '70 (a real race car with two giant fans on the back which was immediately declared illegal after protests of other car makers) and the fictional Red Bull X1/X2014 fan cars.
I’m impressed that this video game technology comes back!
With the difference that they are typically not allowed to have mobile aerodynamic surfaces.
That's why fan cars can be considered cheating. The fan is made of mobile aerodynamic surfaces. The Brabham BT46B try to circumvent the rules by saying their fan was a cooling fan, it didn't work.
If you allow mobile aerodynamic surfaces, indeed, you are going to have aircraft. It is easy to imagine a car with actual wings, with flaps, ailerons and elevators.
Not to be too much of a pedant, but the Brabham BT46B's excuse that the majority of airflow was used for cooling did stand, which was why Lauda's one race win wasn't taken away. It was protests from other teams, Ecclestone's personal interests, and rule changes after the fact that meant it only raced that one race.
Totally, but I still got downvoted a bunch... Using air for propulsion only makes sense if you're saving weight by which point you're better off cornering with wings instead of dragging wheels around with you.
Wings(/flaps/ailerons) are great for that, too, depending on their orientation. And arguably simpler. More effective at high speeds, but then apparently so are these fans.
Right and it’s specifically used for cornering downforce, since the coefficient of friction isn’t high enough to justify generating downforce like this in a drag race.
Right, but the wing doesn't start to work until you hit serious speeds, whereas the fan gives the car extreme traction at launch, which is pretty important in a race that only lasts 30 seconds, especially when your electric car has ~infinite torque.
Did you see Pastrana's ridiculous Subaru with active aero? It puts the wings away when they're dragging and they pop back up when the downforce and/or drag is wanted.
> the wing doesn't start to work until you hit serious speeds
I don't know what you consider "serious speeds", but wings can produce meaningful downforce at pretty low speeds. Check out the various unlimited class autocross cars which carry giants wings for downforce, even though autocross events are typically very low speed events (2nd gear most of the time).
"Meaningful" on order of 100lbs at 60mph. Which isn't nothing, but a Viper ACR has a peak downforce of 2000lbs@177MPH, or basically half the total weight of the car.
Plus, with extreme aero, there's a top-speed vs downforce tradeoff to be made. The big fan trick doesn't have that issue.
If you drill into published specs for wings, it's generally true they only really start to work at silly speeds on most road legal cars. The far more important effect is upon the emotional response of the owner when they look at it... There are exceptions, but virtually all rear spoilers only start to do their work meaningfully at well over 100mph.
> "At the car’s maximum speed, there is a total of 122 kg of rear downforce."
Yes, thats right, you get 122kg of extra downforce once you hit 196mph. Really helpful in 2nd gear... The reason manufacturers generally only quote wing downforce on road cars at incredible speeds is because the number is not very impressive at lower ones.
The wing starts to work immediately. Just not much. This is a pedantic but important point. Even low speed motoring events aero can be very very important if sufficiently large wings are allowed. Aerodynamic gear for cyclists is advantageous even if you are a slow cyclist, etc.
Popular "wisdom" in cycling is that aerodynamics are not a factor below 10 mph and not much of one at 15. It becomes pretty noticeable in the 15-20+ mph range (increasing with the cube of speed, or something like that).
~ much more torque than can practically be delivered between the tires and the ground, which is why using a vacuum to improve the traction and eliminate the transient squatting motion of the vehicle is so important in a short race.
Drag racers have had this problem for a long time; those races last less than 5 seconds. This hill climb is interesting because it's only a bit longer, half a minute, which really changes the equations for electric race cars vs. something like Pikes Peak which is 8 minutes to the top (and is now also totally dominated by electric cars).
This is a weird car guy myth that gets tossed around. The thinking is that, electric motors make uniform power output at any RPM, and torque = some_constant * power_output / RPM. Thus, as RPM goes to zero, torque goes to infinity.
Obviously, this is wrong in the real world for so many reasons, but that doesn't stop this from getting repeated.
Repeating it is a great way to paint yourself as one of those dolts that likes to act like they care about EVs for the virtue points.
Everyone who's ever used a drill knows that while speed and torque are inversely related in most of a motors normal operating range you don't get insane torque at low speed. Of course you can wind a motor differently to mitigate this somewhat but still, not a huge improvement. You wouldn't see reduction gears on all sorts of things if this were the case.
Turns out, it's fairly straightforward to build a car that rather radically exceeds the physical limits of the driver.
I would love to watch the autonomous version of that, though, with "no restrictions" (or nearly none - melting the nose of the car behind you with a flamethrower isn't quite in the spirit). You want to have a driver in a sim booth drive it over wireless? Great. You want to have a self driving algorithm? Great. You want to generate gobs of downforce with upward firing jets? Great. Just define some basic fan safety based limits, or... don't, and have a closed track.
I would love to see what some of the race teams could come up with, unrestricted from all the various "Hey, let's keep drivers and fans alive!" limits out there.
If you’re going to race, rather than time-trial, you probably want limitations on car size, too.
Also, formula one for years has cars leave a so highly turbulent wake that they had to introduce a system that gave cars close behind other cars some leeway as to their aerodynamics to make overtakes possible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_reduction_system)
They've actually radically redesigned the aerodynamics of the cars this year to address this exact problem (using ground effect instead of relying so much on wings for downforce). It's had it's own issues (there have been real problems with the cars bouncing on track), but it does seem like it's worked, they can follow much closer for much longer now.
DRS is still there though. The basic argument for it is that it makes races more exciting by encouraging overtakes even more (though there is a lot of debate about that).
Given that one restriction would have to be no hot exhaust (which would damage the other cars), electric turbines would have to be used, which should make the races pretty interesting, and the technology useful, especially for electric planes!
Many of the rules are there for safety, it’s not that hard to make a car so fast that the limiting factor is the driver and then the race becomes a contest of how willing to die your driver is.
Even with humans driving remotely, it's not very profitable. Drone racing is about as successful as RC racing has become. People don't take sports seriously without humans being directly involved.
And if their heart rate drops below 149bpm they get sacked. Boring is subjective but you're watching it wrong if you didn't find the last championship exciting.
Some years ago Racecar Engineering magazine had an excellent editorial that touched on the rising costs of F1, the technological benefit to consumers these programs can have but also the rising difficulty of keeping up with the Joneses and that perhaps we might be reaching the budgetary limit of what racing teams can realistically finance.
The author proposed "Formula Zero," where teams would be national rather than purely sponsor-oriented. Team America (cue music) vs. Team Japan vs. Team Italy etc. Note that this was years before the zero-emissions effort of the same name. Cool idea, and one might imagine what could emerge from efforts where NASA helps with aerodynamics for Team America, DLR for Germany, etc. (and/or DOE's combustion engineering experts consulting on Team America engine design: the potential collaborations run long).
Fun fact: a major limiting factor for racing speed is the allowed size of the brakes. Let F-1 cars have titanic wheels with low profile tires and lap speeds would shoot way up. Of course, brake too little or too late and the resulting wreck will almost certainly be fatal — it's pretty tough to protect against coup-contrecoup injuries no matter how energy-absorbent the car may be when speeds get really high. Scrambled brains are good for breakfast, bad for drivers.
It's been tried in all sorts of endeavors and eventually falls apart.
Back in the day, there was a motorcycle series "Formula USA", with rules essentially "must have 2 wheels, no alcohol", and it was all well and good with folks running their hand crafted, bored out Superbikes until Kenny Roberts showed up with a pair of factory Yamaha Moto GP 500cc two stroke machines (which is, essentially, "unobtainium"), and, in time, dominated the field. Things like that lead to rule changes in F-USA.
Also, consider the origin of modern MMA. The "Ultimate Fighter Championship", which was a "no rules" bout. Royce Gracie dominated those events early on.
I will never forget UFC 4. Dan Severn, a very powerful wrestler, was dominating his bouts (3 as I recall). His fights were over very quickly.
Meanwhile, Royce, who was a skilled grappler, while winning his bouts, they were taking quite a bit of time.
At the end, Royce had just finished his 3rd bout and then had to stand up to Severn, with very minimal rest. Combining Severn's fast bouts, with Royce long bouts gave Severn a lot of time to rest and recover between fights. Royce was obviously quite tired going in to the final round.
Severn dominated that fight, but it drew on...and on...and on. Over 15 minutes.
In the end, Gracie prevailed, upside down, pinned against the fence, with Severn bent over him. It was an extraordinary encounter.
But in the end, it led to rule changes. 15m fights don't really work with the broadcast schedule. Seeing two guys tangled in knots for 10m straight with minimal movement isn't very interesting to watch, either. And now we have modern MMA with combined striker and grappling skills.
Turns out competition is only fun when it's fair. While its technically interesting to see folks exploit the rules, and even dominate, it's more interesting when they have to work within them.
In the end, you (most folks, I know I do) want the man behind the wheel to be the deciding factor, not the machine beneath him.
The Chaparral 2J [0] is the one that comes to my mind as most popular, but I wasted years of my life playing GT3/4 on PSX where the 2J was the only thing I had unlocked as ridiculously fast as the turbocharged 787B.
The other thing that was really exceptional about the 2J, at least as simulated in GT4, was how tall the 3-speed automatic gearing was. Between the car seemingly never changing gears, barely varying RPMs despite accelerating like a rocket, and essentially not needing to brake for turns, it just seemed like the epitome of buggy arcade physics. Through a 2022 lens that description sounds apropos to an EV, despite it being a rather old ICE machine.
Cool, reminds me of how some small racing maze solving robots (micromouse) work - little fans on them to create downforce, letting the robot change directions incredibly quickly. But scaled up for a 2000lb car.
They're a lot of fun. I built one as part of my college's IEEE chapter. It was nothing fancy, certainly not fast or nimble enough to warrant a downforce fan, but one learns a lot going from concept -> schematics -> hardware -> software -> working mouse in half a year.
Just in case anyone thought gasoline powered cars were still relevant in a performance context…
There’s no metric by which an electric motor, sufficiently supplied with everything it needs to function, doesn’t embarrass them. Very exciting future.
If you unleashed 5 full F1 teams to solve EV F1 racing they would most certainly come up with record-breaking solutions to tackle issues you mention. With how good the F1 car aero is and how good the batteries’ low centre of gravity is, I would’t put it past them to be able to create magic.
Oh yeah F1 teams will magically outdo the energy density that chemists, physicists, and material scientists have spent decades achieving with battery technology.
I think F1 teams would figure out how to change batteries fast and recharge them off-track. Mechanical replacement is the only way to rapidly renew the energy density without new chemistry (like you allude).
To be fair, the petrol cars refuel every 45 minutes or so. I don't think a battery could make it this far (especially if they were swappable), but I imagine periodic battery swaps would be feasible.
That would be incredibly inefficient, with any sort of road clearance, and incredibly expensive. I don't think it would ever make sense to put that much copper down into the road, unless it's to power something like a third rail.
> sufficiently supplied with everything it needs to function
That's a large caveat in a performance context, as the battery that does that equates to "for 10-20 minutes" at the moment. But exciting none the less!
It's funny that the only technical downside - recharging time - is quite critical to the people's life style. Solves all the problem but fails at one mundane problem.
Is it? Most people do daily commutes significantly shorter than EV range, and tend to take meal and bathroom breaks every few hours when commuting long distances.
Well, you're being overly protective here. I think this problem should NOT be downplayed, because it can create a whole new industry in the future - automated charging or self charging or whatever. It's simply that the BEV market isn't big nor mature enough to allow scalable (widely-compatible) solutions.
> It's simply that the BEV market isn't big nor mature enough to allow scalable (widely-compatible) solutions.
I don't have the latest statistics from here, but I just read that in the neighboring country over 80% of the new vehicles (90+% of the private vehicles) this year have been BEVs. It's a solved problem.
As long as you limit "performance" to the context of "racing" and not "extreme environments" or "heavy industry"...both having mission-critical "performance" requirements where EVs utterly fail.
What are you talking about? Electric cars are completely uncompetitive in the majority of races. EVs have a handful of high-profile victories, which are noteworthy precisely because they are rare. It is doubtful they will ever be competitive in endurance events (like Le Mans) without radically new designs.
>There’s no metric by which an electric motor, sufficiently supplied with everything it needs to function, doesn’t embarrass them.
There is no way a snail, sufficiently supplied with a speedboat, doesn't embarrass Michael Phelps.
Power and cooling are the hard parts. You can't just take them as given.
I own an electric vehicle, and range is an issue, since I don't have access to the Tesla charging network. I have to take my gas car when traveling to my mom's house (California to Colorado). Even within California, I've been stuck in remote places on level 2 chargers too many times to take it more than 40% from home, without some serious planning.
The driver of this car, Max Chilton, deserves a lot of credit for really going for it with a very fast car that looks pretty squirrelly.
With regard to taking records away from the VW ID.R, a much more interesting benchmark would be its performance at Pike's Peak. I don't imagine they're ready for that yet.
It's an infinitely more sophisticated race course, if you are interested in that sort of thing.
More to the point, in terms of testing an electric car there's a stark difference in the amount of storage (and therefore, mass) needed to climb Pike's Peak and to climb the hill at Goodwood. If VW had to beat the Speirling's time at Goodwood tomorrow, they'd make the run with less battery storage. I honestly don't know if the Spierling could even be set up to make it all the way to the top of Pike's Peak. Their stock car surprisingly has, on paper, more battery storage than the VW (60KWh vs 40KWh) but they need to spin those giant fans...
I would not want to make any guesses about how Spierling's ground effects would perform at a much higher altitude. I'll be the first to watch if they set it up as a proper race car.
edit: intriguingly, a Top Gear article suggests the VW ran at Goodwood with a smaller than normal battery. No idea how the Spierling was setup. Pike's Peak, or a sprint race at any proper sports car track, would be a more realistic test for both cars. I actually don't have any doubts about who would win that, short of some very real development on Speirling's part...
The McMurty as normally configured is good for 30 minute track sessions, and I haven't heard anything about it having a small battery for the day, nor did the weights being quoted indicated it was a small battery. A smaller pack could also reduce power potentially so they might not be able to do that for a net win.
>I actually don't have any doubts about who would win that, short of some very real development on Speirling's part...
It is a team that figured out how to absolutely shatter the goodwood record that VW had set, seems strange you are so confident they can't figure out Pikes Peak.
Pikes Peak (especially in an electric car where altitude doesn't matter) is primarily a test of the driver. 156 corners in 12 miles is incredibly hard to learn and there are almost no safety barriers (or reference braking points). The goodwood hillclimb is simply not in the same category of complexity or challenge as Pikes Peak, which stands alone as the toughest and most dangerous hillclimb event in all of motorsport.
Pikes Peak is also extremely bumpy and was only paved all the way to the top in 2011. A car like the Speirling relying on fans for downforce would really struggle to maintain grip throughout a Pikes Peak run as each bump would cause a momentary loss of aero (not dissimilar to this season's F1 porpoising issue, just bigger and worse)
Hey, are you there right now? Do you know if the Gen3 Formula E car Mahindra brought set a time?
> seems strange you are so confident they can't figure out Pikes Peak.
I meant what I said: they would need some real development to make that car into something that could win at Pike's Peak. I'm pretty sure VW spent seven figures preparing their car for that race. Don't get me wrong, I hope these guys do it.
If they're taking publicity seriously, they'll do something at Nürburgring once they've made their street legal version available. Of course it would be interesting to see how the current car performs there as well.
There is no need to be a douche. For that matter, that they ran with a smaller battery is quite easily verified elsewhere if this information worries you somehow...
Just a friendly reminder that using Top Gear as a source on anything EV related is literally less trustworthy than claiming that vaccines cause autism because Jenny McCarthy said so.
Not OP but Pikes Peak would be more interesting because it is infinitely more interesting than Goodwood. And it’s much longer so would be much more difficult technically for an ev to perform well.
The differences are mainly intangible but the events are just not in the same league
Pikes peak doesn't present any challenge to it in terms of length at all. Its designed to do ~30 minute track sessions and Pikes Peak is only 8 minutes.
Not my area of expertise at all, but I would imagine 8 mins on a track is easier than 8 mins climbing a steep mountain road.
Just as a very unscientific benchmark, looking at the instant fuel consumption on my car shows that driving slowly up a mountain road (i.e. to a ski field) consumes about 3 times the fuel as flat driving at highway speeds.
That is going to make a much bigger difference to a regular car than a race car, which runs at much higher power levels and is going to spend most of its energt accelerating or pushing air even when going uphill.
Squirrelly indeed! Max was definitely leaving extra room and not going for every last 1/100 sec. - It made a record but he still left some on the table - would probably want a lot more seat time and data on the car before pushing it harder - it looks like a handful - and tons of fun!
I wouldn't ever expect them to fight to the last hundredth at Goodwood - that's why Max's obviously high commitment was sort of fun in and of itself. Having learned today that VW prepared a special ID.R for Goodwood, and based on some of the conversation here, I have to admit that I'm surprised at how seriously many seem to take the times set there. It made some sense with the vintage cars that I associate with being gingerly driven around the track for an adoring crowd, but at the end of the day, there are much better tracks if you're trying to prove something about a new car.
Yup! While we wouldn't expect it, the intensity here and at vintage races can be very high. Those guys are definitely on the side of "it was built to be raced, don't leave it sitting idle as a garage queen". Other than leaving an extra inch or two of racing room, they go at it hammer and tongs, even with essentially priceless unique vintage racecars. A few hundredths left on the table, but not many... Glorious fun!
The Goodwood estate holds another event later in the year, it's a retro vintage weekend at the racing circuit called Goodwood Revival. They race priceless vintage cars and most of them are raced very hard and occasionally some do crash.
Have a look on photo / video sites for "goodwood revival crashes" to get an idea. It's a fantastic weekend and seeing these old classics doing what they were designed for is wonderful.
I'm aware of the Goodwood Revival. I'm just surprised that racing new supercars up the hill is being taken with the same level of seriousness by some fans.
When I was watching the run I presumed he was keeping to the centre of the track to ensure the fan didn't lose suction and reduce the downforce. It relies on a constant smooth surface, so crossing the edge of the tarmac and especially going onto the grass would undoubtable reduce that.
I was watching Goodwood this weekend (it's still ongoing btw [0]) BUT holy moly that brick wall at 0:27 in the video after they leave the Grand Stand. Or here is it https://i.imgur.com/7TyNsP0.jpeg One slight mistake and you are dead and oblitareted into atoms. No official FIA sanctioned event track have anything like this.
One thing that makes it worse from inside the car is going from bright sunshine into quite dark shade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJdQ5wtWqZU is doing a show run, but you get some idea of how little you can see from inside the car. I know the eyes are better than the camera, but even so it's quite a ride.
If you think the guys on normal bikes are crazy, tt has a sidecar category that beats it hands down for OMGs/mile
I watched a pair pull into the pits after their lap. The pilion took off his helmet and tried to clean his glasses. His hands were shaking so much that I took pity on his wife and two young kids as they watched.
Still to this day I have no idea where that guy's priorities are.
Hill Climbing is a fantastically old competition. The heritage extends well beyond the vehicles. The culture of everyone from The Scrutineers to the burger vans is well worth looking into, if you can.
An example, continuously running since pre-quake SF:
Something these types of high performance electric cars are continually proving now, is you don't need fossil fuel cars to go fast. It's helping to change how people think about cars, gasoline, and internal combustion engines. Someone's next sports car can easily be electric, beautiful, and fast.
> Something these types of high performance electric cars are continually proving now, is you don't need fossil fuel cars to go fast. It's helping to change how people think about cars, gasoline, and internal combustion engines. Someone's next sports car can easily be electric, beautiful, and fast.
As far as I'm aware of how things work, compared to ICE vehicles, EVs currently have better instant torque but lower top speeds. That said, is there anybody who doesn't appreciate many of the nice qualities of electric engines? Just from the perspective of the engines, they're extremely fun toys and I think that opinion is close to universal.
I think that most of the skepticism of EVs doesn't have anything remotely to do with the engine performance, but many of the complicated infrastructure and social factor questions surrounding their usage.
Some EVs have lower top speeds because they don't bother with a transmission. If you wanted a high top speed, just add 1 or 2 gears and you are good to go.
Imho the infrastructure required for them will be much simpler than the existing infrastructure required to power gasoline cars. All those underground tanks with trucks delivering toxic flammable fluids are replaced with modest upgrades to the grid (it doesn't take much, as refining a tank of gasoline requires as much electricity as charging an electric car).
This transition is already well underway and many of us have been doing road trips with minimal or no pain for years already while others are still skeptical! Granted, there are still use cases that are difficult, like towing large things a long way.
"The grid" is not a uniform piece of infrastructure with similar capacity or use patterns in all areas. I think people drastically underestimate the amount of time it will take to absorb these changes to a point where "critical mass" is reached.
I'm very skeptical on the road trips part as well, it still appears you're going to spend 15% to 30% of your total trip time sitting at several chargers along the way. For day trips this might not be an issue, but for long range multi day trips, the patchy availability still seems to be a real problem.
The intersection of Hotels and Motels with Supercharging On Site is still a very narrow proposition. I'm excited for the future, but I believe it's further away than most people readily acknowledge.
There's no reason an EV can't have a high top speed, it's just that most road going versions omit a transmission for weight and cost savings. Formula E cars can be configured for 200 mph.
At the same time ... there's (almost) no reason you need a car to go faster than the 90mph you get out of a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt. It's like, neat that you can make an electric car as fast as anything else, but if road-going cars basically couldn't do more than 90 it'd be no great loss.
My understanding is that a factor in making EVs seem like they have lower top speeds is because of increased safety standards/laws in some countries. Those countries require speed limiters for speeds too far above highway speeds. Many ICE engine designs were grandfathered in without needing to be updated with such speed limiters, but EVs are new designs and don't meet any such "grandfathering" criteria.
Your understanding is incorrect. Speed limiter laws have only been introduced or planned for commercial vehicles in major markets. AFAIK there is no jurisdiction planning speed limiters for personal vehicles (although there are informal agreements such as the 155mph limiter on German sports cars and the 186mph Japanese sportbike top speed). Also, there are laws in some countries regulating that vehicle top speed cannot exceed the speed rating of the stock tires, so some vehicles that would be otherwise capable of higher speeds sometimes have limiters so a less expensive tire can be shipped as standard equipment.
> EVs currently have better instant torque but lower top speeds.
Some also have limits on battery output. The Mustang MachE can only go full speed for 5 seconds before power is cut really drastically. So much so, that in a quarter mile drag race, the Mach E is as fast as a 5.0 to 60 MPH, but slower than a 2.3L to 100. Not that every EV has this weird limit, but it does exist.
Plus, EVs are all quite heavy, and even though the weight balance is much better, they don't handle nearly as well. The writing is all the wall though, there will never be an EV Miata or GR86. Future vehicles are all going to be gigantic cars with hypercar acceleration and numb handling.
No.. but gasoline is still dominant in the "going far" and "recharging quickly" category. I think that's the more important issue to tackle with respect to the current consumer market.
I am thinking you could flip a switch, which lowers a skirt and runs the fan in reverse : instant hovercraft mode for crossing a river, or even just deep mud. You'd need a steerable outlet jet on the back for propulsion.
Then once on firm ground, flip it and go back to racecar mode.
Ages ago when I was still a grease monkey I read a bunch about cars like the Chaparral 2J and recall something about the car leaving a horrible mess in its wake. The car was effectively a giant few-hundred-HP vacuum cleaner with no bag, blowing everything it sucked up straight out the back at anyone following. These were open cockpit Can-Am cars, I'm sure that was pleasant.
Details of the ground effects car with some staggering statistics.
I'd be very concerned about trapped energy thermal runaway fire risk with the batteries surrounding the driver especially at impact, but this is an absolutely spectacular machine imo
American race-car driver Jim Hall pioneered a number of ground effects in the mid to late 1960s, including the use of fans like on this car. I think McLaren also used them on a Formula One car in the 1970s.
It's worth reading the comments section of the article as it includes some observations from spectators at the hill climb. It sounds like the car in motion is quite a sight to behold!
That's right. I knew there was a Gordon Murray tie-in somewhere, but it was for Brabham, not McLaren, that he utilized a fan on a Formula One car in the late 70s.
McLaren actually used them on the F1 (I learnt today) but they overshadowed by all the cars other firsts. Their T.50 has a much more prominent fan, super cool.
Could fans become a standard safety feature of all cars? It could activate only when needed, when the driver needs to swerve suddenly or when the tires begin to lose traction due to ice/oil/hydroplaning. Hazard detection systems could activate the fan early.
Unlikely, "fan cars" are really "vacuum cars" and that vacuum needs to occur under the car, so the car needs to have a low ride height which most cars are don't have and can't have.
The fan can't be activated that quick in order to create vacuum so it would need to be running most of the time, also can you imagine having hundreds of cars rolling down the street with their fans on blasting whatever gunk, dirt, gravel into the air?
Why do you think a car could not create a vacuum quickly? Airbags deploy quickly. Seatbelts tighten quickly. An emergency vacuum could use three parts: a deployable skirt, a device to create the initial low-pressure, and a fan to maintain it. The speed limitation is the speed of sound (340m/s), which takes only 1 millisecond to propagate through 1m of distance from the car to the ground.
I think this kind of record should have two versions, the first one is that apparently standard ex-F1/Indy driver, and the other is some random person picked up from outside a tube stop during a weekday morning.
It is my opinion that the current generation of supercars (not to mention hypercars) not only exceeds the driver skills but also the driver's ability to properly function for 7-10 days after bringing said supercar to the limit.
Makes sense to have both the V12 and a small electric motor because the rich folks would buy the car for the option (but not the obligation) to use the V12 but in reality it's gonna be the electric motor doing all the work while proceeding at 7mph around Harrods/Piccadilly or the Burj Khalifa. I think the environment can handle a couple of V12 revs per week when rich folks get out of Harrods.
I don’t think you have a good understanding of the hybrid systems running in Hypercars compared to a Prius. For example, the battery system in the new AMG-ONE is not there for fuel economy. Instead it is used to assist the drivetrain in creating maximum power with minimum lag. The turbo and crankshaft are assisted by the battery system on the low end rpms.
This is especially so where snow or consistent surfaces are involved. I've raced on yikes-steep hills that later you see the video — and it doesn't matter if it's just some coach's camera or network sports coverage — it just looks like barely a notch above the novice slopes. A cameraman needs to really work to show the steepness anything close to being there.
The only situation where the slope might really show up is where there are dramatic changes in slope like a sudden drop-off, flat, crossroad on a slope, etc. Then you can sort of see a good comparison, but it still doesn't rival the reality. And the Goodwood course is a fairly consistent grade with no sharp features like that.
Well, for a hillclimb it is pretty mild. Some of them have sections as steep as 30%. But it's def. not flat, especially the second half, starting with the left 90 and then the run up to the chicane by the wall.
That's funny. There are a couple of Strava segments around town that are relevant here. One is 4.4% for only 0.4 miles (i.e. very similar to "Heartbreak Hill" on the Boston Marathon course); the other is 3.8% for 0.7 miles. As a runner I regularly pass cyclists on both, and that's from the minority who will even attempt them. I see many more walking their bikes, and I suspect the next street over from the shorter one has three to five times as many cyclists precisely because it goes around instead of over. Simply put, 5.7% for a mile is out of most cyclists' and runners' range, never mind the vast majority of the population who aren't either. I doubt even those who can handle it have "this isn't a hill" on their minds very much. Yes it damn well is a hill, and it's very noticeable even if you're one of those easy-mode folks who can build up speed at the start and coast down the other side at the end.
Most sports cyclists consider 5% a "steady climb". I don't doubt that you regularly pass cyclists on both, but for a sports cyclist I can confirm that - as the OP said - 6% is considered a mild gradient.
Cycling races regularly have hills above 10%. For example in the recent Giro d'Italia race the final 10km of the Blockhaus climb average 9.4% and the final 6km of the Santa Cristina are over 10%.
If you aren't looking to climb hills you'd avoid it for sure, but that isn't what the OP claimed.
Yes, it's a hill. Maybe a small hill, maybe a mild gradient, but still a hill. We already have multiple sports involved in this thread, and none of them have goalposts so let's not move any. The motorists, who have it even easier physically than the cyclists, call it a hill. Maybe we should just let them. Turning it into an "I'm so tough" contest is just silly, especially from folks who are squarely in the middle of the effort-per-mile scale.
Is referring to my previous comment where I said it was pretty mild.
The road in my backdoor that I use for my short cycling climbing loops is averaging 5.8% over 18.8km, from sea level to 1100m. It is only difficult because it includes 2 small descents in between which mean that some parts have to be double-digit gradients, including one at +17%, to reach that final elevation. Appart from that 17% part it is still considered a relatively easy climb.
So is it a hill? Yes. Is it a really small and mild one, also yes.
Since you persist ... have you ever tried that climb without a few thousand dollars worth of carbon fibre and aluminum to help? That was my original suggestion, and unlike some I'm sticking to it.
And I've seen people climb it with some 2-3 decade old 26" MTB and I climbed far more difficult climbs with my 13kg (28lbs) fat bike and my 15kg (33lbs) full suspension trail bike.
That's still not what I asked about, is it? People need to stop saying "it's easy for me" when "it" isn't what we were talking about. It's like a compulsion. 5.7% for a mile is still a hill and doing it on foot would put any ideas to the contrary out of anyone's mind. Doing it with a 3-4x mechanical advantage, even with 20% extra weight, proves nothing either about whether it's a hill or about the commenter.
>>> have you ever tried that climb without a few thousand dollars worth of carbon fibre and aluminum to help?
>> I've seen people climb it with some 2-3 decade old 26" MTB and I climbed far more difficult climbs with my 13kg (28lbs) fat bike and my 15kg (33lbs) full suspension trail bike.
> Not what I was asking.
That would be "yes". I don't understand how you think he didn't answer your question.
Edit: unless you mean "have you run/walked up it?" - but I don't understand what the point of that question would be.
> Not sure what point you're trying to make or refute
The person you responded to said "Even by cyclists standard, 6% is pretty mild." and you said "That's funny" and went on to say how some cyclists struggle on it.
I was confirming that "cyclists" (as in people who enjoy the sport of cycling as opposed to ride a bike to get somewhere) generally think a 6% hill is mild.
I believe these should be illegal, just as it is in F1.
The basic problem with this concept is that if it ever stops working you are now driving way over the limit (not just a tiny bit) of what the car can handle and are unceremoniously thrown out of the track at a dangerous speed.
It becomes basically the contest of who can create more downforce.
The cars resulting from this have very little clearance and very hard suspension. Add a huge, changing downforce and you can imagine how anything failing like a suspension or a tyre can immediately put the driver in danger.
I think allowing this creates unhealthy, dangerous incentive to escalate the downforce until something fails -- the driver due to G-force, some component in the car or an object on the track that causes the car to bump up, etc.
What if a wing fails on an f1 car? Or a suspension component? Or a tire?
Cars that get their downforce from traditional aero elements are also susceptible to catastrophic failures if they hit bumps too big for the design to handle. Mercedes famously demonstrated this at Le Mans.
Anyway this car is designed for people to have fun with at track days, so their are no rules, so you can't make it illegal.
F1 also bans cars that get a lot of downforce by traditional aero elements. For example, there is minimum required clearance between the track surface and any element that is not wheels, which severely limits downforce. Additionally, they have banned a lot of different types of geometry and aero elements that could create suction even with high clearance.
Each of those things you list are orders of magnitude more reliable than a fan system where a slight chip in the skirt can instantly send you careening off the road. This includes tires.
