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Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

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Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#231

Post by gavia1 »

crgwbr wrote: post #215
gambiting wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you live, but 140bhp is a lot for a small-ish car here in UK - it would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive to insure for a young driver for instance. My sister's first car is a VW Polo with a 1.0L 65bhp engine, and that "monster" runs at nearly 4000rpm when doing the legal 70mph(~120km/h) on the motorway. At least it's not a turbo engine so I suppose it's not that bad. It was still a small…

Interesting; things are a bit different in the US. I bought my first car at 18. It was small, a Honda Civic Si, but had 198bhp. That wasn’t a slow car by any means, but wasn’t considered especially fast either.

200HP is considerably higher than the average power output of most European cars.

Most small hatchbacks will be producing somewhere between 90HP and 170HP. Estates and wagons from 190HP to 250HP and SUVs somewhere similar.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#232

Post by Phillipharryt »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #211
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point: a homologated (i.e. stock road car) Ford RS200 Evo set a record of 0-60 in 3.07 seconds back in 1986. When tuned for racing (non-road-legal) they would hit 60 in 2.1 sec. That's with a 2.0 litre straight-four engine, in the 1980s. Optimizing for ludicrous acceleration has always been possible. But it is at odds with race track performance, which is what Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini are focused on. At…

Ferrari, McLaren , and Lamborghini are focused on race track performance. Bugatti is optimized for top speed and prestige, which makes them hogs on the corners due to the heavyass train engine that powers it.

It also has a worse drag coefficient than your prius, it needs to suck in an enormous amount of air to cool and feed that quad-turbocharged w16 engine.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#234

Post by hazeii »

dpark wrote: post #221
hazeii wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I did point out that on Ninja's (I have one) you need to build the revs; you can't just dump the clutch and go like you can on a BMW Boxer or a Harley (which I also have). Hence the Ninja is generally slowest away when the lights change (but is by far the quickest bike overall). In fact bicycles are fastest off the line, since they produce max. torque at 0rpm (just keep weight on a pedal, release the brakes…

> In fact bicycles are fastest off the line, since they produce max. torque at 0rpm (just keep weight on a pedal, release the brakes to go). I doubt a bicycle would actually cross the starting line before a high end bike or car would surpass it. A 180lb rider would produce about 90lb of torque at most (assuming 6” crank) and that’s only for the instant that the crank is parallel with the ground. A high end car would…

Yes, but the car has to accelerate around 20 times the mass. Bugatti Veyron is listed as having the highest torque [0] at 1,106lb/ft but then it weighs over 4,000 lbs. Plus there'd a delay for the engine to rev up to peak torque before the launch (i.e. it wont produce 1,100ft-lbs at idle). Be interesting to test, but I'm not too practiced at racing Veyron's off the line on my bicycle.

Having said that, I am very used to riding bicycles and (large) motorbikes around town, and from waiting for lights to change if I'm on a bicycle I'm generally first away even when motorbike riders are getting competitive (never mind cars).

The advantage of the bicycle is generally only a few feet, of course.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#235

Post by hazeii »

jstanley wrote: post #206
hazeii wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bikes like Harleys and BMW twins have plenty of torque, where bikes like Kawasaki Ninja's major on power (peak torque at high revs). Hence Harleys and BMW's are first off the line at the lights (no need to build revs) but the Ninja's will come steaming past seconds later. There are some fun youtube videos demoing bike performance, e.g. Ninja H2's doing 0-250MPH in 26s [0], outdragging a Bugatti [1] and outpacing an F…

Harleys aren't high-performance machines. I highly doubt any Harley will beat even a ZX-6 over any distance, modulo rider reactions.

Harley: lights change, dump clutch.

ZX9: lights change, rev engine, dump clutch.

None we're talking about general around-time riding, waiting for the lights to change here. The point is big torque means less delay between seeing the signals change and starting to move.

No disagreement that if the ZX9 is sitting on the line with the revs already in hand that it's going to be away first.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#236

Post by et2o »

Phillipharryt wrote: post #233
Tepix wrote: post #11

That car looks remarkably non-aerodynamic for that insane speed.

It has a horrendous drag coefficient, worse than a prius (not that they are a the worst car, but they're not sporty). It needs this to cool and feed the engine.

I hate to nitpick, but a Prius isn't a great comparison since they have pretty good drag coefficients.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#237

Post by hazeii »

msandford wrote: post #229
dpark wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact bicycles are fastest off the line, since they produce max. torque at 0rpm (just keep weight on a pedal, release the brakes to go). I doubt a bicycle would actually cross the starting line before a high end bike or car would surpass it. A 180lb rider would produce about 90lb of torque at most (assuming 6” crank) and that’s only for the instant that the crank is parallel with the ground. A high end car would…

You can produce torque in excess of your weight by using pedals that clip in and pedaling "circles" instead of "squares". When I was in good shape I figured I could produce torque much closer to my weight than half of it.

Did you forget to figure in the crank length? 180lbs at 6" is 90 foot-lbs of torque.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#238

Post by ska »

crgwbr wrote: post #215
gambiting wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you live, but 140bhp is a lot for a small-ish car here in UK - it would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive to insure for a young driver for instance. My sister's first car is a VW Polo with a 1.0L 65bhp engine, and that "monster" runs at nearly 4000rpm when doing the legal 70mph(~120km/h) on the motorway. At least it's not a turbo engine so I suppose it's not that bad. It was still a small…

Interesting; things are a bit different in the US. I bought my first car at 18. It was small, a Honda Civic Si, but had 198bhp. That wasn’t a slow car by any means, but wasn’t considered especially fast either.

For more perspective, that’s about what a really fast motorcycle puts out these days, e.g. H2 SX. That’s a whole different ballgame of power-to-weight. Not many are pushing 200, but there are lots in the 150 to 180 range, stock. Heck, even some of the midsize (read, small and under 450lb) are knocking on the bottom end of that range with displacements well under 1l.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#239

Post by beatgammit »

dalbasal wrote: post #81
tialaramex wrote: post #13

It's futile to actually have road-legal cars that go this fast because you can't do very much useful with the speed. This is much too fast for the human operator (driver) to safely react to things outside the cockpit, which is why for example Britain owns trains capable of 140mph in service but deliberately limits them to 125mph. Tests suggested drivers couldn't be relied on to reliably observe and react to a linesid…

Even if it could be operated safely by a person, it still would have no practical value. This is not a transport feat, it's an engineering/brand feat.

How is it not practical? We have race tracks in my area, so if I owned one of these, I'd get a ton of use out of it destroying other people on the track. That's pretty practical from my perspective.

It's not going to make my commute any faster, but that's not the only use for cars.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#240

Post by ska »

gavia1 wrote: post #231
crgwbr wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting; things are a bit different in the US. I bought my first car at 18. It was small, a Honda Civic Si, but had 198bhp. That wasn’t a slow car by any means, but wasn’t considered especially fast either.

200HP is considerably higher than the average power output of most European cars. Most small hatchbacks will be producing somewhere between 90HP and 170HP. Estates and wagons from 190HP to 250HP and SUVs somewhere similar.

FWIW, I suspect it’s higher than average for North America too, for smaller cars. Higher proportion of trucks and SUVs though, and “small cars” are mostly a bit larger.
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