New world record with an electric racing car: From 0 to 100 in 0.956 seconds

Post by csours » Tue, Sep 12, 2023, 7:47 PM UTC

ActorNightly wrote: post #98

csours wrote: post #31

> "To ensure strong traction right from the start, the AMZ team has developed a kind of vacuum cleaner that holds the vehicle down to the ground by suction." Traction is now the limiting factor, so better acceleration results will be driven (hah) by better traction.

Traction has always been the limiting factor in automotive performance. There is a reason why a Civic Type R set a faster time than exotic cars of early 2010s, and thats because modern street tire compounds are as grippy as slick racing tires from those years. And now, race tires have a static friction coefficient greater than 1, because when warmed up they actually glue themselves to the road.

Post by munificent » Tue, Sep 12, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

1-more wrote: post #141

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #133

One of the photos really brought something home to me. Where I would expect to see an axle or something to provide torque to wheels from the engine, there is just a yellow wire. I know that's how electric cars work. But something about it in the racing car context just brings it home to me - electricity just works differently to all our other intuitions about the world. Factories used to have bands and axels taking p…

> Factories used to have bands and axels taking power from one central steam engine to all corners of the building. From my own experience: a popular home woodworker tool from the middle of the 20th century is a Shop Smith. It had a motor that you would couple to the various mounted attachments to run the lathe or the band saw or the table saw etc one tool at a time. I guess part of the appeal was certainly the size…

Post by Nick87633 » Tue, Sep 12, 2023, 8:03 PM UTC

raleec wrote: post #162

bborud wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there's the Brabham BT46 "Fan car" that actually raced in F1. Once. Before it was banned. :-) https://youtu.be/B294RfWj1QE?si=jxYpIgwtH44at6Bq

...and it's current spiritual successors The McLaren F1 and now the GMA T.50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_F1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50

Post by lucgommans » Tue, Sep 12, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

chungy wrote: post #100

lucgommans wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than teaching a separate utility, I would recommend qalc which has unit conversions built in :) $ qalc -t 100km/h / 0.956s to gee 2.9629132 gees (where -t is for terse mode; by default it expands unit abbreviations and adds parentheses so you see whether it did what you wanted) The reason I recommend it is because it does so much more, I really love this utility since discovering it about a year ago. Example o…

The irony of advocating against a "separate utility", and then promoting a separate utility...

Post by Nick87633 » Tue, Sep 12, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

gladoskar wrote: post #134

enragedcacti wrote: post #120

I find the suspension design to be really interesting. It seems like the front wheels and the rear wheels each share a single coilover and they use hydraulic cylinders at each wheel to transmit the force. I'm sure this saves a lot of weight but I'm interested in how the suspension dynamics are changed by two independent wheels sharing the same spring and damper. Do any other vehicles do this? Are there are any other…

This is actually fairly common in Formula Student cars. They often use decoupled heave/roll suspension systems, where one spring/damper is for the heave of the entire axle and another one for the roll on the axle. It has some advantages over separate springs, but I'd have to ask our suspension guys. The graphics in this article show its function fairly well, but don't explain the calculations either https://www.marek…