You’ll have to excuse my ignorance about winter sports, but I really don’t know anything about them. So here goes…
Several Winter Olympic events (eg. bob, luge, skeleton) involve racing down a prebuilt track on whataver ‘vehicle’ it is that competition is in, but how much input does the competitor have after the start?
If we got a mannequin the same weight as a competitor and somehow gave them the same start, how well would they do?
Well, they steer…
It would be similar to putting a mannequin in a vehicle on the highway and setting the cruise control to 70 mph or so…they might be ok for a while, but sooner or later, the track will turn and they won’t (as much).
Not very well. They’d probably be thrown off the sled halfway down the track. Steering is a big part of the “sled” events, you’re always trying to cut a corner as close as possible and balance your weight and that sort of thing. Screw up going around a corner and your sled will turn over and crash at over 100 kph. Also, mannequins can’t flatten their bodies aerodynamically like a conscious human can.
My Wife and I did the bobsled run before the Winter games in Utah. It was a special sled that you could not steer. Instead the runners, under the sled where round/tubes, and I’ll guess we went about half the speed of a real bobsled team. Don’t remember for sure. But it was damn fast, and bumpier than you might expect.
(My Wife loves roller coasters too. No way we where gonna pass that up)
I imagine at the slower speeds you wouldn’t slide far enough up on the turns to worry about a crash. Sounds like fun though.