I read once that F1 cars produce so much downforce, that they could theoritically be raced upside-down. Is that not the coolest concept ever? Can anyone validate the above statement, as I may have dreamt it.
Wouldn’t the downforce cause the F-1 racer to rise if you were to race it upside-down?
Sort of. The wing would push up making this possible. The Formula 1 webiste says that it is true.
“As this pressure tries to balance, the wing tries to move in the direction of the low pressure. Planes use their wings to create lift, race cars use theirs to create downforce. A modern Formula One car is capable of developing 3.5 g lateral cornering force (three and a half times its own weight) thanks to aerodynamic downforce. That means that, theoretically, at high speeds they could drive upside down.”
USA Today says that it is true too.
Sounds like a job for the Mythbusters!!
The problem with racing a car upside-down would be making sure the cars maintain enough speed to generate the downforce. The corners would have to be very gentle to allow the cars to carry their speed, and an accident would result in a driver landing on his head. The pit road transitions to and from inversion would be difficult to manage as well.
I see a new sport emerging as the X-games punks get a little older and a little wealthier…
I remember when Jim Hall introduced the Chapparell 2J “sucker car”, 1969 I think it was, he said that if they had been able to figure out a way to make the extra engine that drove the fan that made the vacuum run upside down, they would have exhibited the thing haanging from the ceiling.
Keeping the engine lubricated, or, well, just generally keeping all of the fluids that a normal, right side up car relies to some degree on gravity to disperse properly would be a problem (not insurmountable) to be considered.
Same is true of Champ Cars and Indy Racing League cars. And they generate this amount of downforce at relatively slow speeds, about 100 mph, IIRC. (They can all go well over 200 mph.)
Depending on how the fuel system is designed, I can picture an F1 car getting upside down then having the engine conk out. This would probably be a bad thing.
A liitle more on the origin of down force.
We’ve done this to death. Do a search. We’ve even (I seem to recall) come up with some not too bad suggestions for how you get the cars upside down.
Can we manage anything along the lines of F-Zero? 
First thing I thought of too 
I expect if we tried hard enough, we could work out a way of mounting an engine on some sort of gimbal to allow it to rotate - I was going to say that the output shaft would have to be iin the axis of rotation, but even this could be overcome - the gimbal would have to be powered/braked to prevent the engine simply turning itself, but I’m sure none of these problems would be insurmountable if enough money was thrown at them.
That said, there are probably easier ways to get an engine to run upside down.
They wouldn’t need anything that fancy, just an inverted fuel and oil system like in an aerobatic airplane or an old WW2 fighter.
Wouldn’t a large scale model RC car with the appropriate body an electric motor prove the feasibility?
I’m sure some of our engineer/science/math types could do the necessary calculations to determine the proper parameters to adjust for scale like speed, weight of the car etc. (if the cars too light I’m thinking we could always add weight).
Possibly, but not everything scales up and down in the same way, especially as this problem involves fluids (air).
Exactly, this is why a true scale model either won’t fly at all or flys like a rock.
I vote we go with a 2-stroke. They can easily be made capable of going upside down. A rotary engine probably could too, but I’ve never heard of a large 2-stroke engine, so I vote for it.