I suspect that the 200mph target is set more by the marketing department than the engineering department. I’ve got a friend that works for McLaren in the road car division, I’ll if he has any insights.
probably not as much as you’d expect, F1 cars are designed for a tremendous amount of downforce.
Unless “suitably faired” means adding non-standard (not F1 compliant) fairings to reduce air resistance, which can also reduce downforce.
As mentioned above, a 2005 Honda F1 car reached 257 mph at Bonneville: Formula One car - Wikipedia
It was trimmed for less downforce but it apparently retained the overall basic aerodynamic design. That engine was about 900 hp.
There is a slight chance 1500 hp could enable it to break 300 mph (482 kph). Since power required increases as the cube of velocity it is very unlikely to reach 500 kph (310 mph).
http://www.wallaceracing.com/Calculate%20HP%20For%20Speed.php
Top Fuel dragsters and funny cars reach 300+ miles per hour using 10,000+ horsepower, but they’re also intended to accelerate as rapidly as possible.
And their engines are rebuilt after every heat…
Actually, i made that exact point about 15 posts previously.
A top fuel car accelerates so fast that it could allow a Z06 Corvette a 200 mph flying start, launch from a dead stop when the Z06 crosses the starting line and still beat it in the quarter mile.
Do you have any cite that 200 is some kind of speed limit?
Here is a list of 50 cars that all do over 245mph. Some listings are variants of the same car, but I still believe your premise is flawed.
I don’t remember giving that website permission to go into my garage.
Seriously, though, that is some epic machinery.
yes, that’s what I was suggesting. have it teetering on the brink of take-off (as no cornering is needed)
To get an idea of the ‘more power’ aspect for planes v cars, compare a ‘normal’ high end sports car (not absolute super car) Porshe 911 Turbo, ~3600# driven by 540hp, 6.7lb/hp to an ATR-72 turboprop airliner ~50,000# max takeoff weight driven by 5,500 takeoff hp, 9lbs/hp. The Porsche has a max speed of 198mph, the airliner a max cruise of 316mph, and will be producing significantly less than takeoff horsepower doing so.
It’s just a rough illustration backing up the point others have made that the regime in which planes operate, air, is different than cars, at the ground/air interface, and that explains a lot of the difference in speed. It’s not true that planes are necessarily more powerful, relative to their weight, than high end cars.
As others also noted cars have limits like tire heat capacity and traction (ability to generate enough downward aerodynamic force to hold the car on the road). The Porsche speed I would guess is an electronic limit, not necessarily the point here the car just won’t go any faster. That said the plane speed is max cruise not absolute max, and keep in the mind that the plane must generate induced drag (the drag created by the wing’s lift, not counting the parasitic frictional drag) just to hold itself up in the air. The car is held up by the ground, though OTOH as mentioned has to eventually generate induce drag for negative lift to keep it on the ground. And being held up by the ground also means friction from wheels, though that’s a smaller and smaller portion of a car’s total resistance when you get to 200mph. IOW they are different situations in any number of ways.
With jets you add in the additional complexity of getting an apples to apples comparison of a jet engine’s power since the rating is expressed in static thrust at sea level, but actually at cruise the engine is generating much less thrust than at take off but the faster the plane goes, the more useful work per unit time (ie horsepower) a given amount of thrust equates to. But jet airliners aren’t basically a lot more powerful per unit weight than turboprops. Their speed advantage is mainly a function of being able to effectively apply that power at higher speeds.
There was also the CART race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2001 when drivers going 233 mph on a track with a lot of banking and experiencing blackouts. They cancelled the race and lawsuits ensued.
On its 2.5 mile tracks with high banking (Daytona, Talladega) NASCAR feels they can’t use the regular configuration because something disastrous would happen (cars going into stands) so they slow the cars down by restricting air input. Which gets a bunch of cars running tightly bunched at 180 mph until “The Big One” happens when someone loses control and one-third the field gets wiped out. Although they are built for very good safety
So essentially all you’re asking is how fast a car with 1500 hp be designed to go?
Some cars top out at 190, but have potential for going 205. Gearing a car to do 205 when the best gearing from the 6-8 available gears sees it top out at say 185 doesn’t mean the car can’t go faster, it’s just that it would make less sense to make a road car geared like that.
There is a particularly quick Bently Continental GT out there that tops out at something like 168, but it’s running around tracks with supercars that can pull 190-200. Why? Most road courses are never going to let you spin faster than 150-160, so spacing out the gears to be shorter and closer in ratio is better.
So, it’s likely there are more cars that can be geared to go faster (198 vs 205, or 188 vs 200, etc), but now we’re propping them up as examples of cars that have hit a wall they didn’t hit.
Also, in some cases, top gear is made impractically long/tall to return MPG on highway, but the gear is so long/tall the engine couldn’t possible pull in that gear to redline at top speed, so top speed is achieved in a lower gear, and some in-between gear ratio would have produced the optimal top speed (which most aren’t pursuing anyway).
Veyrons don’t race and they don’t have a racing pedigree. They can be set up for complete impracticality.
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No, not just any car, the classic 1.5 litre turbo-beasts of the rather insane F1 era.
They were something of a nightmare and my young mind wonder just what they could do if unfettered by such niceties as having to go round corners.
A bit like wondering what an unrestricted M5 would do…200mph+?
Oh, I’ve had the same thoughts in my youth (or even still). But if you remove the need to go around corners, why stop there? Just redesign the whole thing for max speed.
No, it still has be recognisably the original thing. That concept covers pretty 99% of all Top Gear challenges.
Honda F1 did something good like this back in 2006. They took their V10 F1 car and modified it for a top speed run (removing the rear wing, etc). However, they still only managed a top speed run of around 259 mph.