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A two stroke engine
Those “Autopian TV” things in the middle of the articles make me think the Autopian is going downhill.
Hey! The publisher here. It’s a fun challenge being a modern website where basically all of our competition has this but x9000 (do you think MotorTrend is going downhill?). We would like to earn as much of our money as possible from membership, which requires no advertising, but we need more members than we have now. This one ad unit is pretty powerful (which is why everyone has a version of it) but it allows us to keep the other ads pretty sparse.
That being said, if you become a member, we turn off the mobile overlay version of it.
https://www.theautopian.com/give-the-gift-of-an-autopian-membership-and-save-9-28-and-see-fewer-ads/
Membership is also discounted right now.
Anybody who enjoys this article, I recommend watching the videos Driver61 (subject of the article) has made about their plan to do this for real.
Is this the one titled something like “driving a formula 1 car on the ceiling for real” but it turns out they won’t be using a formula 1 car?
Formula 1 cars of the late ‘70s - early ‘80s used the newly developed (by Lotus) ground effects to enhance negative lift by using the forward motion of the car to create low pressure under the car using venturis in each side pod and sliding skirts along the sides to seal in the vacuum. They could generate more downforce than the weight of car, like 3,000 lbs or more - enough in theory to enable them to stick to an inverted road surface if transitioned using a helical ramp. Lotus with Mario Andretti started experimenting with the effect in 1976 after doing rolling road wind tunnel tests, inspired by the British WW2 plane the Mosquito that had radiators buried in the wings.
Poo pooing on F1 cars early in this article is very weird, as the current ground effect cars this season are approaching 5x their weight in downforce at pace, Sky was just talking about it in Q1 earlier today.
Seems like a pretty uneducated take on the topic.
Generating 5x their weight in downforce at what speed?
They want to reach the necessary downforce at the lowest speed possible. Also, because of the curvature of the tunnel, they need to be pretty smart with the floor design and the wheel alignment.
If an F1 car generates 5x its weight in downforce at 200 mph, then at half the speed it’s only making 1.25x its weight, as downforce increases with the square of speed. Which would mean that if it were upside down at 100 mph, there would only be a quarter of its weight in “up” force holding it on the track. For safety reasons and to avoid having to make the tunnel longer than necessary, they need something that can generate at least 2x the weight in downforce at the lowest speed possible.
The hillclimb car they are modifying can achieve that target downforce: weight ratio at only 80 mph, significantly better than an F1 car.
I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t been done yet
Current Redbull F1 car weight just slightly less than a ton with the driver in it and its downforce is 5 tons. That’s crazy.
Jeremy Clarkson already drove upside down in the sewage tunnels under Belfast with a Twingo RS133, and he fit Ross Kemp in the boot.
“Upside down in a tunnel” starts at about 1:15 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwAasSkZ7pA
By the way, fuck the /r/cars mods who configured AutoModerator to remove my previous comment that included a link to an ad-free non-Google version of the video.
To say that this is driving upside down is quite an exaggeration.
I used to own that car, what a riot it was. It wasn’t fast by any means but that little NA engine was so fun to beat the shit out of. And what a go kart chassis it had, you could feel every asperity of the road in your ass.
Considering the car fell off the ceiling as soon as he got upside down, it’s probably not a “drive upside down” moment as it is a barrel roll. Still a fun video though.
Now try it not moving.
Hold my beer
Or just ship it to Australia.