My mind is usually filled with useless information that I find fascinating and that I just wait for the right conversation to come along so I can get my thoughts out there. Most of the time that situation never comes up so I’m stuck with these thoughts in my head for months or sometimes year. I need to post more stuff here so I figured I would just write about things that I find and hopefully that will clear some of the useless thoughts from creeping into my head. More than likely though I will just wonder if anyone is reading my blog and if so hope that they find it as interesting as I do.
Lately I have been fascinated with aerodynamics. A little while ago I read that there is actually an aerodynamic top speed to vehicles. That means that no matter how big and powerful an engine you put in any type of vehicle there is a certain point at which it won’t be physically possible to go any faster. At some point the vehicle just will not be able to move the air out of the way and if you have enough power, no matter how fast you are going, you will just spin the tires rather than go faster. A good example of this is the Bugatti Veyron (My new favourite car):
The ‘standard’ version of this car has 1000hp and a top speed of 407kmh (253mph). 1000HP! I know that there are cars out there that have that many horsepower but those are usually super tuned to the point of exploding and or limited to race tracks. On what is probably the best TV show ever made, Top Gear, they managed to get a Veyron up to 408kmh (254mph). That was on a closed track that is so flat and straight that you couldn’t see the end of it because of the curvature of the earth. Now a few years later Bugatti made a Veyron Super Sport, which has 1200hp, yet it has a top speed of only 415kmh (258 mph), Top Gear got it up to 417kmh (259) and then the Bugatti test driver got it up to 431 kmh (267mph). Not sure what the Bugatti test driver got with the regular Veyron. At that extreme speed they needed to add an extra 200hp just to get it to go another 8kmh faster. That is insane! Now if you took the whole engine/powertrain out of that car and put it in another car of equal weight but had a straight front with no aerodynamics at all that car wouldn’t go anywhere near that fast no matter how long of a track you had. If most people are like me they don’t/didn’t consider the air density to actually stop a car from accelerating. Yeah I realized that it has a factor in how fast you accelerate, but I used to think that given enough of a straight away you could get the same speed.
That’s all for now. Hopefully I will keep updating more often as things pop into my head, but I’ve said that before and it never really seems to work.
