What would F1 cars look like with no regulations?

[mat205125]

Panamax said:

Any Monaco GP of the last 20 years shows that racing is non-existent unless cars and circuits are designed with each other in mind.

Comments were made during the Monaco weekend, that the F1 car concepts that designers come up with are a compromise to be as good as they can at the majority of tracks that are visited; cars are not designed with Monaco or Monza in mind.

If a car were designed per track, then the Monaco concept could be more Pikes Peak / Time Attack, with the Monza car being more 90's IndyCar

[TheDeuce]

mat205125 said:

TheDeuce said:

With electric boost it'd be more like 2000+hp and cornering forces that fighter pilots can only sustain for relatively short periods. The idea of a 2 hour GP would be out!

Although I suppose it wouldn't be a two hour GP anymore, Newey's concept car in software was demonstrated to be 20 seconds faster per lap at Suzuka. Just think how much concentration would be required to maintain that sort of pace, on top of +8g to -4g lateral on an endless repeat cycle.

Grand Prix is two hours or two hundred miles.

Might be little more than a 1hr blast if the G was that high, and top speeds to high.

How much reinforcement would be needed for the tarmac??

The tarmac would cope as it is I would think. The uplift effect of the cars would be significantly higher than today's levels but tarmac is itself pretty heavy stuff so it wants to stay in place.

It doesn't matter anyway though, who cares if the track can survive when the driver definitely cannot... No one can sustain such forces for anything like 200 miles. A handful of laps would probably take longer than most dog fight scenarios a fighter pilot may train for.

I suppose certain things could be done to help a driver, active head supports might make slightly higher G practical, but without a full pressure suit there remains the problem of internal organ trauma.

We're simply too weak!

[cholo]

People always say that without regs the cars would be too fast for drivers to cope with, but surely the limiting factor are the tyres?

If the tyres were sticky enough to cope with these loads, surely they would last a relatively short amount of laps, which would mean multiple pit stops, which may mean that a harder tyre perfoms better over a race distance and ids more driveable?

[vaud]

cholo said:

People always say that without regs the cars would be too fast for drivers to cope with, but surely the limiting factor are the tyres?

G forces would be the limiting factor - blackouts or other change in vision, etc?

[TheDeuce]

cholo said:

People always say that without regs the cars would be too fast for drivers to cope with, but surely the limiting factor are the tyres?

If the tyres were sticky enough to cope with these loads, surely they would last a relatively short amount of laps, which would mean multiple pit stops, which may mean that a harder tyre perfoms better over a race distance and ids more driveable?

Normal cars become traction limited, but with no regs the downforce would push the tyres so hard into the tarmac that the car would be able to generate lateral G at troublesome levels (for the driver/victim) long before the tyre lost traction.

Due to the amount of downforce you'd want a harder tyre, which under such force would behave more like a typical softer compound.

The tyre would fare better than the driver and last longer I reckon.

[Big Nanas]

I doubt there would would be many (any?) tracks that would be able to contain the cars in case of accident. Cornering speeds would be very high, so run off areas, barriers etc would need to be suitable.

People complain now about the large run off areas, and boring open circuits, I can't imagine how any circuit could safely host these 'unregulated' cars.

[vaud]

Big Nanas said:

I doubt there would would be many (any?) tracks that would be able to contain the cars in case of accident. Cornering speeds would be very high, so run off areas, barriers etc would need to be suitable.

People complain now about the large run off areas, and boring open circuits, I can't imagine how any circuit could safely host these 'unregulated' cars.

It just wouldn't work, it's just a fun bit of speculation and hypothesis.

[KobayashiMaru86]

Someone asked on Twitter before about it and I immediately thought the Red Bull cars from GT and Super Asurada from Cyber Formula. Was a racing anime which was effectively F1's future which in timeline would be about now. They even raced at Spa and other F1 circuits. Cars with AI to help them race, fans, jets, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_GPX_Cyber_For...

[TheDeuce]

An F1 car couldn't do this..

https://youtu.be/96UjqDWGVns


And that's just a fairly low rent example of how fast an unregulated car can be.

Talk about cornering on rails haha! Electric power plus massive ground effect, it could barely be faster if it was literally attached to rails.

[PhilAsia]

TheDeuce said:

An F1 car couldn't do this..

https://youtu.be/96UjqDWGVns


And that's just a fairly low rent example of how fast an unregulated car can be.

Talk about cornering on rails haha! Electric power plus massive ground effect, it could barely be faster if it was literally attached to rails.

Not normally a fan(sic) of lecky cars, but I can make exceptions.

I've just pointed the fans in my Fozzie to the ground. Temps are up in traffic, but I'm experimenting with ground effect.

[entropy]

For the most part, all out performance for an F1 car would be all about downforce. Even with grounds effect it would be just as ugly and more so as found in the late 2000s with all sorts of bodywork addenda.