RE: 331mph Tuatara is world's fastest production car
Discussion
MikeGalos said:
JxJ Jr. said:
Beating them at what? Cars sold? Profit? Top speed?
Seeing that the article is titled, "331mph Tuatara is world's fastest production car" and seeing that SSC beat Bugatti at being the World's Fastest Production Car the first time and seeing that the thing everyone is defending Bugatti about this time is about their attempt to pretend they'd retaken the World's Fastest Production Car again when they didn't use a production car and refused to do a 2--way run, take a guess what SSC beat them at...WCZ said:
it weighed more than a standard chiron ss because of the cage and the additional equipment. which was there purely for the safety of the driver
you 100% could do the same speed in a production car
I suppose one question would be that if the roll cage and stripped out interior were there for the safety of the driver on that record attempt, what's different on the customer cars that mean subsequent vmax attempts by customers can be undertaken without needing the same additional safety measures? Do customers sign a waiver the moment they arrive at Ehra-Lessien you 100% could do the same speed in a production car
The Tuatara that set the new record, appears to have done so with a car that's the same as what will be offered to customers. Of course there'll be conspiracy theories that it was modified, but the onboard footage at least, appears to show a complete interior, with no special additional safety kit.
In any case, both cars - along with Koenigsegg's exploits, have reached what will probably remain the high water mark for ICE road cars. Legality, validity and real world relevance ushered to one side for a moment, these stand a testament to what can be done within the confines of road worthy cars that can still pootle to the shops and sit in traffic without overheating. It's mightily impressive engineering - I've only driven at 220mph, and that was nowhere near road legal
How significant is the weight of the vehicle to a tyres ability to withstand any increased forces that are in line with increasing the speed? Would a lighter car transmit less forces into the tyres, at any given speed, than a heavier car and would this then allow a lighter car to hit a higher top speed before an equal force is being experienced? I, like many others on here, was under the impression that these records were defined, to a large extent, by the limitations of current tyre technologies as much as the cars themselves so it is amazing that these tyres were good for 330+ (with more speed to come) in such a short period of time after the previous attempts. Was the Bugatti’s top speed limited by it’s relatively high weight, and the implications of this weight on the tyres, even if this higher weight didn’t necessarily effect it’s ability to punch through the air?
gigglebug said:
How significant is the weight of the vehicle to a tyres ability to withstand any increased forces that are in line with increasing the speed? Would a lighter car transmit less forces into the tyres, at any given speed, than a heavier car and would this then allow a lighter car to hit a higher top speed before an equal force is being experienced? I, like many others on here, was under the impression that these records were defined, to a large extent, by the limitations of current tyre technologies as much as the cars themselves so it is amazing that these tyres were good for 330+ (with more speed to come) in such a short period of time after the previous attempts. Was the Bugatti’s top speed limited by it’s relatively high weight, and the implications of this weight on the tyres, even if this higher weight didn’t necessarily effect it’s ability to punch through the air?
Good questions!The tyre pressures for high speed running (at least on curved/banked tracks) are selected to avoid the tyres falling apart (reliably support the weight of the car, avoid any extreme hot spots on the tread area) and obviously to steer/handle ok.
By supporting the weight of the car, then yes, definitely a heavier car is a greater challenge than a lighter car...but... the pressures in the tyres will be raised though to give about the same vertical deflection that you would also have with a lighter car. You can’t go too crazy because you still need ok steering and you need to spread the work across a sufficient amount of tread (you need a fairly normal contact patch).
I didn’t mention setting pressures to allow low rolling resistance, as high rolling resistance, means a lot of energy absorbed by the tyre...which is not what you want...so low rolling resistance is sort of a given for tyres tuned/set up for high speed runs.
Heat and centrifugal force are the risks. Heat is reduced by reducing deflection, reducing the energy required to deflect, reducing scrub/slip angles and allowing cooling. Tyres are weird sometimes, you can get tiny hot spots at the edges of the belts that cause the rubber only there to breakdown (turn to black crumbs)... and that sets of a chain of events that cause the tyre to quickly fail.
Kawasicki said:
gigglebug said:
How significant is the weight of the vehicle to a tyres ability to withstand any increased forces that are in line with increasing the speed? Would a lighter car transmit less forces into the tyres, at any given speed, than a heavier car and would this then allow a lighter car to hit a higher top speed before an equal force is being experienced? I, like many others on here, was under the impression that these records were defined, to a large extent, by the limitations of current tyre technologies as much as the cars themselves so it is amazing that these tyres were good for 330+ (with more speed to come) in such a short period of time after the previous attempts. Was the Bugatti’s top speed limited by it’s relatively high weight, and the implications of this weight on the tyres, even if this higher weight didn’t necessarily effect it’s ability to punch through the air?
Good questions!The tyre pressures for high speed running (at least on curved/banked tracks) are selected to avoid the tyres falling apart (reliably support the weight of the car, avoid any extreme hot spots on the tread area) and obviously to steer/handle ok.
By supporting the weight of the car, then yes, definitely a heavier car is a greater challenge than a lighter car...but... the pressures in the tyres will be raised though to give about the same vertical deflection that you would also have with a lighter car. You can’t go too crazy because you still need ok steering and you need to spread the work across a sufficient amount of tread (you need a fairly normal contact patch).
I didn’t mention setting pressures to allow low rolling resistance, as high rolling resistance, means a lot of energy absorbed by the tyre...which is not what you want...so low rolling resistance is sort of a given for tyres tuned/set up for high speed runs.
Heat and centrifugal force are the risks. Heat is reduced by reducing deflection, reducing the energy required to deflect, reducing scrub/slip angles and allowing cooling. Tyres are weird sometimes, you can get tiny hot spots at the edges of the belts that cause the rubber only there to breakdown (turn to black crumbs)... and that sets of a chain of events that cause the tyre to quickly fail.
Twinair said:
I think I may have been a bit quicker than this on a closed Tewkesbury high street, before the MOP fair in an Astra GTE 16V - red top around 1988/9... probably...
That was me in front of you in the Lancia Y10 Turbo that you were trying to catch having given you the coffee beans outside the chippy. I was running on Avgas though having siphoned it from dads petrol strimmer.NMNeil said:
No place for a 300 mph car on the public roads, the racetrack, yes, but not the roads.
You think a car that can go 300 mph has to go 300 mph? Perhaps you think cars that go on public roads should only be ones that can't go above whatever national speed limit there is in your country?
Please, expound on your amusing idea. I'm sure we'd all love to hear more.
SturdyHSV said:
This just reads like a German press release about everything is not finely focussed on ze driving pleasure being achieved by the utmost efficiency in suspension dynamics and body kinematics and spending 18 months perfecting the weight balance of the cup holders when both extended and stored away.
It's all utter fodder. Journalists have to waffle on about the minutiae between cars, because it's all they can do to justify their job. The accepted concept they can 'feel the difference' between a Lamborghini 30kg lighter compared to when they drove it in a completely different place 3 years ago is f
king laughable, but this utter obsession over alleged stats and 'feel' at some incredibly sophisticated level is a load of bks.
Outside of journalists and racing drivers, so few people have the experience (in terms of practice, exposure to a variety of vehicles, time spent learning about handling near / over the limit etc.) to actually be able to make an informed judgement on something as complex as car handling, and yet marketing repeatedly tells us we're all discerning sophisticated customers who demand the best because it feeds our ego.
Forgive me if you're a PH driving god or similar, but even if so, you won't be the only person thinking this way about the car, and surely it's fairly easy to see the absurdity in largely saying that a 1,850hp read wheel drive supercar would feel crap and not be good for enjoying on the fabled 'twisty bit of road'. People will be thinking this who have no more significant experience than when they drove their mates 335d XDrive once down a particularly curvy slip road, and yet they'll chunter on in the pub (at an appropriate distance with face covering on) about how the American's can't go around corners so the ttYourA wouldn't see which way their 120d M sport went down a twisty bit of road etc.
It's just ridiculous.
Jeez, who pissed in my cornflakes this morning eh?
But my point was that the car would be even better at the things that people like you or I would use it for if it had a speed limiter at 220mph and therefore could have the suspension, geometry, tyres etc optimised for the way we'd use it, rather than needing the compromises ncessary for 300mph+It's all utter fodder. Journalists have to waffle on about the minutiae between cars, because it's all they can do to justify their job. The accepted concept they can 'feel the difference' between a Lamborghini 30kg lighter compared to when they drove it in a completely different place 3 years ago is f
king laughable, but this utter obsession over alleged stats and 'feel' at some incredibly sophisticated level is a load of bks.Outside of journalists and racing drivers, so few people have the experience (in terms of practice, exposure to a variety of vehicles, time spent learning about handling near / over the limit etc.) to actually be able to make an informed judgement on something as complex as car handling, and yet marketing repeatedly tells us we're all discerning sophisticated customers who demand the best because it feeds our ego.
Forgive me if you're a PH driving god or similar, but even if so, you won't be the only person thinking this way about the car, and surely it's fairly easy to see the absurdity in largely saying that a 1,850hp read wheel drive supercar would feel crap and not be good for enjoying on the fabled 'twisty bit of road'. People will be thinking this who have no more significant experience than when they drove their mates 335d XDrive once down a particularly curvy slip road, and yet they'll chunter on in the pub (at an appropriate distance with face covering on) about how the American's can't go around corners so the t
tYourA wouldn't see which way their 120d M sport went down a twisty bit of road etc. It's just ridiculous.
Jeez, who pissed in my cornflakes this morning eh?
You can see this more easily if you extend the top speed even higher. You must have the centre of drag behind the centre of mass at higher speed, you have to have slower steering, you need a longer wheelbase, and, at some point, you have to have wheels made of metal with no tyres on.
These compromises don't suddenly appear from nowhere at 400mph, they are right there in the design at the speeds that this car is doing.
As to what differences us normal people can feel, I bought the car that I'd just sold, an R8 Plus, to change up from my V8 R8, and the differences in how it felt to drive were night and day. I don't know which of the differences were the critical ones, maybe it was the hugely lighter ceramic brakes, perhaps the higher quality dampers, or maybe it just has a slightly different geometry, but I could tell even just turning into the first roundabout that I much preferred it.
I still think the same three years later, but also know that it was nowhere near the pleasure I got from an S1 Elise, which was on another level again.
Max_Torque said:
Worth noting that as speed increases the power to drive the car through the air at that speed goes up (by the cube of speed actually) so the tyres also have to be able to transmit that tractive effort to the road, so tyre load is significant from that factor
Power does, but the force only goes up as the square of the speed, and it's this that matters for the tyre's integrity.Kent Border Kenny said:
Max_Torque said:
Worth noting that as speed increases the power to drive the car through the air at that speed goes up (by the cube of speed actually) so the tyres also have to be able to transmit that tractive effort to the road, so tyre load is significant from that factor
Power does, but the force only goes up as the square of the speed, and it's this that matters for the tyre's integrity.Oli is a good friend of mine and I was with him on Tuesday at the Michelin Supercar Driver event at Donington.
I’ve read on here people saying where do you get a 7 mile stretch to get up to 300mph. This is correct but as Oli said “it wasn’t the speed that was hard, getting to 300mph was quite easy’ it was the slowing down that was hard”.
He said that he had to slowly decrease his pressure on the accelerator a bit at a time. That after he hit the 331mph he started to lift off bit by bit (which is pretty hard to do with all that adrenaline pumping through your body), he said he was about 40% lifted off when he thought great I must be doing about 150-180mph, he was still around the 285mph mark. For him he said the scariest part was if he decreased his speed too much then he’d just have spun out. After the winds started to pick up he decided to call it a day, and I don’t blame him, especially with his daughter on the way. Oli is a great guy and a fantastic driver who takes pretty much everything in his stride but after that run even he said it was extreme. I just looked at him like he was suffering from delirium, what a guy, what a nutter!!!
I’ve read on here people saying where do you get a 7 mile stretch to get up to 300mph. This is correct but as Oli said “it wasn’t the speed that was hard, getting to 300mph was quite easy’ it was the slowing down that was hard”.
He said that he had to slowly decrease his pressure on the accelerator a bit at a time. That after he hit the 331mph he started to lift off bit by bit (which is pretty hard to do with all that adrenaline pumping through your body), he said he was about 40% lifted off when he thought great I must be doing about 150-180mph, he was still around the 285mph mark. For him he said the scariest part was if he decreased his speed too much then he’d just have spun out. After the winds started to pick up he decided to call it a day, and I don’t blame him, especially with his daughter on the way. Oli is a great guy and a fantastic driver who takes pretty much everything in his stride but after that run even he said it was extreme. I just looked at him like he was suffering from delirium, what a guy, what a nutter!!!
AER said:
Tractive effort might be the square of the speed but losses are a function of power so keeping tyre temperatures under control is driven by at least a cube law function of speed - probably more.
But then of course you also have airflow past them which increases linearly with speed...Kent Border Kenny said:
But my point was that the car would be even better at the things that people like you or I would use it for if it had a speed limiter at 220mph and therefore could have the suspension, geometry, tyres etc optimised for the way we'd use it, rather than needing the compromises ncessary for 300mph+
You can see this more easily if you extend the top speed even higher. You must have the centre of drag behind the centre of mass at higher speed, you have to have slower steering, you need a longer wheelbase, and, at some point, you have to have wheels made of metal with no tyres on.
These compromises don't suddenly appear from nowhere at 400mph, they are right there in the design at the speeds that this car is doing.
As to what differences us normal people can feel, I bought the car that I'd just sold, an R8 Plus, to change up from my V8 R8, and the differences in how it felt to drive were night and day. I don't know which of the differences were the critical ones, maybe it was the hugely lighter ceramic brakes, perhaps the higher quality dampers, or maybe it just has a slightly different geometry, but I could tell even just turning into the first roundabout that I much preferred it.
I still think the same three years later, but also know that it was nowhere near the pleasure I got from an S1 Elise, which was on another level again.
I think my point is that 'better' (in the objective, quantitative way) doesn't necessarily mean more enjoyable, or perhaps it's better phrased the other way around, just because a car isn't at the absolute best balance of compromises for the exact piece of road you find yourself on at the time, doesn't then mean it won't be fun or you'll be wishing for lighter ceramic brakes, different dampers or a different geometry.You can see this more easily if you extend the top speed even higher. You must have the centre of drag behind the centre of mass at higher speed, you have to have slower steering, you need a longer wheelbase, and, at some point, you have to have wheels made of metal with no tyres on.
These compromises don't suddenly appear from nowhere at 400mph, they are right there in the design at the speeds that this car is doing.
As to what differences us normal people can feel, I bought the car that I'd just sold, an R8 Plus, to change up from my V8 R8, and the differences in how it felt to drive were night and day. I don't know which of the differences were the critical ones, maybe it was the hugely lighter ceramic brakes, perhaps the higher quality dampers, or maybe it just has a slightly different geometry, but I could tell even just turning into the first roundabout that I much preferred it.
I still think the same three years later, but also know that it was nowhere near the pleasure I got from an S1 Elise, which was on another level again.
Your point of the R8 V8 and R8 Plus being night and day different in feel, but (no criticism here) being unable to pin down why sort of aligns with my point about few people having enough experience to actually know what is 'better'. You are well aware they're different and know which you prefer, but that preference is perhaps subjective. More 'analog' classic cars are frequently cited as being much more involving to drive, and they're involving partly because of the various areas that they are crap in.
My frustration is with this focus on some sort of absolute objective superiority as being more important than actual enjoyment. Personally I'm sure a Porsche 911 Carrera would be infinitely 'better' to drive on the fabled twisty road than the Tuat, but if offered the keys to both the Stuttgart car wouldn't get a moment's consideration, and I just can't imagine that I'd find myself in a Tuat (one t
t inside another ) wishing for more compliant tyres that didn't need to cope with 330mph. If anything, personally the compromises made to allow it to do 330mph would make feeling all of the quirks and compromises exciting and interesting to discover, and working with them would be far more engaging (obviously on the wild assumption I'd be able to feel anything other than the warm steady trickle of urine down my inner thigh )Kent Border Kenny said:
AER said:
Tractive effort might be the square of the speed but losses are a function of power so keeping tyre temperatures under control is driven by at least a cube law function of speed - probably more.
But then of course you also have airflow past them which increases linearly with speed...NFC 85 Vette said:
I suppose one question would be that if the roll cage and stripped out interior were there for the safety of the driver on that record attempt, what's different on the customer cars that mean subsequent vmax attempts by customers can be undertaken without needing the same additional safety measures? Do customers sign a waiver the moment they arrive at Ehra-Lessien
iirc they do sign a waiver.Max_Torque said:
Kent Border Kenny said:
AER said:
Tractive effort might be the square of the speed but losses are a function of power so keeping tyre temperatures under control is driven by at least a cube law function of speed - probably more.
But then of course you also have airflow past them which increases linearly with speed...Regarding rubber properties I remember being fascinated to learn that sometimes extra load versions of tyres have actually less material in them than the normal version...why?...to reduce heat build up due to hysteresis and to promote cooling by increasing the area that can radiate the heat.
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