Building the FASTEST RC F1 Car

DISCLAIMER: This video is purely for entertainment value. Personal use of video content is at your own risk. Recreations of experiments, activities and projects are the sole legal responsibility of the person(s) involved in replicating them. I can not be liable for any information or misinformation, wrongful use, damage to personal property, death or any circumstances that result from replication of any projects seen. Be safe!

[ivanmirandawastaken]

FIND - A - TUNNEL (with a flat ceiling)

[BPSspace]

James you MUST do a part 2 and see if you can get it to drive upside down! 🏎

[Apha]

If anyone is interested in fan cars, the McMurtry Spéirling recently broke track records, proving that ground effect is very effective under the right circumstances.

[kelevra]

The issue was you locked the suspension out. You effectively cancelled out the mechanical grip of the car. In turn, you also proved the effectiveness of the design. Double edged sword so to speak. You must have heard of the McMurty special right? If not....bro.... where have you been?

[thequesomanishere]

I believe the Chaparral 2J had its skirt mounted to the suspension, not the chassis. This way the skirt stays flat with the wheels, and doesn't move with the body. Try mounting the skirt to the ends of the suspension near the ball joints, and I bet you'll have more consistent suction and longer lasting skirts.

[ThePippin]

Fun fact. Gordon Murray (the designer of the BT46B fitted an aeroplanes altimeter in the cars so that it would show whether the underfloor was sealed. The drivers had a problem that the skirt would be damaged and they wouldn't know and suddenly find themselves going through a corner about 40mph quicker than they could without the ground effect and having a colossal crash. So if the altimeter was in the green they could push. If it wasn't they had to back off.

[Urasuperstar]

From what I studied, the vaccum skirts on the bt46b were attatched to the suspension so that they'd always stay level despite the body movement.

[AndyFromBeaverton]

The original Lotus car had sideboards mounted on slots so they would always adjust themselves to be touching the ground. Your front skirt-board doesn't need to create a perfect seal to the ground. If it's bouncing on the ground it will be slowing your car down. Some of the F1 cars used broom bristles to create a seal.

[glumpy]

Love to see this run on a basketball court where the floor was perfectly smooth. That would let it really corner.
Seems like for the skirt, some thing pliable but durable like silicone sheet would be good. Great vid as usual!

[peraltarockets]

"tea, obviously"

James, engineering in the best British tradition.

[MattTheMartian-qcpr]

The car is bouncing because you disabled the suspension

[ChristopherKlepel]

Why can't you make your skirt out of rubber? You could even use an old bike tire inner tube.

[danielstamenov]

You could try to just mount the skirt part of the car to the suspension. This was, it should keep it at roughly the same height off the ground (like a car called the Chaparell 2J)

[testpilotian]

The part you missed, or couldn’t replicate from the original fan car, was the skirts moved up and down inside a channel in the sidepods so that they maintained the perfect hight to the road all the time, the last time I saw one it was effectively a draft excluder bolted to a piece of plastic that sat in the channel. I’m also fairly sure they didn’t completely enclose the skirts at the front (and probably the back) of the car as that was how they drew the air in to create the vacuum. There’s no way this is practical to do on that size of car but maybe a bigger one?

[aadyansharma]

11:52 are we just not gonna talk about how clean off a drift that was

[TeslaNick]

I'm so glad somebody had a go at this. Really cool project. The original skirts were spring loaded strips that pushed down into the road kinda' like DC motor brushes.
It always amazed me that it works at all. It's so counter intuitive to try and maintain the seal between car and road.

[lesternielson]

the small bits of debris, gravel and overall road roughness at the scale of your RC car, would be similar to trying to drive a formula car on a 4x4 off road trail. perhaps try testing again on a smoother airport runway?

[christopping]

Excellent video, as always. No theatrics, unnecessary sounds or emojis. Just a logical, well edited video. Thanks. Waiting for the next one.

[marksteps]

i'm an f1 nut and i know back in the day they had a semi rigid skirt that would bounce inside a receiver style channel, i wonder if you could construct something like that and try t again.
despite the porpoising as soon as that fan cut off it was going straight to the scene of the accident, awesome look, need a 2.0 video

[soviut]

You should test this in a gym or any place with polished concrete. Additionally, the skirt could probably be made out of overlapping flexible "tongues" that angle backwards and can bend when pressed down. Combat robots often use this as a flexible wheel system that's difficult to damage.