I don't understand why on Hackernews we change the titles of the submissions, if the originating site (a repudable arstechnica in this case) has the original title of "Formula 1: A technical deep dive into building the world’s fastest cars".
And with gems like this in the article, how someone couldn't say that it's technical?
"For example, each Formula 1 team is only allowed to use 25 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) of double precision (64-bit) computing power for simulating car aerodynamics. 25 teraflops isn't a lot of processing power, in the grand scheme of supercomputers: it's about comparable to 25 of the original Nvidia Titan graphics cards (the new Pascal-based cards are no good at double-precision maths)."
The tunnels themselves can be full size (which is good for reduction of boundary layer effects) but the models are typically 60%. There do exist some 50% models for cost reasons, but the correlation is worse and there are problems like the pirelli-supplied model tyres (amongst many other things) tend to be a bit crap.
The irony is there's still a rather obvious factual error left in the title, in that the slowest top fuel dragsters are well over 100 MPH faster than the fastest straightaway speeds of F1 cars.
Eventually the title is going to be chopped down to not much more than "F1" LOL.
Due to continuous modification of the rules, today F1 cars are faster than NASCAR but its an incredibly close race (LOL the pun) and it seems inevitable that given the constant turmoil of the rules there will eventually be a season where the top NASCAR speed is higher than the top F1 speed for that season.
So if its not bad enough that the dragsters are faster than F1, its only via extensive rules manipulation that the fastest NASCAR cars are not occasionally faster than the fastest F1.
The absolute fastest "cars" in the world tend to be the jet-propelled vehicles solely built to break land speed records (I believe the current holder is this car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThrustSSC)
A jet car isn't going to be able to be driven very easily on a closed race course, though. :)
Many cars are designed to be fast in one way, but not as quick in other ways. Cars designed just to go straight (like dragsters) do not need loads of speed-robbing downforce for taking corners quickly.
Formula 1 doesn't even hold the fastest lap ever recorded by a sanctioned racing series... as far as I know, that would be CART / Indycar, who achieved a 241mph (387kph) qualifying lap at Fontana (http://www.prnmag.com/columns/44-columns/66-who-holds-the-wo...).
But Formula 1 doesn't run on banked ovals like Indycar does.
Circuit Gilles Villeneuve has hosted a lot of series, including both Formula 1 and the NASCAR Nationwide series. There's a comparison of record lap times at the end of the Wiki article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_Gilles_Villeneuve). At least here, it seems that Formula 1 is a fair bit quicker than Indycar and loads quicker than the saloon / sport type cars. For this particular type of course, they probably are the fastest racing class.
F1 is about 10x better than other racing series or car tech. The top speed and power obviously not. But look at the max. rpm. Capped now at about 20k, but they can easily go to 26k. F1 is all about high freq and acceleration. Internal systems are running at 10khz cycles, normally a NASCAR or normal car Max is 500-1k. F1 dynos are small monsters compared to NASCAR. Dragsters have strong power, 3x more than F1 with stronger dynos but this is like a ship dyno. You could use cheap hydraulic dynos to test them.
Transmitted data rates and sensors are insane, team budgets ditto.
NASCAR and Indy could never use that much sensor tech as F1. They are highly motivated, but it's a different league. The F1 dyno tech would blow away any Tesla e-motor.
No, 20k rpm was "the good old days". Now they are limited to 15k.[1]
I think the engine manufacturers were the ones pushing for all these rule changes. The reason is the manufacturers want to be able to utilize this technology in their road cars. Just look at turbos, not too long ago F1 went turbo (again). Not coincidentally many recent road cars are turbo. E.g. Honda has turbos in their econoboxes.
It's Ars Technica, they specialize in click-bait titles and acting technologically ignorant when convenient. It's unfortunate to see them linked consistently, because they are a low-merit publication.
