Fasteam

The Formula One cars of years past had no limit to the down force the designers could engineer onto their racers. An early example had a rear mounted impellor that acted as a vacuum pump, in conjunction with side skirts and front spoiler and in effect sucked the car onto the bitumen.

The only limit to this cars cornering speeds was the “G” forces on the driver, up to three to four “G’’s. The use of this system was eventually banned, because of the road debris that was shot back at following drivers, small stones becoming lethal shot.

The very successful Coopers and Brabham formula on cars had stripes painted onto the bonnet as sighters to point the car around a corner with a fifteen degree angle of deviation to the direction to  the road line. The car at this angle, with the tyres of the time, had the most traction and with the front tyres a further fifteen degrees to the direction of the car, gave these drivers the most help to beat the opposition.

When the American V8 car from after W W 2 was available to the next generation, by putting the engine and transmission into a light chassis the owner could out accelerate almost any new vehicle up to and including sports cars. The group of young drivers soon started racing from a standing start to see who had the fastest acceleration. This racing graduated to a quarter mile “drag” strip and for some a run on the Bonneville salt flats for a top speed test.

As the formula one cars had a slip angle the drag cars found that a driving tyre that was going faster than the car speed, a slip amount gave the most thrust and the highest final speed. With one “G” weight of a dragster the theoretical top speed of a dragster was calculated at three hundred miles per hour or four eighty kilometres per hour. In the mean time, at Bonneville the high speed runs were having a problem with the front of the cars lifting at high speed. The problem was solved by fitting a small wing in front of the car coupled to the front suspension, as the car lifted the angle of attack increased forcing the front down.

The use of various shape wings and aerodynamic aids spread to most car racing with a higher cornering speed and with good down force a better braking effort due to the better pressure on the front wheels at high speed.

The drag cars of today use wings to increase the tyre grip on the front and on the back, the amount of  increased down force against the increased air resistance means the driver needs careful adjustment of these factors, for the best result.

The early grand prix cars had the first rear wings almost three feet above the rear of the car. This gave a lot of down force but with a lifting effect on the front of the car at top speed, which had to be countered with a front wing and giving more resistance to the car through the air. The overall result was to get the wings at the back as low as possible and the front wing also as low as possible and as far in front of the front axle alignment as the designer could get.

The first drag racers had the driver behind the engine/transmission with almost no forward vision, later designs had the driver in front of the engine etc and a longer nose section and made faster times. The huge power the supercharged engines had meant that the slip amount was dependent on the skill of the driver as the rear of the car could actually have no grip at all at top speed. One of the best performing cars of today is a light weight two seater using a Honda front wheel drive assembly at the back, but with a supercharger as the car is so much lighter that the transmission is capable of handling the extra torque. The engine/transmission weight on the driving wheels makes for full traction and a rocket on acceleration.

The fastest combustion speed is the mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen with a residue of just water. The space vehicles need a very high speed at the top of the atmosphere to get to orbital velocity and liquid oxygen/hydrogen gives that. The opal fields have a machine called a blower that uses the first compressor of an outdated jet engine to make, in effect a huge vacuum pump. The use of the other end of that out dated jet engine is the turbine that takes power from the exhaust, high temperature, high pressure.

A jet turbine coupled to a driving axle through a massive reduction gearing, with a hydrogen/ compressed air feeding a combustion chamber may be a viable power source for an experimental dragster. The opal field vacuum originally used two reversed gear boxes at first gear, so four to one and then four to one again, a total sixteen times the engine revolutions. Thirty thousand revolutions per minute for starters before increased speed with belt driving.

The opal field blowers have compressor revolutions of thirty to sixty thousand per minute, depending on the depth of the spoil lift, the driving diesel engine speed is the adjuster.

In the original jet engine the combustion chambers deliver to the pick-up turbine and also to the exhaust, giving thrust. The pick-up turbine is the heart of the jet motor and what ever revolutions it achieves, being on a common shaft as the compressor means that is the revolutions feeding air into the front of the engine.

Copying the blowers and using just one part of the jet, the turbine in a shaped cone, with the front an exhaust from a chamber fed by hydrogen and air and ducting out to have a driving thrust, a shaft with sufficient gearing to allow the turbine to capture the power from the fastest gas flow possible,could be a big power source.

Using the down thrust from a body shape and a rear wing, could give a tyre grip that means no slip at all and a higher top speed. The rear wing to be variable by having a pivot that allows the air pressure as the speed rises to reduce the angle of the wing and reduce the overall drag. A calibrated spring on each end of the wing support is an easy way.

The body shape to be a wide shovel front with the front axle having trailing arms that use two go-cart tyres each side, in a straight line. A rack and pinion steering box to push the paired wheels left or right, the axle to be sprung to counter lift and the down force the shovel shape would give. The weight of the driver could be multiplied by having the driving seat in a frame that is part of the shovel front, with a pivot point about the drivers thigh bones and the rear section under fast pick-up lifting this cradle and putting more down force on the rear drive. A rubber snubber for this movement and to keep this increased down force as the speed rises and the shovel front adds weight.

All dragsters use braking parachutes,a pad pushed down onto the road with a rubber facing bolted to it might be an alternative, one or two near the back.

A problem with the pivot cradle, the side frames, even a ladder type would need an amount of triangulation to prevent side bending.The use of light weight gas bottles of air and hydrogen would have a short running time, trial and error would determine the size needed.