Re: Go-karts and GP racers

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Wcub) wrote:

> "U-K4\\js1" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message 
> news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Gniewko 
> > wrote:
> > > I think this statement is too generic to be valid. It will depend on
> > > the track. For example on a sufficiently twisty and wide track, a bike
> > > can go pretty much straight through a chicane without slowing down
> > > because it's so narrow, but a car is much wider and will have to slow
> > > down and follow the turns of the track.
> > > 
> > 
> > Check the lap times at all the tracks that cars and bikes share.  It's not
> > close.  That one chicane isn't going to cost the bikes 10+ seconds a lap.
> > It's all those fast corners where the F1 cars can pull four Gs, whereas
> > a bike will get less than one.
> 
> I visited a website some time ago and the website compared a motoGP
> bike with a F1 car by comparing the speed at various section of Suzuka
> track (Japan). The results gave evidence that a moto GP bike has
> almost identical grip in slow corners ( 62 km/h ), so bikes can match
> cars in corners.

Wha? Well, Suzuka is a really fast track, so it's possible the cars were 
tuned for almost no downforce, but an F1 car's mechanical grip should 
still amount to more than that of a moto GP bike.

When you look at bike vs. car lap times (and the short answer is that 
the fastest street bikes generally run very close to the fastest street 
cars (think Corvette vs. R1), but that victory tends to be 
track-dependent. Cars generally corner fast, losing less speed there 
than bikes, but the bikes accelerate ferociously fast: the power-weight 
ratio of bikes is not quite as good as that of F1 cars, which are 
basically the highest-performance track machines in regular use.

I grabbed some lap times from Laguna Seca:

The WSC lap record is 1:24.833
The fast lap in the last ALMS (prototype racers): 1:16.910
Fast "Star Mazda Series" (some sort of Formula series) lap: 1:29.004
Fast Speedvision GT lap (track-ready 911s, Corvettes, and M3s): 1:39.278
CART: 1:11.898 during the 2003 race

-really fast pure race cars are way faster than WSC motorcycles, and 
probably faster than GP1 bikes
-really fast prepped street cars are not nearly as fast as WSC bikes, 
but the Speed GT cars are actually fairly lightly modified, I believe.
-170 horsepower formula cars are no match for 180 horsepower motorcycles

Note that as tracks go, Laguna Seca doesn't have a really long straight, 
it has a fair number of corners, and it has one really steep climb which 
would heavily favour motorcycles, and a steep, descending corkscrew 
section which might or might not be good for bikes.

-- 
Ryan Cousineau, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club