How This Car Does 0-100 in 0.9 Sec

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car goes from no to 62 mph in 0.956 in a second n to 60 is the classic acceleration test we all grew up using to compare cars, a formula 1 car would do it in about 2 and a half seconds, the fastest production car a rimac NAA will do it in 1.7 and my trusty old VW Pat will do it in about eight oh come on but a group of AMZ racing students based at eth zorich Swiss University made a car accelerate faster than anything else in the world. and broke the previous record of 1.46 seconds, so I spoke to AMZ Racing's ELO Russet to understand exactly how these ambitious students approached

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crazy project, what challenges they had to overcome, and how they designed a car that accelerates more than twice as fast as a F1. car and we said, hey, we do it and go all out, we aim for a second, let's see what happens.

This record, which is not actually 100 km per hour, is one that has been long fought for and was last broken in 2022. University of Stuttgart at 1.46 seconds, teams typically use a base of a formula car for students and if you didn't know, formula for students is fantastic, where university students from all over the world design, build, test and race a formula style racing car, the goal is to give students They have experience in practical engineering as well as teamwork and project management, and many of these students end up working in Formula 1, so AMZ Racing used the base of a formula student car, as it is lightweight and It has a small frontal area which is good for low resistance. and they had one available too, but it wasn't just about adding more power to an existing student formula car, the problem is that you don't design a student formula car for these types of loads because based on the current record, there are to put like really high loads on all parts of the suspension for downforce, the power you need is much higher than for racing competition, so you have to modify a lot and AMZ Racing's goal was not just to beat the old record, they were ambitious and wanted to break the 1 second threshold, which is more than 30% faster than the previous record, which is a huge amount.

Simply put, this project is about three things: having enough power to accelerate quickly, having enough grip to transfer that power through the tires to the asphalt. and make the drivetrain chassis and suspension strong enough to not bend or break while doing so, in order to achieve their goal, they needed a car that was stronger, had more grip, and was more powerful to plan a such an ambitious project that the team needed. Go back to the drawing board and figure out what was really required and as you may have guessed their standard formula student car was not up to the task so the team stripped everything from this car leaving only the bathtub and the seats. tires and a few things, but its main focus was going to be grip and power and a surprising loophole in the rules that I'll explain later.

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It's really a great service to try shiny for free for 30 days. Visit shiny.org driver61 or click the link. in the description, the first 200 of you will get a 20% discount on the shiny annual premium subscription, thanks to shiny and now let's get back to these genius students, so first let's talk about the grip, the most interesting part here is the floor of the car, since we know a lot. The downforce of formula cars comes from the ground. Typically, air flows under the car and accelerates, creating a low-pressure area that sucks the floor toward the ground. This means that the tires are pressed harder against the track and therefore give the car more grip and that works quite well, but it is by no means the best way to add strength to a racing car, but the problem with racing series, at least for engineers, is that they have rules and, over the years, regulators have banned various types of design that create downforce, some examples include flat floors which were banned in 1994 after the death of Sen, side skirts that were banned in the 80s and the famous Bram fan car that was withdrawn from competition in 1978, but for the N a 100 record there are no such rules and So the first port of call of the equipment to generate more grip was the floor and a lot of fan assisted downforce and the concept was pretty simple: we put a fan on the floor, we put some skirts around it to seal it, the fans here are doing the same job. like organic aerodynamics creating low pressure under the car to suck it into the ground, look at how effective the fans are, just look at how the entire car is sucked into the track here, but why are the fans more effective than normal?

Arrow well, first for a couple of reasons. You can place the fans where you want by changing the center of pressure. Secondly you can control the speed of the fan thus controlling the amount of downforce and most importantly when the normal Arrow needs the car to move to run the fans don't and when you try to break a record that starts from a standstill that's very important you can have maximum downforce at 0 mph but things get more complicated as the car starts to accelerate in the traditional formula car the underside is a bit like the wing of a inverted plane that sucks the car for the track and with this type of floor, more speed and more air means more grip, but the AMZ racing car is slightly different, its floor is completely flat, there is no diffuser, it is basically a flat rectangle of carbon between the four wheels and there is no diffuser to accelerate. air while the car is moving means that the floor alone

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not create any downforce; instead we have the fans and while not moving this works incredibly well, the skirts on the side of the floor seal it to the ground and the fans are easily removed. enough air to suck it in and load the tires, which is great for the initial getaway, but when the car starts moving, more air enters the front of the floor, which means the pressure under the floor is not as low and , therefore there is less grip and There are other problems, and as soon as the car starts moving, defects and bumps on the track surface mean that the seal on the side of the floor is not as good and allows the air from outside the floor enters and is reduced again. suction, so with air coming in from the front of the floor and air leaking in from the side, the team needed more fan power, but with so many unknowns it was difficult to know exactly how many fans were needed, so we exaggerated and We committed to We put in about six eight fans and in the end we only worked on two as for the skirts that seal the side of the floor, these are made of molded carbon fiber that rubs the floor to offer the best seal, of course, that means that They wear out pretty quickly but are so important for grip that the team simply changed them when necessary.

By the way, if you're a student watching this, I have something for you. I have realized that we have many students. watching content from 61 driver who is interested in getting a job in Motorsport, so I talked to a couple of friends in the industry and we are going to organize some free seminars on how to best prepare for getting a job in Motorsport. If that sounds interesting, visit dri students 61.com for more information, and then about the suspension, since this was a straight line record, you might think that the suspension isn't that important, after all, no There are curves except the suspension, etc.

Controlling ground clearance has a large effect on the downforce generated. Remember most of the grip comes from the floor and fans and if the seal on the edge of the floor breaks we lose a lot of grip so imagine AMZ racing. car with a really soft suspension, the car accelerates from a standstill in 3G and the load that goes through the suspension is enormous, so the rear suspension compresses and the front suspension lifts, but the real problem here is the floor of the car, the edge is gone from being perfectly parallel with the ground at the rear of the floor, being much closer than the front and with a larger gap at the front, pressure will be lost, which will reduce the grip of the car, so , what is the solution?

Well, you might think that, since we're not going. in any corner we don't really need the suspension, maybe you can make the suspension a bit solid like a kart and this is something that was actually tested by Williams F1 in the 80s, but that's another story, the problem with a solid suspension is that even going straight you still need some suspension to absorb the initial acceleration and small bumps in the track, otherwise you would just have the tire acting as a spring and, without any damping, the car would probably bounce awkwardly on the track and if it is bouncing and also breaking the seal on the side of the floor, so the suspension must be stiff enough to withstand about 200kg of grip force, but soft enough to withstand any vibration and shock, for so the answer was simple, a complete multipair.

Suspension with hydraulically connected components. You may have heard of hydraulically connected suspension or the strange front-rear intersuspension in Formula 1. It is not an active suspension like we saw in F1 in the 90s, but a passive system that works by hydraulically connecting the front and rear suspensions, this linkage helps maintain a constant ride height and car attitude under different conditions such as acceleration, braking and cornering, the system was first introduced in Formula 1 by the Mercedes team and its then director coach, Aldo Costa. This innovative system debuted in 2011 and represented a breakthrough in Formula 1, but was banned by the FIA ​​in 2014.

Anyway, this system allows the AMZ racing team to keep the suspension flexible enough to absorb bumps, but also rigid enough, especially when accelerating, to keep the car's floor properly aligned with the ground. we've got the dam power, we've got the suspension, just the tires, the drivetrain and that little crack when I spoke to Eloy, I was hoping the team would use a super soft custom tire, stickier than the blue type tire, however, the team just used the standard formula. Student competition huia lc0 tire I also expected the team to use super-low tire pressures, like those used in drag racing, for maximum grip;

However, they did not deviate too much from the standard tire pressures and this decision makes sense because non-solid tires can press under pressure, which again affects the distance between the floor of the car and the ground and, as we know, that is really important. However, although they used fairly standard tire pressures, the relative pressure was essentially lower because there is more vertical load going through the tires. The same tire pressure essentially means that the tire is being crushed more on the drivetrain, acceleration being what matters here, of course the car is four wheel drive and for me this is one of the most interesting innovations in the Formula students, our usual Formula student cars.

We have four motors, so one on each wheel. We have a tradition in our team of designing the motors ourselves since the beginning of the electric class in 2009. Yes, each wheel has its own small motor that weighs around 3 kg. The car

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not have a differential. no driveshafts or gearbox, which is interesting because it means you can control the torque of each wheel individually, but more on that later, a typical formula student car is restricted to 80 KW of power, i.e. approximately 107 horsepower, and the team knew that this was not going to be enough, so they set out to double the power and, like the rear, the car has moregrip thanks to the weight transfer and the position of the car's floor, the rear tires have more grip than the front, so this was the area.

For development, we redesigned the rear, which is where we could use most of the potential and basically doubled the power, so we made a completely new version of the engines, we just made them a little longer. We put double the torque so that the car now has enough power, but how do you control that power? Remember this acceleration is insane, less than a second at 62mph, the wheels spin, you slide and the car spins or worse before the driver realizes it, that is of course the worst case scenario, But what is more relevant is how a human driver would maximize the grip of each individual tire with reaction times of approximately 2/10 of a second and the inability to control the power of each wheel individually;

There is simply no way a human can get the most out of a launch. So instead the driver just puts his foot on the floor and then the computers take over, you just have to tell your body, whatever happens, pedal to the floor and in the end a lot is happening under the body here to be able to steer. the perfect amount of torque for each of the wheels the first task of the control system is to understand the speed of the car and to do that it uses a speed detection laser that you may have seen in F1, it points at the ground and measures the speed 200 times per second then the car has a speed sensor on each individual wheel that way the system can compare the speed of the car to the speed of each individual wheel and thus calculate if any of the wheels are skidding once it knows.

Allow each wheel to slip up to a certain calculated point, but if the slip increases too much, the torque applied to that wheel will be reduced, which will reduce wheel spin and keep the car on the straight and narrow and all these calculations They must be applied very quickly and with great precision, it is quite complicated because you can have quite big accidents if something goes sideways, it is something that in the tests When we were at lower power we also saw that it is fine, if something is not safe it gives a little scary, so what happened on the day of the world record, well, let's first talk about the choice of location and this is where the team found a big loophole.

In the rules I would have thought that a downhill stretch of asphalt would be the best option for this record and it probably would be, but the rules just don't allow you to do that, so the next best option is a perfectly flat stretch of track. Well, not really, the world record rules state that if racing on a flat surface, the car must complete the course twice in both directions, so the average time of the two courses is taken for the official record; however, the AMZ team obviously has a great future in Formula 1 as they found a better way to get around the rules if the race is uphill just a little, only one race is needed when we broke the record in 2016.

I checked the data and I checked the times because they did. I think 10 races in a row. or maybe a little more, we saw that the variability was up to half a tenth of a second, so that's quite a lot for all the effort you put in to get there that fast, so we said, hey, if we can just do a slightly uphill race, It's better than having variability, yes they needed to drive uphill slightly which is slower but it meant they could really push in a race and not have to worry about replicating the same speed and for the team it was worth it so If you have the engineering mindset, you might be wondering why they didn't go even faster.

Remember this record was about the combination of power grip and making sure the car didn't break and it seems like the car breaking would have been the limiting factor we saw. that the limitation we had was, on the one hand, the structural integrity, at some point the chassis cannot support any more loads. ELO mentioned that they could have turned on the fans and could have had a little more power. I have more power, honey, but next. The suspension would probably have broken and designing and building a new chassis is very expensive both in terms of time and money.

The team managed to surpass the previous record and break the 1 second barrier and at some point these projects unfortunately. I just need to stop so we made it so at that point you also have to get back to normal life thanks to AMZ Racing for the help with this video and to Eloy for the interview which you can watch in full on the dri 61 podcast channel and all. podcast platforms thanks for watching and see you next time