Random car-fanboy post

[denny]

Just saw this on a mailing list consisting of various friends of mine. I'm not a great fan of cars generally, they're more a practical thing than a hobby, for me. But this, this one impressed me:

The Ford RS200 is a true motoring legend. How many cars are banned from rally sport because they are 'too fast to race'? Very few - but the RS200 was one of them. Today, some twenty years after it was designed, it remains in the Guinness Book of Records as the 'fastest accelerating car ever sold to the public'. That might come as a bit of a surprise to some people fitting twin motorcycle engines into replica Lotus Sevens in pursuit of acceleration. And Ford's own testing of their amazing RS200S achieved even faster times than the official record: Ford quoted 0-60 mph in 2.01 seconds, 0-100 mph in 5.2 seconds, and a standing quarter mile in 9.5 seconds. With an unknown top speed, but somewhere in excess of 200 mph.

(Source: http://banmoco.co.uk/200/)

My emphasis on the 0-60. My bike will do it in about 4 seconds, with a really really good rider in charge, or about 5-6 with me on it. A normal family car takes between 10 and 15 seconds, I believe. duranorak informs me that this roller-coaster boasts about its acceleration, and is slower than the car!

Comments

[zotz]

I'm unsure about this kind of figure. Specifically, how would it get enough traction to accelerate itself that fast? I'm not entirely sure that Formula 1 cars hit 60 any faster than that, and they have to use the sort of aerodynamic tricks that a road car can't manage.

I suspect that if you tried to put that much force through the road wheels, they'd just unstick. Or the front wheels would leave the ground, which would be as bad.

60mph is 96.5km/h, or 26.8 m/s . To reach that in less than three seconds implies an acceration greater than 1g. My hunch here is that you won't stick to the road under that horizontal acceleration without some pretty fancy tricks (which I doubt could have been used - it was a rally car, after all). The official figure is 3.6 seconds, which is about believable.