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Driving BF1 upside down
(83 posts, started )
Quote from tristancliffe :Would it? Why have the F1 teams designed their engines to be capable of negative-g? Why bother with scavenge pumps in the cylinder head, and oil tanks designed to separate air/oil when inverted if they never are.

The answer is: No, the engines, fuel system and transmission would need to be heavily modified to make them work (amongst other things).

Gumbert have already made one for that apollo thing, yes it does require quite a high amount of mods for it to work but with their budget i doubt they haven't built one already...
Quote from Becky Rose :You can buy a year old F1 from Ferrari and donate it to the cause if you wish... Mathematically the principle is sound, the amount of downforce generated by current F1's is greater than the weight. There isn't a tunnel suiteable in the world to test it for real, but some of the bigger wind tunnels can probably generate sufficient wind I guess .

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LHC is big
Quote from Shotglass :well it would prove a point about the superiority of lfs' formulaic approach to physics opposed to the more usual table based one which is likely to break down in such unusual circumstances

Like, for instance, rF? I remember that stunt track with the tunnel... that didn't work so well. I wonder how LFS would handle it.......

Quote from pearcy_2k7 :Gumbert have already made one for that apollo thing, yes it does require quite a high amount of mods for it to work but with their budget i doubt they haven't built one already...

Why would they waste their time and money on such a thing? Regardless of budget, no team in F1 can afford to piss away resources on something like this. Any real test will have to be carried out at the expense of a third party. I think you under-estimate how important money is in F1.
Quote from MAGGOT :Like, for instance, rF? I remember that stunt track with the tunnel... that didn't work so well. I wonder how LFS would handle it.......

probably ive never tried to drive upside down ith rf but any table based approach is bound to go wrong if you push it past its boundaries

judging by that video lfs should at least be not completely off
Quote from MAGGOT :Like, for instance, rF? I remember that stunt track with the tunnel... that didn't work so well. I wonder how LFS would handle it.......



Why would they waste their time and money on such a thing? Regardless of budget, no team in F1 can afford to piss away resources on something like this. Any real test will have to be carried out at the expense of a third party. I think you under-estimate how important money is in F1.

How long have they said this theory is true? And how many teams do you think have wanted to do it? to prove their car can do it. When all the speculation was going round whether it would be possible you think no teams would have attempted to make an engine that works upside down?
If Gumbert can do it why cant ferrari? easily.
I'm sure they could - it's not that difficult to make an engine that works upside down. But the point is they haven't and won't whilst there is nowhere to test it and the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Shot - with high, sustained lateral G, the oil is still at the bottom of the oil tank (so swirl pots can go at the top to separate the oil), and the oil is still scraped off the crank at the bottom and scavanged at the bottom, with probably two or four scavenge pumps distributed around the sump.

The point is that for more than a few seconds inverted a whole new engine would be needed. And transmission probably. And cooling system? All the plumbing would need to be different to cater for the scavange pumps over the engine...

It hasn't been done. If it had, we'd have heard about it by now, as it would be a marketting tool.

But it could be done, if a team (or private individual) wanted to spend (waste) 20 million doing so by designing a car from scratch for the purpose.
So is it difficult or not? Your other post suggested it was. If it wasn't for Top Gear (not the most reliable source ) i wouldn't know Gumbert had made an engine to run upside down. With nearly everyone in F1 talking about this at one time, lots of teams would have looked into it and made test parts etc or even used old parts, they used to change their engine after 1 race so i doubt they were short on parts to start building one.
It's not about using old parts - the cylinder head, block and sump would need to be redesigned to cope with oil going upwards (relative to the usual direction oil flows), and getting the oil out of them sufficiently to make it work. The cooling system would probably cope, as they are pressurised anyway. The gearbox would need to be designed to cope with oil sitting on the 'top' of the casing.

Lots of engines can cope with sustained negative G. But it would be difficult to fit one into an F1 car without a lot of needless expense and 'packaging issues'. And we haven't even discussed where to find a long length of tunnel with access to get to the ceiling - probably need 1000m of smooth, large radius tunnel with no sharp corners where it meets the road...

The numbers suggest that a current F1 car will easily double in 'weight' at speed. Upside down, one g would be required to overcome gravity. Any more merely helps traction, and it only needs enough to sustain the speed required to generate that downforce... A Monaco spec car would manage with ease.
Im not arguing whether it will work or not. I just don't belive that an F1 team hasn't attempted or even made one. Yes they have better things to spend the money on but designing something like that would be a breeze for them and not that expensive (to them) You'd think Gumbert would have better things to spend money on also, like launching their manufacture car, but they found time and money to build one and a fraction of even 1 of the F1 teams budgets. Their car wasn't even in the original myth. < That is my argument, stop being so god dam stubborn
Quote from Dajmin :I've wanted a stunt track in LFS since the first time I saw those pre-S1 shots. You know the ones; glorious untextured objects, bright green and yellow polygonal shapes. From a time long ago.

I'd love to see some kind of indoor arena with massive jumps and rings of fire to jump through and stuff

Stunt car racer style? I loved that game.
Quote from Shotglass :probably ive never tried to drive upside down ith rf but any table based approach is bound to go wrong if you push it past its boundaries

judging by that video lfs should at least be not completely off

I read somewhere that in rfactor you can't drive upside down because the downforce go always down. Seems that in LFS that's not a problem.

If this works in LFS, I don't mind seeing a circuit with a tunnel, overtaking someone through the roof must be really exciting

About doing this in real life, I really don't see someone crazy enough to risk his/her life doing this. As someone said before, maybe in a wind tunnel could be done.
Quote from Goodday :I read somewhere that in rfactor you can't drive upside down because the downforce go always down.

Wow, and they call it a simulator. Pathetic

I'd be stupid enough to risk my life driving a F1 car upsidedown
Dont spend millions redesigning the engine then, simply make some sort of pivot that allows it to always stay the right way up, or mount it upside down =D
That's what i thought, making an engine that allways stays upright?
I can't speak for upside-down F1 engines, but mounting a v8 at 90-degrees doesn't seem to cause many problems. Certainly a few mods wll get it sorted. Because the Ferrari 348 and Dodge Viper use engines mounted at right angles to normal.

So how much more effort would it be, or how many problems would it cause to stick that upside-down rather than at right angles?
Do engines really rely on gravity that much?
They're not mounted at right angles to the floor, but at right angles to the car - i.e. transverse mounted. Bit difference.

Yes, engines rely on gravity a lot with regards to lubrication systems. Turn an engine upside down and all the oil that drains into the sump is going to sit in the pistons, leak past the rings, fill up the cam cover, come out of the breathers (unless it's a sealed engine for reducing crankcase pressure below atmospheric, which an F1 engine would be)........

I'd have thought anyone with a basic understanding of how an engine works would be able to see it wasn't just a case of turning it upside down and waiting for it to work. Plus it has to work the right way up too before it goes on the ceiling.

And I very much doubt they've done it, because it would such an awesome advertising bonus it would be all over the magazines and papers. Why would they keep it a secret?
Can't you just use a two-stroke engine? Don't they work at any orientation, hence why they are used in some hand power tools (chainsaws, for example)? OK it won't have the power of an F1 engine, but if you were to make a car do this, you'd make it as light as possible, so you wouldn't need as much speed to create twice as much downforce as there is weight in the first place.
What happens to the oil trying to get up the bores, and puddling inside the piston?

Same problems.

Besides, F1 cars don't have two-strokes, so that would another huge job to make a two-stroke just for this purpose, and sooner or later you aren't testing if an F1 car can drive upside down but a ridiculously heavily modified F1 car
Tristan, I think they're testing the theory that downforce can hold a car upside-down, doesn't actually have to be an F1 car. I believe I'm right in saying that during one of Top Gear's power track tests, Clarkson stated that <insert the name of road car I can't remember> could drive upside-down at 186 Mph.
Quote from S14 DRIFT :Tristan, I think they're testing the theory that downforce can hold a car upside-down, doesn't actually have to be an F1 car. I believe I'm right in saying that during one of Top Gear's power track tests, Clarkson stated that <insert the name of road car I can't remember> could drive upside-down at 186 Mph.

Veyron was it? With it's big wing?
Nah it wasn't a Veyron.. it was a Ferrari or that Gumpert (Although Hamster tested that... not sure)

Meh!
Do it with something else and you don't answer the question 'can an F1 car drive upside down', you instead answer the question 'can a Veryon/Gumpert/Ferrari drive upside down'. And as the question isn't answered by experiment, it would remain questionable...

So, it would need to be done with an F1 car of reasonably contemporary form (last 10 years say). If someone wants to supply the F1 car and the tunnel, I am happy to do the work, free of charge, to convert it to the required spec (as long as I can get some of the money from the marketting experience afterwards).
It's the theory that downforce can hold a car upside down as it drives along. A Formula 1 car is just the paving slab for doing so since everyone is like "zomg f1 carz downforz y0!"
If you just want answers to the theory, then ask any F1 team what the peak they see during the season is. I'd wager anything it's enough to hold the car on the ceiling.
Tristan why would they advertise that they have made the engine? no-one would give two shits because they haven't done it. Thats why Gumbert haven't been shouting about it, i only knew because of watching Top Gear and im sure most people wouldn't either and they have more to prove than say an F1 team, as they are actually trying to get people to buy the car.

Driving BF1 upside down
(83 posts, started )
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