(engine revving) - This is the Bugatti Bolide a new experimental hyper car built around Bugatti's eight
liter quad turbo W16. And this is a golf ball
that was rolling around in the back of Cain's pickup truck. He's a Ford ranger guy so he's got a lot of stuff out there. He's got golf balls,
he's got old golf clubs. He's got chairs, he's got
dead people. Ranger life. Now what do these two
things have in common? Well, supposedly they're aerodynamics at least according to a bunch of articles and Bugatti themselves. Bugatti has the Bolide set to break some serious records. But how much of what they say about this golf ball arrow is really real. Well, turns out not all of it. Today we're gonna double
on the black magic that is aerodynamics. Explain the science
behind the Bugatti Bolide and see how much it and this old golf ball
really have in common. If there's one thing I
hate more than hypocrites, It's people who play golf. (chuckles) (upbeat music) - Looney, Looney Boonie. Are we good? - Thank you to off the record for sponsoring today's video. - Top of the morning to ya. St. Patrick's day is here, and I know how fun it is
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at offtherecord.com/donut - Was that great? Did I Nail it? - [Man] Nailed it. - Yes. (chuckles) - A few years back Bugatti
asked themselves what if we strip away all of the
Chiron's heavy bodywork and creature comforts
and replace everything with the latest, lightweight
aerodynamic parts and crank up that legendary engine. (shouts) - You ever seen someone crank up something on crank? You get it. The answer they came up
with is the Bugatti Bolide. Bolide is Italian for fireball and it's a track only monster weighing just over 1200 kilos with 1800 horsepower. That's like the weight of
a Mini Cooper and the power of two Indy cars, but a great power to weight
ratio isn't the only ingredient for a fast race car. You need race car tires,
race car suspension and maybe most importantly,
race car aerodynamics. But I'm not sure if race car
aerodynamics is the right term because the Bolide has a feature I've never seen on any race car. On the roof is a giant air intake which feeds that massive W16 engine. And on top of that are 60
inflatable bubbles that can extend up to 10 millimeters from
the surface of the car. Bugatti says that this more
football outer skin reduces drag and improves both agility and efficiency. They say it can do this
because those bubbles work just like dimples on the
surface of a golf ball. So there you have it. That completely explains
Bugatti's new golf ball arrow. Thank you for watching
like, and subscribe. We're not done. Look Bugatti I get it. Arrow is complicated, but for starters those are bubbles and golf
balls they have dimples. Those aren't the same. They're kind of like the actual opposite. So let's pick up where
Bugatti left off and see if we can fill in some of
the gaps in this story. Before we get into how
Bugatti's golf ball arrow works. We need to understand some of
the basics of aerodynamics. Race car arrow is complex and involves many parts working together. But aerodynamic design is
based on a simple principle. Adding or reducing pressure
to one side of an object will create an imbalance
that can move that object. Let me show you what I mean just by being in our atmosphere these two ping pong balls
have a constant force on them from both sides, about
14 PSI or one atmosphere. Since the pressure is on all sides it's balanced and the
balls remain stationary. Now, if I add more pressure to one side, for example by blowing on it. It moves towards the
area of lower pressure. Now, what if instead of
increasing pressure, we lower it. We can do this by using
the Bernoulli principle which states that an increase in the speed of a fluid
occurs simultaneously with a decrease in static pressure. If we create a current of air between the two ping-pong balls you might think this air
current would push them apart but the moving air actually
reduces the air pressure between them causing the
balls to move inward. Increasing pressure or decreasing pressure it doesn't matter. Any imbalance will create motion. So how do these principles
apply to race cars? Vroom, vroom, let's go speed. Let's start with the most obvious example of race car, aerodynamics, the rear wing. It creates a vertical
pressure differential with high pressure on top and low pressure below. This produces negative lift or down force pushing
the car into the track which means more grip,
which means faster speed, when you're going around corners. The Bolide has adjustable
wings, front and rear and at 200 miles an hour and maximum attack angle
Bugatti says they're good for 5,700 pounds of combined down force. That's a lot of your mamas. Now another way race cars
produce down force is by taking advantage of ground effect. Similar to how creating a current of air between the ping pong balls caused them to move inwards towards each other, creating a fast moving current of air underneath the car will cause it to be sucked down to the track. So why not just install
some six side skirts and a huge wing, call it a day? Well arrow, isn't all that simple. All the down force producing parts of a race car can create huge amounts of grip and high speed stability but they have to be precisely
calibrated to work in harmony. If the front splitters angle
of attack is too shallow this can create lift and
that lift can cancel out the down force from the ground effects and without ground effects
and a rear ring producing huge down force on the rear of the car. Something like this can happen. - [Narrator] Here we go.
Oh my god. Oh my god. The Mercedes has taken off. - Your car stops being a car, and it starts being a plane. We don't want that. Planes are planes for
a reason, right guys? (laughs) So now, you know the basics
make everything work in harmony and create tons of down force. Well, that would be great for high speed handling and braking, but it comes at a cost of
acceleration and top speed. Because most down force
producing parts also create drag. Usually when we think of drag,
the first thing that comes to mind is having to
push air out of the way. But there's a secondary
drag called pressure drag, and it's just as important. Pressure drag is when a
fast moving object leaves a low pressure area or
weight behind itself. And this weight increases
the pressure differential pulling the object backwards,
slowing it down further. So how do we reduce this pressure drag? Well, in Bugatti's case,
they turn to a concept that's over 100 years old. And it looks like this. Like any object, a moving ball displaces
the air in front of it. And air has viscosity. It likes to stick to whatever surface it's traveling over. At low speeds air travels
along the ball surface in nice orderly layers, all
going the same direction. This is called laminar flow. As a ball moves faster. The inertia of the faster air overcomes the viscosity forces that were keeping it stuck to the ball. And so the air detaches
and that separation leaves a large low pressure
wake that gradually fills in with detached air tumbling into it. This causes that pressure drag
we were talking about before. So how do dimples help with separation? Well, the dimples create microscopic areas of high and low pressure. These turn the boundary layer of laminar air into turbulent air. So the layers are no
longer gliding smoothly past each other. This turbulent air has less inertia so it can stick to the
surface of the ball longer. It's not much extra stick but a dimple golf ball
can fly twice as far as a smooth one. So how does this compare to what Bugatti is doing with the Bolide. The Bolide suffers from the
same detaching air dilemma as our flying golf ball. At speeds over 50 miles an hour the air passing over the
intake scoop would detach instead of following the
curve of the roof line. As the car increases in speed, the wake of the hood scoop would reach
further and further back eventually producing a low pressure area around the rear wing,
making it way less useful. So, they brought in the bubbles like the dimples on a golf ball, the Bolide bubbles prevent the separation by creating multiple areas
of high and low pressure. All those small pressure
differentials produce turbulent air that can stick to the surface of the car and follow the curve of the
body towards the rear wing. When Bugatti says that those bubbles reduce
the aerodynamic drag of the scoop by 10%, they're not talking about the air resistance
at the front of the scoop. They're talking about the
pressure drag behind it. Bugatti is actually not the first company to use bubbles like this,
to reduce pressure drag. But they are the first to
make those bubbles active. So why not just have the bubbles
inflated it all the time? Well, below 50 miles an
hour, the air is moving over the intake slowly enough
that it doesn't detach. If the bubbles were there they just create drag in
the form of air resistance. Dimples on a golf ball,
they have the same problem. The perfect golf ball
would have active dimples that don't appear until 55 miles per hour. When their positive
impact on pressure drag will outweigh their
increased air resistance. I guess I found out how
to make a lot of money make an active golf ball
and sell it to cheaters. All golfers had cheated at least once in their golfing life, right? So why use bubbles instead of dimples? Dimples would create areas of low pressure but probably would be less
effective than bubbles, which protrude into the air flow. Maybe they'd work even better if the bubbles had dimples, but that's untested speculation. And unfortunately, so is a
lot of what Bugatti is saying about the Bolide. According to Bugatti the Bolide's
massive power, lightweight and high-tech arrow means it
could lap The Nurburg ring in five minutes, 23 seconds. It could lap the 24 hours Le Mans circuit in three minutes seven seconds they say. Seven seconds faster than
the fastest race car. Bugatti says the Bolide
could do these things but they haven't actually done it. The Bolide is a real functional car and it looks pretty sweet. But apart from the
weight and the horsepower every number Bugatti has said is based on computer simulations. The Bolide has not run from
zero to 60 in 2.1 seconds. It hasn't hit 311 miles per hour. It has not produced 5,700
pounds of down force and those magic bubbles on the roof they've never produced
a 10% reduction in drag. Those bubbles success is all
based on simulations too. It's like the matrix over there Bugatti. I wanna believe all those
numbers are possible. I really, really do, but
for me to believe it, I need more than just a
simulation, I need to see it. I need to see it happen. I didn't believe in Brendan Fraser until I saw him in a
Walmart in Rancho Cucamonga. He's a nice guy. Where has he been? Nobody knows since I saw him there. (chuckles) Thank you guys so much for
watching this episode of B2B. Follow us on Instagram @donutmedia. Follow me on Instagram @jeremiahburton. click like and subscribe
that really helps us out. Let us know how we're
doing in the comments. You guys liked this nerdy stuff? I hope so, until next week. Bye for now.
Teams have been known to use vortex inducing strips (Mercedes most commonly).
As for the "Bolide", the active dimples are more of a gimmick. If you have separation in the area, why not make the scoop have a more gentle slope? If the design department requires this design, why make it active? Why keep the "active" element of the dimples, and remove the weight that comes with it?
Pretty sure golf balls use the dimpled texture because they're spherical and aids the flow behind the ball specifically for that shape.
Most surfaces on F1 cars are aerofoil shaped to begin with, and they have other ways to energise the boundary layer on longer, draggier surfaces, eg s-ducts and vortex generators.
Okay... sigh... The issue here is Reynolds number, i.e. the ratio of inertial to viscous force. A golf ball has a relatively low Reynolds number (small scale and low speed), i.e. the viscous force dominates, in this case transitioning the boundary layer and maintaining attached flow reduces drag and allows the ball to fly further.
On an F1/road car the boundary layer is already turbulent. The transition Reynolds number on a flat plate is 5e5, so say for a front wing of chord 525mm transition of the boundary layer would have occurred by ~50km/hr - that's without considering the pressure gradient. This is why the matte/gloss paint argument is so dumb and why golf ball dimples are not useful for F1 cars.
The reason for having dimples on a golf ball is to delay separation by introducing turbulence, this in turn decreases drag. An F1 car would not benefit from this since it does not have uncontrolled separation of the flow to same extent as a golf ball. I’m sure dimpling could be viable on a certain part of the car where the engineers want to delay separation, problem is just introducing the turbulence which can affect other parts of the car in a negative way.
Another note, turbulent flow and boundary layers increases skin friction and thus drag!
It's funny because most people have a similar thought process when first learning about aerodynamics. 1. Learn the basics. 2. Learn why golf balls have dimples 3. "Can we put dimples on cars!?"
Not criticizing the question. I asked the same question at one point.
Could F1 cars use aero dimples (as on a golf ball or the new Bugatti) to help maintain aero flow? Would this help against dirty air, or do F1 cars have other tricks that help against this?
Skip to 7:50 if you want to.
edit: y'all really downvoting me for being curious? lmao shame on you