Building the FASTEST F1 RC Car

in this video you'll see what happened when I took a 100 mph RC car and upgraded it with a huge fan to see if it would go faster improving its downforce to increase cornering speed and acceleration performance if you've seen my videos before you'll know that we're no strangers to Extreme RC cars here on the project air YouTube channel but this car project would be very different providing a unique set of aerodynamic and mechanical challenges to overcome and many things that could go spectacularly wrong ground effect in cars is used to create downforce which helps the tires grip the track the way that the bottom of a ground effect Formula 1 car is shaped forcing air through a narrow opening helps it to accelerate creating a Venturi effect this Venturi effect lowers the air pressure and creates a sort of partial vacuum which pulls the car downwards but what happens if you use a fan to actively suck the air out from under the car effectively turning it into a giant vacuum cleaner this is exactly what an F1 team called braam did in the 1970s with a car called The bbam bt46b this used a large fan connected to the engine to draw more air through the car this not only created downforce in the corners but also from a standing start squashing the tires into the track allowing it to get away faster without wheel spinning the car I chose to use for this experiment was an armor Limitless a very fast RC car capable able of some eye watering velocities although fast in a straight line this car is definitely not the best at cornering being quite heavy which means that it has a lot of inertia making it difficult to change direction without under steering with fresh tires fitted I could time the Limitless between two points in a bend in this road to measure its maximum cornering speed repeating this going faster and faster until the tires gave up oh oh dear overcooked it a bit there now we can see how quickly the stock car could accelerate using an onboard GPS to time the N to 60 MPH 3 2 1 with it super powerful motor I had to gradually increase the throttle to prevent the wheels from spinning but to be Fair it still went very fast indeed 2.9 right these were the targets I wanted to beat after modifying the car could I use downforce generated by the fan to one go faster around that corner and two beats that existing na 60 time and go faster than a modern Formula 1 car to build my version of the brabon Formula 1 car I firstly disassembled the entire RC Limitless stripping it back until I was left with the chassis ready for some rather serious modifications the idea was to bolt a big metal ground effect floor to the underside made from aluminum drawing upon the design of the bt46b I measured this up and cut it to size this was a big flat floor that would be the roof of the sealed low press area under the car now of course for this to be a fan car we'd probably be needing some sort of fan so I asked my engineering helper Emma to cover this part of the build I've designed what we call in the fan intake unit so we've got three parts to it we've got the propeller we've got the housing and then we have the intake this fan would be made up of some 3D printed Parts fitted with a powerful brushless motor designed for RC planes so we're printing the propeller with a very high INF because it's going to be under a lot of force and we've also got a very low layer height so we have a really nice finish on it we can now assemble these parts and test them out to see if the fan blades would hold up to the extremely high rotational forces the motor we had based the design around had a very High KV rating meaning it would spin very fast indeed and this would be important for creating a decent pressure drop under the car that was really scary actually wasn't it yeah that was like I was getting spook it's survived though look now we knew that we had a fan that worked I could get ready to mount it to the car all right we've got the intake printing over there on 3D printer so now I need to well I've just done it actually cut a hole in the tray the underfloor tray now there is one thing I need to do though which is to make a Guard from some mesh and this stuff's going to protect the fan blades from sucking up a load of you know stones and stuff from the from the road surface so what I need to do next is to create some sort of skirt just like on the Bram bt46b Formula 1 car to seal the car to the track now this is important because we want to make sure that the high pressure air on the outside stays on the outside and the low pressure air on the inside of the ground effect tray stays there and stays low pressure the first idea I had was to make this part of the car out of foam board that would be taped and glued to the underside L brackets this was probably not my best idea as it might be ripped to shreds on the road surface but I thought that this could be a temporary solution that we could learn from and improve upon later to test the effectiveness of the skirt and fan I 3D printed a simple instrument called a YouTube monometer which would tell me what the differential pressure was between the air outside of the ground effect tray and the inside now to make this easy to read you should use some food coloring or something in the water but I haven't got any so I'm going to use tea obviously the first test at full power resulted in a rather low reading of 2 cm on the monometer which equals around 1.8 kg of downforce this wasn't a bad start but I thought that maybe increasing the number of blades would help to create more of a pressure drop Emma altered the fan design and also slightly adjusted the air foil shape to have more under camber it was all a bit of guess work but we could see if this helped in practice and the difference was quite astonishing this eight-bladed redesign now created 6.4 kg of down Force which was about equal to the car's weight so the obvious next question was why not try even more [Music] blades well the 10 bladed fan was certainly creating more of a pressure drop under the car than the eight bladed fan topping out at 10.09 kg of downforce and it certainly felt like that much weight pulling the car down when I tried to pick the car up from the table but then I smelt something burning H that's quite hot and this is a few minutes later as well we'd found the limits with our fan blades so I would use the eight bladed design instead with a fresh motor now this is all great but with engineering you really can only progress so far without doing some real world testing would the fan actually work on a real Road and would the foam board skirt maintain a decent seal [Applause] [Music] so we have sucked up bits of the bits of foam yeah that didn't take long to and that's fallen off H if I going and get some cell tape then we can take that back together the car did feel a bit grippier with the fan off the car slid around all over the place but with the fan powered on the car would still slide but would come to a more abrupt stop the best news from all of this was that the fan had survived even after launching some small stones at Emma are we did you get hit a little bit no it didn't well it's surviving it's it's not broken yet the skirt clearly wasn't strong enough though so I'd need to fix this or create a completely new solution firstly I locked out the suspension of the car using cable ties to limit the travel of the shock absorbers this was how I'd stiffened the suspension on my jet powered car to make sure that the ride height stayed almost level at all times next I cut plywood strips which would extend the rigid sides of the floor and these were bolted to the aluminium brackets under the car I sealed everything up with hot glue and made sure that the Gap to the ground was an even 3 mm all the way round this Gap was way too big to create the same sort of partial vacuum that we'd seen earlier from the monometer tests and the car bouncing up and down when running at high speeds would certainly ruin this ground effect entirely so I needed to add flexible tape that would fill in the Gap to the floor I was confident that this improved skirt design would do the job nicely but as it would turn out I'd be in for a nasty reality check on the first high-speed Corner test now I could finish up the car by painting up a brand new streamlined F1 style Body shell complete with project a logos and the names of my patreons with fresh tires this car was now ready for another test but how well would it work on that bumpy corner and that straight road as the weather was quite nice I wanted to take a quick trip to the local River to quickly sail a small remote control ship I've been meaning to test out if you're anything like me and you like RC cars and all of that sort of thing then you might also like model boats because they're great fun to mess around with and learn about all of the sort of you know intricacies of ship design and all of that sort of thing even with a silly toy boat just like this one now if you want to learn about the history of boats like this and also play a really cool game then you should definitely check out World of Warships who are actually sponsoring this video with an ad world of ships is a free-to-play multiplayer game where you can command over 600 ships this is so cool with greatl looking graphics and interesting gameplay modes oh no oh no the game also has special events that only come around now and again such as the current event in which you can command legendary vessels in missions inspired by June the 6th 1944 which was the largest naval operation the world has ever seen players can unlock new ships to try out special D-Day PVE and PVP missions for new and existing players new commemorative historical commanders special patches skins and customizations you can cap in some incredible American destroyers Cruisers and battleships that sail the Seas during early 20th century conflicts while learning all about American Naval Warfare history one of my favorite vessels in the game is the USS Phoenix which is incidentally available for free with my link in the description there is actually an exclusive invite code down there with a special offer that includes all sorts of cool things that you can get for free if you download it today you can get a 7 Days premium account 200 dubloons 1 million credits and the choice of the USS Phoenix Japanese Cruiser Kuma French Battleship cor and Italian Battleship Dante aliri or the HMS wakeful make sure to check out the link in the description and download World of Warships today right then time for the first test let's see how fast this goes around the corner now we've made all of the modifications so this will be the first test with the new skirt no idea if it's going to work or not like with all of my projects there's an element of things you know being uh left unknown to the last minute and then you uh you actually have to sort of go for it and see what happens remember before with the unmodified car the best top speed we achieved around this corner was 4.75 seconds if the fan was effective enough to overcome the weight penalty of all of the extra gear and electronics on the car it might go faster but would the bumpy road ruin the ground [Applause] [Music] Effect 3 2 [Applause] [Music] [Applause] 1 something didn't feel quite right we lost the rear a bit of the end there a little bit I wonder if it's a skirt I wonder if the skirt's just bouncing on the ground listening to the car as it went past the wooden skirts seemed to be bottoming out and releasing pressure off the tires the fan was also sounding a bit weird stuttering as it went by maybe maximum fan power would help to smooth things out but then the fan suddenly failed [Applause] [Music] oh oh oh my goodness did you get that yep what a crush H Fan's dead well this isn't great so what happened looking at the footage I lost all of the fan power mid corner and the car skated off the track almost like a [Music] hovercraft the rigid part of the skirt had definitely been bouncing along the ground losing even more Tire grip I realized my semi- rigid skirt design was not working at all so I'd have to change it back to the old foam board design that seemed to be performing better despite being a bit fragile back at the corner we could try all over again with some more timed runs could I beat 4.75 seconds [Applause] the car was still bumping around on the rough surface breaking and then regaining the ground effect causing it to skate erratically across the track unfortunately the best time we were able to get of the car without it crashing was just 4.97 seconds so slower than the previous time I think what we discovered here is one of the fundamental flaws of ground effect cars unlike with winged cars where the downforce is fairly consistent these ground effect cars don't work if they're not touching the floor at the perfect ride height we had one more test to do though to see if the car was faster in a straight line on a much smoother piece of track the original straight where we did our previous acceleration tests with fresh tires the car was prepared for a few final runs now would it perform much better getting more grip from the tires for a faster speed off the starting line there was only one way to find out ready when you are okay [Music] the first run showed that it had already improved with a time of 2.49 seconds what could it do with maximum fan [Applause] [Music] [Applause] power 2.28 seconds we tried again but went slightly slower this time doing 2.38 seconds which was still extremely quick so the ground effect was definitely doing something overcoming the weight penalty and allowing these tires to bite with more grip we did it we got 2.2 seconds which is way faster than a current Formula 1 car which is very impressive I I'm very surprised that it could do that especially seeing as though it could not do that before we put the ground effect on it so yeah this fan has clearly helped with the N to 60 high five we' built one of the fastest ground effect RC cars in the world with a ridiculous n to 60 time in doing this we'd actually mirrored the development of real ground effect cars from developing functional skirts to measuring downforce levels to pushing it all the way to the absolute limit well that was very much more challenging than I I thought it was going to be I'm not sure if you've watched my previous videos but if you've seen my previous fan car that was a lot smaller and simpler than this one it worked way better on a smooth surface and yes this one being on a actual Road surface it made the whole thing way harder a big thank you to Arma for sending me this car and a big thank you to you for watching this video uh make sure to subscribe to the project a YouTube channel if you do enjoy my videos check out this video next if you've got to this point in this video I'm sure you'll enjoy that one um and yes I'll see you in about a month's time for the next project air YouTube video right I'm going to mess around with this a bit more and just drive it for fun see you later

Channel: ProjectAir

Views: 475,198

Keywords: James Whomsley, whomsley, James, projectair, 3d printing, rc, r/c, airplane

Id: yAXjDo-2Xls

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024