The Gordon Murray T.50s Can Drive Upside Down

hello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be covering the gordon murray t-50s the racing version of the t50 which if you haven't yet you should check out my video on now this car still has the fan but instead of six modes there's just one high down force the fan spins at a constant 7000 rpm and many added aerodynamic features means this thing is making crazy crazy downforce yes even enough to drive upside down now all we have is a sketch of the t50s but there's actually a lot we can learn from it there's a prominent new roof scoop working as a ram air intake to increase horsepower we can see the driver has an 18 degree field of view and is reclined about 33 degrees we can also see that if the driver were to spit it would land approximately on the windshield in front of them which doesn't make a whole lot of sense since they're clearly wearing a helmet i'm not so sure about this sketch heading to the back of the core we can see a massive fin trailing from the roof scoop to help with high speed stability there's also a very tiny arrow hard to see but you can follow the tail of it and that leads you to what appears to be a rear tire jury's still out on what brand they are okay so the sketch only tells us so much about this car so let's walk through some of the absurd numbers associated with it so if you want a car to go around a track as quickly as possible you might think well just throw a ton of horsepower at it but actually horsepower won't be all that useful in creating very good lap times two things can play a far larger role if you take advantage of them reducing the weight of your vehicle and maximizing downforce so if you think back to the 2016 viper acr it went around and it smashed a ton of lap records for production cars and the viper is fairly heavy you know it's about 3 400 pounds and it only has about 600 some horsepower so there's nothing crazy looking at those stats but what it has working in its favor is an absurd amount of downforce about 1700 pounds of downforce 770 kilograms and because of that downforce it produced about 1.5 lateral g's of grip and was able to smash all of these track records because it had so much grip so that's what this t-50s is going for and we're going to use the road car benchmark of the viper acr to just demonstrate how absurd this t50s is now as far as a simple discussion about grip we have our car driving along down the road and it has a certain mass and it has a certain amount of down force and so we can think of our grip in terms of g's the lateral grip that the car will be able to sustain or break with in terms of its mass plus its down force divided by its mass so think for example if you had a car with zero down force it would have mass over mass that's just one about one g of grip so we're just assuming a frictional coefficient of our tires here of one but essentially our car has one g of grip now if we add down force to that we increase our g's here so for example we can look at our viper acr which has a mass of 1540 kilograms down force of 770 kilograms and that gives us a grip of 1.5 g's now that's assuming those tires once again are pretty basic if you had some pretty advanced tires something with a frictional coefficient of 1.2 well that's basically a multiplier effect for your g's here and so you'd be at around 1.8 g's now let's compare that to an absurd track only core the sena gtr the thing only weighs about 1200 kilograms that's the dry weight and has about a thousand kilograms of down force so using our same simple little equation here we're at 1.84 gs if we have super sticky tires you know 2.2 gs of grip now again this is a track only car here and it's capable of somewhere around you know 2 gs of grip which is insane uh but we we move on to our gordon murray t-50s it's 300 kilograms less than a cent of gtr with 500 kilograms more of down force so what does that mean in terms of grip about 2.69 g's and then you know we put some sticky tires on there 1.2 uh frictional coefficient and we're at 3.2 g's now these here we're calculating without the weight of a driver mclaren's always given dry weight this might also be dry weight so you know you can take these down a little bit here but in gordon murray's press release they're saying they've seen in breaking a peak grip of up to three g's so absolutely absurd nearly double what you're seeing in a road car okay so how does this translate to track time so let's just take a very simple example and say we're going around in a circle here and so we have a 250 meter circle which gives us a total circumference of about 1 570 meters or about one mile so we're going around in this circle here and we're trying to figure out how quickly can we do it in different scenarios so what's happening is your car is turning and as it's turning the acceleration force makes it want to go away from that circle but the tires are gripping to that road and they're giving a force resisting that outward acceleration so if you set these two forces equal to each other you can find out the maximum velocity that you go around this circle so that's essentially what we're doing looking at different levels of grip from a basic road car with about one g of lateral grip all the way to perhaps our gordon murray t50s with 2.5 gs of grip so you can plug in the numbers here if you would like one thing to note which you might kind of question why are we multiplying down force by gravity because certainly downforce isn't a mass but yet here's you know kind of a flaw with the metric discussion of downforce in kilograms kilograms is a mass and yet very frequently in metric which i did this video in for all the metric folks out there but discussing downforce in terms of mass in kilograms isn't all that logical to do you'd multiply it by 9.81 so you can get that in units of newtons all that aside we're looking at what kind of speeds can we actually go around this circle so if you had a car with one g of grip that will be going around the circle at about 110 miles per hour or 180 kilometers per hour if you had a car with 1.5 gs of grip you're at 135 miles per hour 220 kilometers per hour and then if you have this t-50s and we're saying that it has 2.5 g's of grit with down force uh 175 miles per hour or 280 kilometers per hour now what is this in terms of time so we know the circumference we know how fast we're going we can see how long it takes to go around that circle 32 seconds for the average road car 26 seconds for that dodge viper and about 20 seconds for our t50s now realistically it might not be at 2.5 it'll probably be somewhere in the 2 to 2.5 g's so we're really looking at about 20 to 22 seconds but think about that this car is going around this circle in 20 to 22 seconds and no other road car out there could do it in less than about 26 seconds so it is absolutely absurd i mean this the scale of this is a tiny little one mile track with you know 26 second lap times and we're taking six seconds off of that absolutely incredible and the the benefits aren't just on cornering so you might say well this is a circle of course it's going to do better because it's just cornering on a straight line you get to break so much later because you have that high grip so you can carry your full speed down towards the end of the straight and then break super super late and then have a higher corner entry speed so it just kind of multiplies around the entire track and you just end up dominating as long as you have high downforce low weight you just start crushing because you have so much lateral grip all right let's move on to driving upside down and you've probably heard you know plenty of cars out there say hey you know at this speed this car could actually drive upside down but there's often some things that are overlooked or not discussed when talking about a car driving upside down so the very basics of how does it work well if your car's weight is equal to your car's downforce which in this case is basically an up force then you have equal forces in each direction and so your car doesn't fall if it's driving upside down but if we go back to thinking about our grip equation that's basically now going to be down force minus our mass divided by our mass and in this case because they're equal you have zero on top of this equation so you have zero grip and so at the moment when you have enough downforce to hold the car to the road you have zero grip so you're basically just floating you can't do anything with that and the other thing to think about is in that scenario you would still have to have your center of pressure line up with your center of gravity so for example if the mass of the car is centered here and the center of pressure for down force is centered here well that means the thing's going to start to rotate even if the forces are equal it's going to start rotating and the front of the car is going to come up you're going to have all that air hit it and then you're done you know you fall and crash and hopefully you make it so there's there's several things that have to happen you have to drive at a much greater speed in order to actually drive upside down and so in the case of this gordon murray t-50s with current driver they were saying that they could you know have this equal out at 175 miles an hour and then a top speed of about 210. so if you were actually driving at that top speed of 210 miles per hour and actually able to get that 3g of a grip you know if you were the right way up well in this case you'd basically be driving with one g of grip and so if you're upside down at its max speed it would behave a lot like a normal road car would on the road that's kind of scary because you can't slow down you can't really turn all that much if if you start doing anything that upsets that aerodynamic flow then you just fall again and crash so it's a it's a very sketchy thing but it would be really cool to see at some point an example of this being done okay so let's move on to the engine and they made some pretty cool changes for this engine in order for it to make more horsepower so it's still that same four liter naturally aspirated v12 revving to the same 12 100 rpm absolutely insane but now instead of 663 metric horsepower uh thanks to not having any emissions equipment or you know noise control through your exhaust uh because this is a track only car it's making 700 metric horsepower and then that 700 gets bumped to 730 metric horsepower the actual total output or about 720 horsepower uh because that roof scoop is elevated a bit out of the boundary layer from the car where that air is starting to move slower so it's up in the fresh air and so it's able to use that ram air effect and get about an additional 30 metric horsepower uh so very crazy that this thing you know 720 horsepower out of a four liter or about 180 horsepower per liter from a naturally aspirated engine and you know for comparison the highest road legal naturally aspirated engine would be the t50 at 164 and this is significantly higher than that so you know car like the ferrari 458 is around 130 horsepower per liter so this is absurd that in a naturally aspirated engine you're getting 180 horsepower per liter more than double uh with that viper engine is doing and a lot of that is because this thing revs so high now the engine of course if you're going to go around the track really quickly is matched with a paddle shift gearbox so that's neat that they have that for the track only version and something i think worth discussing is that this car is just on regular old you know road legal street tires both the three million dollar t50 version and the more than three million dollar t50s version uh you know the road legal version coming with pilot sport 4s tires and the track version coming with michelin cup 2. so you know something i think that's often overlooked is when people are modifying their cars they immediately want to go to horsepower when in reality you know you can get the same tires as this three million dollar supercar and stick them on your car and from a grip standpoint from a base script standpoint you're starting off relatively the same and then of course this has so much downforce that it's able to just completely smash all those records as far as what a road car would be capable of so it's a very neat car very cool engineering and thank you all so much for watching if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 258,436

Keywords: gordon murray, gordon murray automotive, t.50, t50, t.50s, drive upside down, upside down, gma t50, gma t50s, engineering explained, gordon murray track car, track car, supercar, v12 engine, 12000 RPM, naturally aspirated, v12, hypercar

Id: pSete8Q1kM8

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020