this is the fastest accelerating car ever recorded it went from 0 to 402 mph in just 3.22 seconds over a/4 mile incredible right but it got me thinking how fast could a race car a dragster or anything with an engine wheels and a driver theoretically accelerate speed in cars is something humans have' been working on for over a century now whether it's land speed records racing around a circuit or acceleration tests and N to 60 acceleration tests have been the go-to statistic for drivers all over the world to compare their cars and over the years these times have reduced a lot and more recently times have gone below 2 seconds the RAC Nea at 1.74 seconds and the MC merury speeding with 1.4 seconds but although that's road legal it's not really a road car and as you can see while in the moment it might seem like acceleration can't get much quicker things do keep on progressing and that's what I love about engineers they just keep on solving problems but those previous cars are just road-going Vehicles what about Formula 1 Dragsters and specially designed cars while a standard bmw3 series will do n to 60 in about 7 Seconds a Formula 1 car will do it in about 2.6 and while that is quite fast there are plenty of road cars that are quicker and that's because F1 cars aren't really designed for standing starts they're all about fast cornering and high speeds just take a look at this data Trace from Spa the F1 car only goes below 60 miles per hour twice on the lap and for a tiny amount of time at the lour hairpin and the final chicane so F1 cars aren't really what we should be looking at however last year a group of students built a car that did not to 60 mph in just 0.9 of a second and how they did this was fascinating the car had an electric motor in each wheel Hub four in total which meant all four tires helped the car accelerate away and it had fans in the floor to suck the car into the ground which puts more vertical load on the tires increasing grip and so generates more traction it was really a fascinating project and I actually spoke with Builders AMZ racing about it in another video however the Undisputed Kings of acceleration have to be Dragsters with 11,000 horsepower big sticky tires and crazy fuel mixtures draas can do n to 60 in about 0.8 seconds and reach over 330 mph in a quarter mile the fastest ever drag run recorded on video at least was by Sandy Miller in his car the vanishing point it actually wasn't an official run but it said that he completed the quarter mile in 3.22 seconds with a top speed of 402 mph which is just insane and Sandy also holds the official fastest quartermile run at a sanctioned event where he reached 386 mph in 3.58 seconds and to put that into context that's a n to 60 of about 0.6 seconds so how do we go about figuring out the fastest acceleration possible well actually the best way to do that is with today's sponsor brilliant.org if you'd like to learn more about some of the topics covered in this video including maths data analysis programming and AI lessons then you should check out brilliant.org they have thousands of interactive lessons filled with Hands-On problem solving that lets you play with Concepts a method proven to be six times more effective than watching lecture videos learning a little every day is one of the most important things you can do and Brilliant helps you build real knowledge in minutes a day with fun lessons you can do whenever you have time personally I love the how llm work course this course is an immersive AI Workshop that lets you experience and harness the mechanics of today's most advanced tool to sign up for brilliant visit brilliant.org driver61 or scan the QR code on screen to enjoy 30 days of free access and a 20% discount on their annual premium subscription and with that let's get back to figuring out the fastest acceleration possible first it's important to know that acceleration is all about three things Mass power and traction first mass and this is pretty simple imagine pushing a shopping trolley versus a car the trolley is much lighter and so it's simply easier to accelerate and the same goes with race cars and draxter the less M vehicle has the faster it can accelerate and this is why race cars are designed to be as lightweight as possible so they can slow turn and accelerate as quickly as possible second power and that's all about the motor more power an engine can produce put through the tires and into the track surface the faster it can push the car forward and finally traction the tires are the only thing connecting the car and its engine to the track so even with lots of power and low mass a car won't accelerate well if the tires can't grip into the surface that's why Formula 1 cars use soft slick tires and why draxter have huge soft rear tires and we also need to decide what kind of acceleration test optimizing for there are speed based tests like n to 60 n to 100 or n to 200 or distance-based tests like an eighth of a mile 1,000 ft or a quarter of a mile and I've decided to take the lead on this one I want our theoretical car to stretch its legs so we're going with the old school drag racing quarter mile rather than 1,000 ft so let's start with traction how the tires and the track stick together and drag strips actually already do an incredibly good job with this you might think that the surface would be asphalt like a race circuit but actually most of the time the first part of the drag strip is made from concrete concrete is usually preferred for the initial 660 ft of the drag strip because it provides a more consistent and reliable surface for tire as felt can vary in texture and condition due to the weather and wear but concrete remains pretty stable and it's more rigid so it doesn't deform as much under the massive startline loads so the concrete does improve traction but there's more drag strips actually prepare the surface in several ways first they clean up the concrete launch Zone and then drag old drag tires across the surface to embed the rubber into the track this is a similar concept to Circuit evolution in F1 where cars running on the same racing line over and over again lay rubber down onto the surface making the circuit faster every session Beyond adding rubber into the traction Zone drag strips also add a traction compound which as you can tell by this video is incredibly sticky it's basically a glue sprayed onto the surface and then brushed into it to produce the very best grip with the tires so track preparation helps but tires are also key when it comes to acceleration and tires create grip in two different ways first indentation this is when the rubber of the tire molds itself to the small imperfections and textures of the road surface as the tire presses down it deforms to match the shape of the road creating a frictional force that helps the tire have better grip and it's this ability to conform to the road that helps a softer Tire have improved grips compared to a harder tire that can't grab into the road quite as well then there's molecular adhesion which happens at a microscopic level when the tire contacts the track surface the molecular change in the rubber form temporary bonds with the molecules of the road surface this bonding creates addition grip just like two pieces of sticky tape sticking together and the better the contact between the tire and the track the stronger this molecular addion improving traction again this is why dragster tires are super soft and only last a few runs and are usually change after only one and 1/2 miles the tire compound is so soft that it just gets torn apart very quickly and it's worth noting for this video with super sticky track surfaces and super soft tire compounds Dragsters are already doing a very good job of transferring that power into the track however there is still more that we can do to improve traction when launching most cars are limited by grip and the world's fastest accelerating machines are no different this is especially important from a standing start where the car relies solely on its weight to push the tires into the surface and the harder that you push those tires into the surface the more grip they'll have now you could add weight over the tires to increase their grip but that means that you also have to accelerate that extra weight which would end up costing you way more time so how do we get more grip from a standing start well we use fans we discussed this in our F1 with no rules video and the AMZ racing team used them on their car fans are great because they don't add much weight to the car but do a fantastic job of pulling the tires into the truck harder and so increasing grip to add a bit of context here the MCM merury Sperling uses fans to produce about 2,000 kg of down Force adding a lot of extra grip and if we used a dragster body for our car we could actually add lots of fans increasing grip and improving that quarter mile time but there's another issue slowing us down Vehicles like Top Fuel dragsters and F1 cars are only two wheel drive that means that only the two rear tires are pushing the car along the track while the fronts just aren't being used for any kind of traction granted the rear tires are more effective as the car's Mass moves backward under acceleration but there's still a lot of unused grip at the front and this is one of the reasons why electric production cars 0 to 60 times have been reducing aside from the high torque most high performance EVS are four-wheel drive so we could theoretically have all four tires pushing the car forward and save some quarter mile time there next let's talk about mass in the acceleration equation the life of the car the faster it will go an F1 car weighs almost 800 kg whereas 20 years ago there used to be around around 500 a Top Fuel dragster has a minimum weight of 1,50 kg and a land speed record car like the Thrust SSC weighs around 10,500 kg though they use jet engines and so aren't at all worried about traction so let's take a closer look at Dragsters the world's fastest accelerating cars the dragster governing body say that Top Fuel dragsters must have a tubular chassis made of chromoly steel for strength and safety with a minimum weight of 1, 57 kg or 2330 lb however steel is 5 times heavier than carbon fiber so we can save weight with the chassis a typical Drager chassis weighs about 120 kg and switching to carbon fiber could reduce this to about 25 or 30 kilos which is incredibly light a draxer engine weighs around 225 kg so if we used even more exotic materials we could reduce this by about 30% % saving roughly 65 kg transmission weighs about 80 kg and we could also lightly reduce this by about 30% again using some exotic materials now those massive dragster tires weigh about 100 kg in total and while I doubt there's much room for improvement it is worth noting and on a flat out run a draxer uses about 15 Gall of nitro meane which is about 65 kg although there's not much that we can do about that so with rough rough calculations we could likely reduce a dragster like vehicle's weight to about 600 kg a 40% reduction though it would be very expensive and wouldn't meet any of the current safety standards now let's talk about power power F1 and sports car power units are about 1,000 horsepower dragster engines are about 11,000 horsepower and Tractor Pulling machines can go up to 30,000 horsepower though they are very very heavy so again because they're the fastest cars we have let's take a look at Top Fuel dragsters dragster engines are 8.2 L V8 supercharged monsters running on Nitro methane and while Nitro methane has a lower energy density than gasoline it produces more power because it contains oxygen allowing more fuel to burn per combustion cycle even the fuel pump of a dragster is powerful it delivers 100 Gall per minute the Pistons are forged aluminium to handle the high temperatures and precious and the connecting rods are made from Billet steel or titanium for strength the crankshaft is made from Billet steel and is perfectly balanced to manage the high RPM and while 11,000 horsepower is a loss we can theoretically do more changing the fuel to the incredibly unstable yet powerful hydrazine increasing boost pressure using more exotic materials and potentially adding hybrid technology could likely about double the horsepower now I'm very aware that just saying we could do this is very different from it all actually working and the engine not exploding on every run but if it was able to work and if the cylinders could keep themselves together perhaps roughly double the horsepower would be possible so we'd have a bit more traction a lot less weight and a lot more horsepower but how fast do we think we could do the quarter mile and how are we going to figure it out luckily over the years a number of formulas have been created to estimate the quarter mile time first developed by Roger Huntington in 1950 he tested around 50 cars of different types and recorded the horsepower delivered by the clutch to get consistency ratings using this data and also the recorded top speeds and run times he managed to get a first equation based only on data which looked like this since then there's been improvements on this formula which have been tweaked and improved to include more inputs such as the coefficient of friction and drag which in turn provides a more realistic time however they're not perfect especially when using them with the high values of a Top Fuel dragster for example if we take a Top Fuel dragster with a power of 11,000 horsep and a weight of 2,320 or just over 1,000 kilos using this formula the quarter mile time would come out at around 3.8 seconds however the fastest ever time recorded for Top Fuel was 4.4 seconds and that's a 14% difference anyway this is the best that we have for the moment so let's take a look at the number numbers first the increase in traction mainly by the fans would grab us about 2/10 of a second not a bad start but it's the weight that makes a huge difference if we trim down to 600 kg we save a full 810 of a second over the quarter mile and then power if we could somehow get to 22,000 horsepower which again sounds crazy that would shave off a further 7/10 of a second meaning and please take the with a huge grain of salt that the quarter mile time could potentially be completed in about 2.7 seconds that's 1.7 seconds faster than the actual record so what do you think is that even possible and have you ever thought about how an engine would be designed and how much power it would have if there were no rules well I interviewed an ex- Red Bull powertrains engineer to find out check that video out just up here thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one