The Dodge Viper: A Demonstration of Downforce's Power

In a recent demonstration, the Dodge Viper was shown to lap a Ferrari every 17 laps, showcasing its incredible downforce and cornering abilities. This result is all the more impressive considering that the Ferrari, with fantastic tires, could still not keep up with the Viper's speed around the track. The difference in lap times highlights just how much of an advantage downforce can provide to a vehicle.

The Viper's downforce was demonstrated through its massive 8 square foot rear wing and array of other aerodynamic devices, including a diffuser, front splitters, and dive planes. These features combined to create an incredible amount of downforce on the car, allowing it to corner at absurd speeds. The result is that the Viper can accelerate out of corners faster than most cars can accelerate from a standstill.

The math behind the Viper's speed was also demonstrated. When compared to a regular car with fairly sticky tires and no downforce, the Viper was shown to be significantly faster. The square root of 1 (representing the frictional coefficient) multiplied by the gravitational acceleration (9.81 m/s^2) and the radius of the track (3099 m), gave a velocity of approximately 14,514 m/s or about 198.50 km/h (123 mph). In contrast, the regular car could only manage a speed of approximately 5514 m/s or about 198.50 km/h.

The demonstration highlights just how much of an advantage downforce can provide to a vehicle. The Viper's incredible cornering abilities and acceleration out of corners allowed it to lap the Ferrari every 17 laps, while the regular car could only manage a lap time of 35.3 seconds. This means that every five laps, the Viper would pass the regular car.

Ferrari's 488: A Study in Aerodynamics

In contrast to the Dodge Viper's approach to downforce, Ferrari took a different approach with its 488. By lowering the coefficient of drag from 33 to 0.34 and increasing downforce by 50%, Ferrari created an incredibly aerodynamic car that can exceed 200 mph on the track. While the Viper is limited to 177 mph due to its high downforce levels, the 488 can take advantage of lower air resistance to achieve higher speeds.

The trade-off for this increased speed is a lack of aerodynamics through the air. The Ferrari's drag coefficient is much higher than that of the Viper, which means it acts like a giant brake when moving through the air. This limits its top speed and makes it less efficient at high speeds.

Conclusion

The Dodge Viper and Ferrari 488 demonstrate two very different approaches to downforce and aerodynamics. While the Viper relies on massive amounts of downforce to corner at absurd speeds, the Ferrari uses aerodynamics to achieve higher speeds through reduced air resistance. Both cars are incredibly impressive in their own right, and their designs highlight just how much can be achieved with careful consideration of aerodynamics.

The math behind these demonstrations is also a key takeaway from this article. For engineers, the numbers provide a clear example of just how powerful downforce can be in cornering speeds. The comparison between the Viper's speed and that of the regular car shows just how much advantage downforce can provide to a vehicle.

Finally, it's worth noting that some might view the Ferrari 488 as less impressive than the Dodge Viper simply because it can exceed 200 mph on the track. However, this ignores the complexities of aerodynamics and the trade-offs involved in achieving high speeds. The Ferrari is an incredibly well-designed car, and its approach to downforce is just as impressive as that of the Viper.

In conclusion, these two demonstrations highlight the incredible power of downforce in cornering speeds. While different approaches can be taken to achieve this effect, the results are always impressive.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be talking about how the Dodge Viper ACR broke so many track records and indeed it did it broke 13 different track records and these were pretty prestigious tracks it's not just tracks in the middle of nowhere that nobody knows about this is Laguna sea Road Atlanta a lot of big names in there and so you know a lot of times when a car can break this many lap records at this many different tracks uh there's often going to be something relating to physics that you can pinpoint and say here are the reasons why this car is faster than everything else out there and indeed with the Viper you can do this so that's what we're going to be doing in this video we're going to be talking about what changes uh does it have what unique characteristics does it have that make it faster than everything else out there on these tracks and so one of the things I'm going to be doing is comparing it to a Ferrari 488 GTB just because the Ferrari is a modern super car it's super fast it's more expensive it's got more power it weighs less for all reasons you know it should be a quicker car uh but I'm going to show you why it isn't uh in this video and so you know if if nothing else uh what we're trying to do in this video is see how fast a car can go in a circle so why are we talking about circles well if you watch my video on what is the best mod for your car uh you know that in certain circumstances you can have tires be 10 times more beneficial to upgrade than power and so a lot of it comes down to grip uh but the the basic understanding from that video is that you know it's not lap times aren't about getting to a high top speed lap times are about maintaining a high High average speed so not slowing down as much as the car next to you going through the corners with more speed and if you can prove that a vehicle can go around a corner with more speed which is what we're going to do in this video then you can prove why it is quicker than that other vehicle so if at any point this starts to get really confusing and I've gone too deep uh you know just think and say to yourself quietly uh you know out loud or in your head whatever you want all we're doing is finding the speed around a circle we're just seeing how fast a car can go around a circle that's all we're doing it's very simple uh and it's going to get a little bit deep um and you know this is going to be filmed in a slightly different style so instead of just throwing everything up on the Whiteboard we're going to go through each of the different steps of this video uh it's going to be a bit slower Pace but hopefully give you a good understanding and let me know what you think about it and we're using the metric unit so I know a lot of you will be thrilled about that and everyone in America uh has to suck it up this time okay so first let's just talk about the two cars we have we have the Dodge Viper ACR and we have the Ferrari 488 GTB the Viper weighs 1538 kg the Ferrari 1475 the Viper with 481 KW of power the Ferrari with 492 as I mentioned it's more powerful it's lighter weight uh down force of the Viper ACR they do give metrics uh Chrysler provides these metrics so you've got 544 kg at 241 km per hour and 771 kg of downforce at 285 kilm per hour Ferrari on the other hand gives you 325 kgrs at 250 km/ hour so as you can see the Viper does have more downforce but also weighs more so you know it's kind of a battle of ratios there and then as far as frictional coefficients this is something we're going to have to calculate um so Dodge gives us uh that the base Viper the SRT base Viper uh no thrills nothing on it uh is going to give you a skid pad of 1.03 Gs versus the Viper ACR will give you a skid pad of 1.15 G's now what they don't tell you what is the diameter of that skid pad uh so what I want to know is does downforce influence these numbers if it's a high speed that they're traveling at then downforce will influence these numbers if it's a low speed that they're traveling at then we can assume that this number right here is pretty close to the coefficient of friction for the tires which is what we're trying to find out okay so step number one is uh downforce relevant in determining our coefficient of friction so I was looking at some of the different skid pads out there Edmonds uses a 200 uh diameter circle uh Car and Driver uses a 300 foot diameter circle so we're just going to go with Car and Driver uh because that's going to give us higher speed it would have more impact with downforce and we'll just assume and be conservative here and so if we were to have a circle with a radius of 150 ft or a diameter of 300 ft in metric units that is going to be 45.72 M and so what we want to find out is what is that speed what speed can I car with tires with a frictional coefficient of one go around this circle so the equation for that if you've watched my video on cornering speed you will know is V equals the square root of the frictional coefficient time gravity time the radius so V is going to equal to the square OT of 1 * 9.81 m/s squared time our r radius of 45.72 M great okay so what does this give you this gives you a speed of 76 km per hour or about 47 miles hour so this is a fairly low speed so what this tells me is that downforce really isn't going to play a huge role in the skid pad results it's really just going to be up to the tires so a tire with a frictional coefficient of one will be able to take a 1G Corner a tire with a frictional coefficient of 1.03 would be able to take a corner 1.03 G's and so we're going to assume that for the Dodge Viper with the base P0 pelli P0 tires it has a frictional coefficient of 1.03 and the Dodge Viper ACR has some special tires made by Kumo just for the Viper ACR uh they're super grippy they're just made for this one vehicle it's a variant of their v720 tires and so spe specific compound and designed just for the Viper ACR and they're able to eek out 1.15 uh G's on the skid pad so we're going to assume it has a frictional coefficient of 1.15 so right off the bat we can see that it has stickier tires the Ferrari 488 GTB will come with pilot sport tires on it and I've looked at some tests on Tire Rack and they show a similar coefficient of grip between ply P zos which are kind of topof the line and Michelin Pilot Sports these aren't the cup tires these are just regular pilot Sports uh they're going to be around the same so we're just going to assume that the Ferrari has the same as a base Viper with 1.03 uh as the coefficient of friction for its tires okay so now that we have our frictional coefficients we want to be able to compare these cars directly and in order to do that we need to have the downforce at the same speed so for the Viper we have it at 241 km/ hour and 285 km/ hour versus the Ferrari we have at 250 and so what we're going to do is interpolate uh and so that we can take a figure from the Viper at 250 km/ hour because that's in between these two numbers so we can interpolate between these two and get a figure so we can estimate what its down force is at 250 km/ hour and one simple way of doing this you might think let's just take 250 divide that by our down Force which is 241.55 5 44.3 and that will give us a number 5637 kg which is more which you would expect so you know it looks like it works but to kind of check our work here let's do 2849 divided by 241.55 44.3 and that should give us a number similar to 771 if this interpolating method work works correctly and so that gives us 6424 and you can see that's obviously quite off from 771 and the reason is because down force is an exponential function uh with relation to your vehicle speed so a more accurate way of going about this would be to take the squares of these two numbers so we have 284 284 look how dyslexic I am .9 squared divide that by 241 . 4^2 multiply that by 544.004 1.4 2ar multiplied 5 44.3 and that gives us 5838 kg of down Force at 250 km per hour so now we can directly compare the Viper ACR at 250 km per hour to the Ferrari 488 at 250 km per hour as you can see it's got 583.310 has a marginally greater effect on uh the Ferrari uh even though this has more now in reality this is still a larger ratio uh but what I'm saying with the Ferrari uh you get more bang for your buck with down force all right so now we've got the Viper's downforce we've got its frictional coefficients so we can start getting into the fun stuff which is how fast can this car go around a circle so what we're going to try and find out is if the Viper is traveling at 250 kilometers per hour how wide of a radius turn uh can it take how narrow should I say can it take obviously you could always go wider you get to infinity and you're in a straight line so how narrow uh can you make that how short can you make that radius and still have that Viper go around that Circle and so the equation straight out of my video on cornering speed for determining this you can set velocity equal to the square root of the coefficient of friction multiplied by the mass of your car plus the amount of down force that you have and then you're going to multiply that by gravity and then you're going to multiply this by the radius of the corner and then to divide all of that by the mass of the car so plugging in our numbers here we've got uh our speed which is 250 km per hour that in m/s is 69.4 repeating so we can set that velocity equal to remember we're trying to figure out this R here uh we've got our frictional coefficient of 1.15 the mass of the car 15 38.6 plus the amount of downforce it's creating 583.310 38.6 kg and so all you've got is one variable here you solve for R and R is 39.9 m 39.9 m okay great so a lot of you are probably sitting there thinking well that doesn't tell me anything so what does this tell us well if we have our Circle and it has a radius of 309.28 km per hour or 69.4 m/s 69.4 repeating uh and so it can go around at that speed so how fast can it go around the lap well we can find the circumference of this that's just simply 2 pi r so 2 * < * 309 9.9 that gives us 1947 so we can take 1947 that's how many meters it is so a track length of 1.94 7 m it's about 1.2 miles uh we can divide that by our speed in me/ second so 69.4 repeating m/s that will give us the time that it can go around this track and that is about 28 seconds so now we know how fast the Viper can go around a circle and our next step is to find out how fast can a Ferrari go around a circle how fast is the Ferrari so we're going to use the same equation except now we're going to plug in the radius that we learned from our previous math into this and solve for the Ferrari's velocity so we can say velocity is equal to the Square t of coefficient of friction 1.03 multiplied by the Ferrari's Mass 1475 plus its down Force 325 multiply that by gravity 9.81 m/s squared multiply that by R which in this case is 39.9 and divide all that by the mass of the FY 1475 kg so we do that and we learn that V is equal to 61.8 2 m/s which is equivalent to about 222.000 km per hour this is traveling at 22 2.5 so we can take our diameter of our track 1947 divide that by our speed 6.82 and so this is going to give us time in seconds 31 .5 seconds and so you can see versus the Viper 31.5 versus 28 so 3.5 seconds faster than that Viper is going to be able to go around this track an incredibly huge difference in speed that it's able to carry and you may also be thinking to yourself wait a minute you're using the downforce from 250 km per hour and you're absolutely correct this number would actually be lower and as a result because you're only traveling at and as a result this number would be higher so the F's actual speed is going to be a little bit slower than this uh purely because it's not going to have as much down Force because it's not traveling at 250 km per hour and so what you're really seeing here is that there's a significant difference in performance of these two vehicles simply just going around a corner that's going to show you the speed that the Viper is able to maintain through corners on a track uh but let's do some tweaking with these numbers so that this isn't our only definitive answer because we've got some different variables here we want to know is it down force or is it tires that's really responsible for this difference in lap times all right so let's swap out the tires on the Ferrari instead of giving it these pilot sports that are at 1.03 we'll give it the uh tires specifically designed for the Ferrari we'll just say that give it a frictional coefficient of 1.15 what that does our velocity now will go from what it was to 65.3 m/s or 235 so we were at 222 km per hour now with these stickier tires we're able to go around that corner at 235 km per hour but as you can see it's still not as quick as the Viper which is traveling it to 50 km/ hour so 1947 / 65.3 that is going to give us 29.8 seconds so the Viper still 1.8 seconds faster uh per lap in other words the Viper could lap the Ferrari every 17 laps uh based on these lap times so absolutely incredible even with uh fantastic tires on the Ferrari the Viper as a result of its downforce this is the thing the kind of the lesson to be learned from this um you can you can kind of make a vehicle into anything with downforce so if you put enough down force on it the Viper actually has an 8 square foot R wing on it which is absolutely enormous it's also got a diffuser it's got front Splitters it's got dive planes it's got the works on it as far as an arrow kit is concerned so if you put a ton of downforce on a vehicle you can just Corner absurdly fast and as a result you're going to post uh incredible lap time so it broke a ton of Records uh as a result of having so much downforce I believe it was or Is Still Remains uh the most amount of downforce on a production vehicle that's you know street legal things like that so 771 kg at 284.5 km per hour that's equivalent to uh I believe it's 1,700 lb at 177 miles per hour so 177 mph is its top speed let's do one more thing for fun here with this demonstration What If instead we compared this Viper to an average car with fairly sticky tires so we're going to assume a frictional coefficient of one and we're going to assume no down Force no lift nor down Force so a net effect of zero as far as down force is concerned so that's going to let's find out what our velocity is going to be so we're going to have the square root of one we've got our Mass plus down Force that's just going to be equal to your mass because we have no down Force we're later dividing by mass we can just cross these out multiply one by gravity 9.81 multiply that by our radius R which is 3099 M this is going to give us a velocity of 5514 m/s or about 198.50 km per hour that's equivalent to about 123 mph so here's our number now just a regular car with pretty sticky tires I mean uh a skid pad result of 1G is still very uh admirable and so we've got our track length of 1947 divide that by 55.4 and that is going to give us 35.3 seconds so as you can see the Dodge Viper 7 Seconds faster uh than a regular car with no downforce and fairly sticky tires what this means is every single five laps every five laps this Viper is going to pass this car which is absolutely nuts I mean this is a track that's not even 2 km and it's going to be getting past every five laps there's that big of a difference in speed between the Viper and this vehicle and so there's some very important things to learn from this and you know I don't want people to get confused and think you know the Ferrari 488 isn't something to be admired what Ferrari did with the 488 is actually really incredible they lowered the coefficient of drag from 33 to3 uh 26 and they increased downforce by 50% so this thing has a drag coefficient of 324 I said 326 it's 324 versus the Viper has a drag coefficient of 0.54 so it's incredibly uh not aerodynamic um so while this thing is going through the air it's acting like a giant brake whereas this thing can glide through so the Ferrari can exceed over 200 mph versus the Viper ACR is drag Limited at 177 mph and so you know if you take off all these Wings and Things the uh Viper the regular Viper can exceed 200 mph but it's a result of all that downforce that makes it quick around a track so the thing to be learned here uh for engineers are brilliant they've designed an incredibly uh good compromise of having a lot of downforce and still being very aerodynamic through the air uh versus the Viper just has a ton of downforce so much downforce um not able to get to super high speeds but able to actually just obliterate all the track records out there so they're both very cool uh and it's it's cool to look at the math behind you know why was the Viper able to do this so I hope you guys have enjoyed watching I will include some links to some relevant videos in the video description thanks and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below oh and one more thing the next time you see a Civic with a giant wing on the back show some respect I'm just kidding that's quite trashyhello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be talking about how the Dodge Viper ACR broke so many track records and indeed it did it broke 13 different track records and these were pretty prestigious tracks it's not just tracks in the middle of nowhere that nobody knows about this is Laguna sea Road Atlanta a lot of big names in there and so you know a lot of times when a car can break this many lap records at this many different tracks uh there's often going to be something relating to physics that you can pinpoint and say here are the reasons why this car is faster than everything else out there and indeed with the Viper you can do this so that's what we're going to be doing in this video we're going to be talking about what changes uh does it have what unique characteristics does it have that make it faster than everything else out there on these tracks and so one of the things I'm going to be doing is comparing it to a Ferrari 488 GTB just because the Ferrari is a modern super car it's super fast it's more expensive it's got more power it weighs less for all reasons you know it should be a quicker car uh but I'm going to show you why it isn't uh in this video and so you know if if nothing else uh what we're trying to do in this video is see how fast a car can go in a circle so why are we talking about circles well if you watch my video on what is the best mod for your car uh you know that in certain circumstances you can have tires be 10 times more beneficial to upgrade than power and so a lot of it comes down to grip uh but the the basic understanding from that video is that you know it's not lap times aren't about getting to a high top speed lap times are about maintaining a high High average speed so not slowing down as much as the car next to you going through the corners with more speed and if you can prove that a vehicle can go around a corner with more speed which is what we're going to do in this video then you can prove why it is quicker than that other vehicle so if at any point this starts to get really confusing and I've gone too deep uh you know just think and say to yourself quietly uh you know out loud or in your head whatever you want all we're doing is finding the speed around a circle we're just seeing how fast a car can go around a circle that's all we're doing it's very simple uh and it's going to get a little bit deep um and you know this is going to be filmed in a slightly different style so instead of just throwing everything up on the Whiteboard we're going to go through each of the different steps of this video uh it's going to be a bit slower Pace but hopefully give you a good understanding and let me know what you think about it and we're using the metric unit so I know a lot of you will be thrilled about that and everyone in America uh has to suck it up this time okay so first let's just talk about the two cars we have we have the Dodge Viper ACR and we have the Ferrari 488 GTB the Viper weighs 1538 kg the Ferrari 1475 the Viper with 481 KW of power the Ferrari with 492 as I mentioned it's more powerful it's lighter weight uh down force of the Viper ACR they do give metrics uh Chrysler provides these metrics so you've got 544 kg at 241 km per hour and 771 kg of downforce at 285 kilm per hour Ferrari on the other hand gives you 325 kgrs at 250 km/ hour so as you can see the Viper does have more downforce but also weighs more so you know it's kind of a battle of ratios there and then as far as frictional coefficients this is something we're going to have to calculate um so Dodge gives us uh that the base Viper the SRT base Viper uh no thrills nothing on it uh is going to give you a skid pad of 1.03 Gs versus the Viper ACR will give you a skid pad of 1.15 G's now what they don't tell you what is the diameter of that skid pad uh so what I want to know is does downforce influence these numbers if it's a high speed that they're traveling at then downforce will influence these numbers if it's a low speed that they're traveling at then we can assume that this number right here is pretty close to the coefficient of friction for the tires which is what we're trying to find out okay so step number one is uh downforce relevant in determining our coefficient of friction so I was looking at some of the different skid pads out there Edmonds uses a 200 uh diameter circle uh Car and Driver uses a 300 foot diameter circle so we're just going to go with Car and Driver uh because that's going to give us higher speed it would have more impact with downforce and we'll just assume and be conservative here and so if we were to have a circle with a radius of 150 ft or a diameter of 300 ft in metric units that is going to be 45.72 M and so what we want to find out is what is that speed what speed can I car with tires with a frictional coefficient of one go around this circle so the equation for that if you've watched my video on cornering speed you will know is V equals the square root of the frictional coefficient time gravity time the radius so V is going to equal to the square OT of 1 * 9.81 m/s squared time our r radius of 45.72 M great okay so what does this give you this gives you a speed of 76 km per hour or about 47 miles hour so this is a fairly low speed so what this tells me is that downforce really isn't going to play a huge role in the skid pad results it's really just going to be up to the tires so a tire with a frictional coefficient of one will be able to take a 1G Corner a tire with a frictional coefficient of 1.03 would be able to take a corner 1.03 G's and so we're going to assume that for the Dodge Viper with the base P0 pelli P0 tires it has a frictional coefficient of 1.03 and the Dodge Viper ACR has some special tires made by Kumo just for the Viper ACR uh they're super grippy they're just made for this one vehicle it's a variant of their v720 tires and so spe specific compound and designed just for the Viper ACR and they're able to eek out 1.15 uh G's on the skid pad so we're going to assume it has a frictional coefficient of 1.15 so right off the bat we can see that it has stickier tires the Ferrari 488 GTB will come with pilot sport tires on it and I've looked at some tests on Tire Rack and they show a similar coefficient of grip between ply P zos which are kind of topof the line and Michelin Pilot Sports these aren't the cup tires these are just regular pilot Sports uh they're going to be around the same so we're just going to assume that the Ferrari has the same as a base Viper with 1.03 uh as the coefficient of friction for its tires okay so now that we have our frictional coefficients we want to be able to compare these cars directly and in order to do that we need to have the downforce at the same speed so for the Viper we have it at 241 km/ hour and 285 km/ hour versus the Ferrari we have at 250 and so what we're going to do is interpolate uh and so that we can take a figure from the Viper at 250 km/ hour because that's in between these two numbers so we can interpolate between these two and get a figure so we can estimate what its down force is at 250 km/ hour and one simple way of doing this you might think let's just take 250 divide that by our down Force which is 241.55 5 44.3 and that will give us a number 5637 kg which is more which you would expect so you know it looks like it works but to kind of check our work here let's do 2849 divided by 241.55 44.3 and that should give us a number similar to 771 if this interpolating method work works correctly and so that gives us 6424 and you can see that's obviously quite off from 771 and the reason is because down force is an exponential function uh with relation to your vehicle speed so a more accurate way of going about this would be to take the squares of these two numbers so we have 284 284 look how dyslexic I am .9 squared divide that by 241 . 4^2 multiply that by 544.004 1.4 2ar multiplied 5 44.3 and that gives us 5838 kg of down Force at 250 km per hour so now we can directly compare the Viper ACR at 250 km per hour to the Ferrari 488 at 250 km per hour as you can see it's got 583.310 has a marginally greater effect on uh the Ferrari uh even though this has more now in reality this is still a larger ratio uh but what I'm saying with the Ferrari uh you get more bang for your buck with down force all right so now we've got the Viper's downforce we've got its frictional coefficients so we can start getting into the fun stuff which is how fast can this car go around a circle so what we're going to try and find out is if the Viper is traveling at 250 kilometers per hour how wide of a radius turn uh can it take how narrow should I say can it take obviously you could always go wider you get to infinity and you're in a straight line so how narrow uh can you make that how short can you make that radius and still have that Viper go around that Circle and so the equation straight out of my video on cornering speed for determining this you can set velocity equal to the square root of the coefficient of friction multiplied by the mass of your car plus the amount of down force that you have and then you're going to multiply that by gravity and then you're going to multiply this by the radius of the corner and then to divide all of that by the mass of the car so plugging in our numbers here we've got uh our speed which is 250 km per hour that in m/s is 69.4 repeating so we can set that velocity equal to remember we're trying to figure out this R here uh we've got our frictional coefficient of 1.15 the mass of the car 15 38.6 plus the amount of downforce it's creating 583.310 38.6 kg and so all you've got is one variable here you solve for R and R is 39.9 m 39.9 m okay great so a lot of you are probably sitting there thinking well that doesn't tell me anything so what does this tell us well if we have our Circle and it has a radius of 309.28 km per hour or 69.4 m/s 69.4 repeating uh and so it can go around at that speed so how fast can it go around the lap well we can find the circumference of this that's just simply 2 pi r so 2 * < * 309 9.9 that gives us 1947 so we can take 1947 that's how many meters it is so a track length of 1.94 7 m it's about 1.2 miles uh we can divide that by our speed in me/ second so 69.4 repeating m/s that will give us the time that it can go around this track and that is about 28 seconds so now we know how fast the Viper can go around a circle and our next step is to find out how fast can a Ferrari go around a circle how fast is the Ferrari so we're going to use the same equation except now we're going to plug in the radius that we learned from our previous math into this and solve for the Ferrari's velocity so we can say velocity is equal to the Square t of coefficient of friction 1.03 multiplied by the Ferrari's Mass 1475 plus its down Force 325 multiply that by gravity 9.81 m/s squared multiply that by R which in this case is 39.9 and divide all that by the mass of the FY 1475 kg so we do that and we learn that V is equal to 61.8 2 m/s which is equivalent to about 222.000 km per hour this is traveling at 22 2.5 so we can take our diameter of our track 1947 divide that by our speed 6.82 and so this is going to give us time in seconds 31 .5 seconds and so you can see versus the Viper 31.5 versus 28 so 3.5 seconds faster than that Viper is going to be able to go around this track an incredibly huge difference in speed that it's able to carry and you may also be thinking to yourself wait a minute you're using the downforce from 250 km per hour and you're absolutely correct this number would actually be lower and as a result because you're only traveling at and as a result this number would be higher so the F's actual speed is going to be a little bit slower than this uh purely because it's not going to have as much down Force because it's not traveling at 250 km per hour and so what you're really seeing here is that there's a significant difference in performance of these two vehicles simply just going around a corner that's going to show you the speed that the Viper is able to maintain through corners on a track uh but let's do some tweaking with these numbers so that this isn't our only definitive answer because we've got some different variables here we want to know is it down force or is it tires that's really responsible for this difference in lap times all right so let's swap out the tires on the Ferrari instead of giving it these pilot sports that are at 1.03 we'll give it the uh tires specifically designed for the Ferrari we'll just say that give it a frictional coefficient of 1.15 what that does our velocity now will go from what it was to 65.3 m/s or 235 so we were at 222 km per hour now with these stickier tires we're able to go around that corner at 235 km per hour but as you can see it's still not as quick as the Viper which is traveling it to 50 km/ hour so 1947 / 65.3 that is going to give us 29.8 seconds so the Viper still 1.8 seconds faster uh per lap in other words the Viper could lap the Ferrari every 17 laps uh based on these lap times so absolutely incredible even with uh fantastic tires on the Ferrari the Viper as a result of its downforce this is the thing the kind of the lesson to be learned from this um you can you can kind of make a vehicle into anything with downforce so if you put enough down force on it the Viper actually has an 8 square foot R wing on it which is absolutely enormous it's also got a diffuser it's got front Splitters it's got dive planes it's got the works on it as far as an arrow kit is concerned so if you put a ton of downforce on a vehicle you can just Corner absurdly fast and as a result you're going to post uh incredible lap time so it broke a ton of Records uh as a result of having so much downforce I believe it was or Is Still Remains uh the most amount of downforce on a production vehicle that's you know street legal things like that so 771 kg at 284.5 km per hour that's equivalent to uh I believe it's 1,700 lb at 177 miles per hour so 177 mph is its top speed let's do one more thing for fun here with this demonstration What If instead we compared this Viper to an average car with fairly sticky tires so we're going to assume a frictional coefficient of one and we're going to assume no down Force no lift nor down Force so a net effect of zero as far as down force is concerned so that's going to let's find out what our velocity is going to be so we're going to have the square root of one we've got our Mass plus down Force that's just going to be equal to your mass because we have no down Force we're later dividing by mass we can just cross these out multiply one by gravity 9.81 multiply that by our radius R which is 3099 M this is going to give us a velocity of 5514 m/s or about 198.50 km per hour that's equivalent to about 123 mph so here's our number now just a regular car with pretty sticky tires I mean uh a skid pad result of 1G is still very uh admirable and so we've got our track length of 1947 divide that by 55.4 and that is going to give us 35.3 seconds so as you can see the Dodge Viper 7 Seconds faster uh than a regular car with no downforce and fairly sticky tires what this means is every single five laps every five laps this Viper is going to pass this car which is absolutely nuts I mean this is a track that's not even 2 km and it's going to be getting past every five laps there's that big of a difference in speed between the Viper and this vehicle and so there's some very important things to learn from this and you know I don't want people to get confused and think you know the Ferrari 488 isn't something to be admired what Ferrari did with the 488 is actually really incredible they lowered the coefficient of drag from 33 to3 uh 26 and they increased downforce by 50% so this thing has a drag coefficient of 324 I said 326 it's 324 versus the Viper has a drag coefficient of 0.54 so it's incredibly uh not aerodynamic um so while this thing is going through the air it's acting like a giant brake whereas this thing can glide through so the Ferrari can exceed over 200 mph versus the Viper ACR is drag Limited at 177 mph and so you know if you take off all these Wings and Things the uh Viper the regular Viper can exceed 200 mph but it's a result of all that downforce that makes it quick around a track so the thing to be learned here uh for engineers are brilliant they've designed an incredibly uh good compromise of having a lot of downforce and still being very aerodynamic through the air uh versus the Viper just has a ton of downforce so much downforce um not able to get to super high speeds but able to actually just obliterate all the track records out there so they're both very cool uh and it's it's cool to look at the math behind you know why was the Viper able to do this so I hope you guys have enjoyed watching I will include some links to some relevant videos in the video description thanks and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below oh and one more thing the next time you see a Civic with a giant wing on the back show some respect I'm just kidding that's quite trashy\n"