Why Some Race Cars Are Fast, And Also Why Innumeracy Is Dangerous

Jonny's wrong, but what's right? How is Douglas Hofstadter involved?

so am i, jonny. so am i

John F. Kennedy enjoyed relating the following anecdote about a famous French soldier, Marshal Lyautey. One day the marshal asked his gardener to plant a row of trees of a certain rare variety in his garden the next morning. The gardener said he would gladly do so, but he cautioned the marshal that trees of this size take a century to grow to full size. "In that case," replied Lyautey, "plant them this afternoon."

I should be grateful for Jonny Lieberman. He is so frequently moronic and ill-informed that I could just about do this whole Substack as a response to his perennial idiocies, be they failing to drive in a straight line or making the genuinely ignorant assertion that a Porsche GT3 RS! has more downforce than a Formula One car! Doing so would be great fun for me but less so for my readers, who have limited tolerance for watching me repeatedly keelhaul a fool.

In this case, however, there’s a chance for all of us to learn from Jonny’s mistake — about the reasons for some surprising differences in pace between various kinds of race cars, and also about the remarkably dangerous phenomenon of “innumeracy”. So let’s give it a shot, with the fun stuff first.

you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole!

Let’s start with a couple of statements that are so obvious it’s easy to imagine Will Buxton saying them as slowly… as… possible… during an episode of Drive To Survive: We measure the speed of a track car, or a race car, by the lap time. The lap time shows us how quickly it gets around that track. Some cars are fast in a straight line, some cars are fast in a corner, some cars are both. And everything is relative: you can be permanently banned from the SCCA by repeatedly using a Spec Miata to turn laps that wouldn’t qualify you for a Majors grid in a Formula Ford.

As a track rat, instructor, and racer of about two decades’ standing, I have heard the phrase “It’s better to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow” about a million times. It’s true, but the following is equally true: it’s even MORE fun to drive a fast car fast. It’s also much, much harder. Most people can be coached into a competitive lap time in a Spec Miata. Some people can be coached into a competitive lap time in an LMP3 car or Radical. Almost nobody can approach the limits of an IndyCar or Formula One car. You probably know this. But here’s the harder pill to swallow: Turning a good lap time in a Viper is harder than turning a good lap time in a Miata.

As KRS-One likes to say: Why is that? Well, the faster you go, the less time you have to process visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli. You are also forced to act within a narrower time frame; missing your brake point by 0.5 seconds in a Miata will cause you to enter the turn off-line, but doing that in a McLaren Senna will put you into the weeds or the wall. Last but not least, it simply requires more courage all the way around the track.

This is why classes like Spec Miata and Spec Racer Ford are generally considered to have higher-quality racers, and higher-quality racing, than the “big-bore” classes. It’s simply easier to be good in the slower cars. And it’s also why race classes like Lamborghini Super Trofeo, Ferrari Challenge, and IMSA LMP3 don’t get a lot of respect; the cars simply aren’t being driven as hard, because most people can’t do it, even if they’re good smallbore drivers.

Sorry for the digression, but I want to have the rest of our discussion without any sort of “slow car fast” pseudo-elitism.

Why are cars fast in a straight line? The usual components are

• power-to-weight

• traction

• peak power

• aero

• braking ability.

You need a good power-to-weight ratio in order to accelerate well, and you need traction to put that power on the ground. At a certain speed, which is around but not exactly 125mph, peak power becomes more significant than power-to-weight because of aero limitations. My older readers will recall that the C4 Corvette made it to 150mph with the 205-horsepower “Cease-Fire Injection” 350SBC, but getting to 175 required 385 horses from the LT5 — and the C6 ZR1 needed 638hp to do 214mph. Those of us who have, ahem, 40-rolled in 205hp Kawasakis against 800-1000hp street cars can attest that the bike walks away from 40-150 thanks to power-to-weight but then fades quickly as total peak hp becomes more important.

Since we’re talking aero drag, obviously aero design and frontal area plays a part. Ask the 40 rollers: Challengers need more power than Corvettes to pull the same way at 175mph, and it isn’t really because they weigh more.

Braking ability is last on our list, and also kind of least. If you have the choice between making your race car 10% more powerful or improving the braking by 10%… well, the former will help you for nine-tenths of the front straight at NCM while the latter will only help in the last tenth. But you do need it, particularly in terms of resisting fade, which will help you turn consistent lap times.

Just to reiterate: you need genuine skill to get the most of a “power” car around a race track. You can lose a lot of time exiting a corner with wheelspin or a bad line, and you can lose a lot of time braking too early. Alright. Let’s move on.

Why are cars fast in corners? This is a lot more complicated, but we can simplify it to:

• Available traction

• Wheelbase

• Suspension geometry/quality

• Polar moment of inertia

• Center of gravity

• Aerodynamic factors

Available traction is a function of tire width and tire stickiness. More of both is better. Wheelbase affects how readily the car can turn. Shorter is better. Suspension geometry/quality controls how much of the traction is available throughout the turn. You want a lot of negative camber and you don’t want the tire bouncing off the ground, even at a micro level. Polar moment of inertia controls how quickly the car can rotate, and with how much force. You want the weight centered in the middle of the car, not out at the ends. Center of gravity should be as low as possible, because otherwise the car will roll, which distributes load on the tires unequally.

All of the above has been well understood since the Fifties at least. Aerodynamic factors? Well, we are still working on that. It is a “black art” and then some.

Start with downforce. Aerodynamic downforce increases tire traction, enabling the car to go around a corner faster without making any other changes. All things being equal, a bigger wing is better. SCCA “A-Modified” autocross cars, which don’t ever go above about 60mph, have massive wings. The famous “ACME Special” can generate 2.9g in an autocross turn:

how to win a lot of races and get zero bitches

You can’t road race something like this because at 100mph this is basically a brick wall and Miatas will pass you. The Holy Grail of road racing is to have maximum downforce with minimum drag. This is why Formula 1 teams are obsessed with wind tunnels and supercomputers. And it’s also why Adrian Newey, who can “see” the air in his head, has won twelve Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championships.

It can be hard for people to understand how and why downforce works. Which is why Jonny Lieberman got it so wrong with his “shit-weasel” statements about F1 cars and the GT3RS. An F1 car develops “1,650 pounds of downforce” at about 100mph. Here’s an F1 car, coincidentally the best one with the best driver:

And here’s the 2023 GT3RS, which develops 1,895 pounds of downforce at 177mph:

I can look at these two cars and see that obviously one of them has a lot more wing than the other, both in relative-to-size terms and absolute terms — but it’s not as obvious as the size difference between, say, Kerri Strug and “Lizzo”. And yet the actual difference is more than a gynmast-to-beast relationship: since drag and downforce increase drastically with speed, those modern F1 cars are thought to develop 7,000 pounds of downforce at 186mph, more than three times the Porsche’s figure.

So it’s not that Jonny is a little wrong; he’s a lot wrong. Which brings us to innumeracy. But not quite yet.

Truthfully, the Porsche’s downforce is quite an achievement, because the car doesn’t really have that much wing or splitter. For comparison, here’s my Gen 3 Radical SR8:

Radical claims 1,980 pounds of downforce at 155mph, which equates to about 2800 pounds at Porsche’s 177mph figure. Even with me in the car, the SR8 doesn’t quite weigh 1900 pounds, so in theory I could drive upside down. But as you can see, it has a LOT more aero than the Porsche. In its body, which is shaped for the wind instead of being formed around two (plus two!) portly fortunate-son investment bankers such as noted contributor (and GT3 owner) “Sherman McCoy”. In the front splitter, which sticks out from the body so far you can stand on it facing the car in size-11 shoes. In the rear wing, which is too wide to be legal for street use and which has two “elements”.

The GT3RS has 518 horsepower, while I only have 445 — but I would cheerfully bet my life on a one-lap timed battle with any driver in any GT3RS, because I have many, many advantages over that $314,000 crapwagon for wannabes. Going through our lists above:

• Power-to-weight: I have the advantage, considerably

• Traction: the 911 has me here, but not by that much

• Peak power: the 911 is just 13 percent up

• Aero: I’m punching a much smaller hole than the 911

• Braking: while I don’t have the same level of sophistication, and don’t even have ABS, I also have half as much car to slow down.

• Available traction: I have about 3/4 as much tire surface for 1/2 the weight, which is an advantage

• Wheelbase: mine is less

• Polar moment of inertia: I have a bespoke 2.7L V8 eight inches from my back, while the 911 has a massive lump in a different zipcode from the driver

• Center of gravity: my shoulders are where a 911 driver has his hips

• Aerodynamic factors: I have more downforce and less drag

In truth, I’m not just significantly faster than the GT3RS street car; I’m also considerably faster than the GT3 race cars made from scratch by Porsche and run in their single-make series. In the second time I drove my SR8, on the 11th lap total, on tires that were four years old, and in traffic, I set a time that is about three seconds ahead of the all-time best in that series. This year, on new tires, and actually knowing how the thing drives? I’ll either put another four seconds on that or puree my skull through a metal barrier in the process.

I’m the best, obviously, and so is my car.

Except there’s a dude out there kicking my butt for $39,000.

This a Staudacher, built by an airplane manufacturer and sold used for $39,000 to a fellow named Jonathan Finstrom. Last year, while I was in the process of getting moved into a new house, he wandered out to Mid-Ohio and set a 1:21.466 lap, nearly five seconds ahead of my tentative best last year and still about 1 to 1.5 seconds ahead of what I think the SR8 can do on new tires. He has about 245 horses from a George Dean GSXR1000 engine against my 445-horse RPE V8. Why is he faster? Well, if my SR8 is a “real race car” compared to a Porsche, this is even realer. It weighs 980 pounds or thereabouts fully loaded with driver — half of my Radical, and in fact less than my four-cylinder Radical PR6. And he has more aero, both in terms of wing and body shape. He’s punching a smaller hole and generating vastly more corner speed.

Finstrom’s the best, and so is his car.

Except for this one:

For $68,900, you could have had the car driven by Graham Rahal to a National Championship a full five seconds per lap faster than Finstrom! He had about 270 horsepower, from an insane-spec 1.6-liter Toyota engine, to push 1,230 pounds. More grip than the Staudacher or Radical, a smaller hole in the air, and plenty of wing both front and back. So it’s even realer.

Can we go nine seconds faster than that? Yes.

This is how you run a 1:05 lap at Mid-Ohio: the 2016 Honda IndyCar. 1,630 pounds. 675 horsepower. And look at all that wing. Why, that car might have more downforce than a street Porsche! Maybe. And yet it has about the same power as a stock Gen V Viper. Let me tell you something: it does three laps in the same time that a stock Gen V Viper can do two.

In future articles, I’ll dig a little deeper into why some street cars are faster than others on track: why is a BR-Z so much better than a Miata with the same power-to-weight ratio? But I wanted to start off with these examples, to give us all a sense of perspective.

Now for Douglas Hofstadter. The quote that opens this article is from a famous article of his on “innumeracy”:

I wonder what percentage of our population, if shown the numerals "314,159,265,358,979" and "271,828,182,845", would recognize that the former magnitude is about 1,000 times greater than the latter. I am afraid that the vast majority 'would not see it and would not even be able to read these numbers out loud. If that is the case, it is something to be worried about.

Increasingly across our dystopian modern world, we are faced with situations in which it is hard to understand the number. The United States has given $75 billion to Ukraine. Can you really imagine $75 billion? If so, how would you imagine it? Does it help if I say that it boils down to about $250 per US resident… but more than $1000 per tax-paying household? When President Obama was elected, the “federal balance sheet” was just north of a trillion dollars; after dipping a tiny bit during Trump’s reign the number now stands at $8,733,787,000,000. Does it help to envision it as $116,000 per tax-paying household?

How much oil is left in the ground? How much food is grown above it? Most of us would struggle to guess within a power of ten. Passenger cars produced three billion tons of CO2 in 2021. Is that a lot? What percentage of global CO2 emissions do you think came from passenger cars? (It’s about nine percent.)

Much of what we are told in the media, just what Jonny Lieberman tells his audience, relies on our complete ignorance of number and proportion — innumeracy plus — to have the desired effect. Eliminating all passenger vehicle transport in the world reduces CO2 by ten percent? Then why are we so focused on it? The GT3RS has 1800 pounds of downforce at 177mph? Is that a lot?

(The 2016 Viper ACR non-Extreme quoted 1,763 at the same speed.)

(The 2016 Viper ACR Extreme was quoted at nearly 2,000.)

(You can do 2/3rds as well on a 1997 Corvette for $1,274.)

We are surrounded by numbers. Learning what they really mean is hard work, and it usually doesn’t transfer from one area of study to another. But it’s worth your time. I’m trying to get better. So should you. To quote Jonny Lieberman’s oddly-anatomically-correct post, “I’m just so sick of assholes talking shit without knowing anything.” He’s one of those assholes, even if he doesn’t know it.

Let’s not join him.