djos wrote:The Veyron is a bit special tho, it needs insane horsepower due to its inherently poor aerodynamic profile and resulting high drag.
The proposed Aston Martin-RB project has very similar targets to the Veyron. Only with added DF.
Remember the spiel....
"Superior in acceleration, top speed and circuit performance to any road car ever made, and likely to be superior to all but the most focused race cars, but with added luxury."
With this in mind you have to (basic)factor in the following:
Acceleration
Power, especially torque.
Tyres.
High speed stability.
Mass.
We know the car will be a petrol/electric Hybrid. Meaning it will
gain Kg's over non-hybrid supercars.
The new Honda NSX and Porsche 918 are examples of cars gaining weight using hybrid tech, as are F1 cars.
Arriving at the acceleration targets, it will have to be 4 wheel drive.
Adding mass.
A complete guesstimate from myself would have this car at over 1550Kg's(3400lb's) all day long.
Porsche tried and tried to cut as much mass as possible for their 918, still came in at 1640Kg's. And that's with far less testing brief than the AM-RB 001.
Then you get to the power. You will likely need a large displacement turbo engine with huge cooling requirements. Torque will be a huge requirement, as it's low down power that stops the engine from losing momentum at high speed. The Veyron is at 800nm per ton... The AM will need to better this IMO. Meaning 2 things.
Added mass and drag.
You can't sit at 250mph+ without that engine sucking in copious amounts of air.
Now we are at aerodynamics. The only way this car will be able to utilise massive levels of aero DF, as the brief suggests, if it has active aero. Even then it will need to be so finely tuned so that at top speed it gain achieve stability without upsetting the balance of the car at 250mph+. At these sorts of speeds anything "active" will need to be benign, or risk flinging the car into the nearest orbiting planetary body.
So it will need to be 2 cars in one. Active aero under a certain speed, and de-activated high speed aero profile over a certain speed. That reeks Jekyll and Hyde characteristics.
If not, and they retain the active aero, this car will need power beyond stupid. And real time aero computation on a heavenly level.
Now we arrive at what makes this all possible. Tyres.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.... Anything weighing 1.5 tons with well over a 1000bhp, and with huge aero loads will need rubber that probably does not exist yet. Not as we know it.
This is where it all falls flat for me. Forget the previous points for a moment, on tyres alone this project appears on rocky ground to say the least.
And then the costs of such development which has been covered already.
With levels of engineering required that would make the designers of such alacritous machinery as the SR71-A, MIG-31 Foxhound and to a lesser extent Wright brothers baulk, I'm sceptical.