MAX Update No. 90: Why 'Real Old' Beats 'Old'

Reader Contribution by Staff
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The secret to good mileage is streamlining and light weight. Okay, two secrets. Streamlining is essential at highway speeds, light weight is essential in city driving, and the two combined allow one to get satisfactory performance with a small engine. If you cut your car’s drag in half (via streamlining) and cut your car’s mass in half (via weight reduction) you can cut your horsepower in half without losing any performance. At present, MAX’s top speed is 90 mph, which is faster than I have any reason to drive, and that’s on 32 horsepower.

This is why my recent automotive designs look much like 50 year old road racing cars. Race cars have always focused on functionality, but after 1960, the function of race car bodies changed.

Before I leap into sports car racing history, I’d like to point out that streamlining hasn’t changed much in my lifetime.

Here are two “Lakester” class land speed record cars; both were record holders in their day. The rules require exposed wheels but the body shape is up to the builder. Note the visible similarity between these two cars; both have rounded fronts tapering to small sterns, though the upper car body was built in 1952 from a WWII fighter plane fuel tank, and the lower car body was built in 2004 from carbon fiber and polycarbonate. The shapes are slightly compromised by practical needs (the older car has a plexiglass bump on top so the driver can see out, the lower car has a scoop on top to let air in to the radiator) but they’re clearly built for the same purpose–going as fast as possible on a dry lakebed–and form follows function.

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