RacerCFIIDave
Well-Known Member
How bout air racers... My goal is to build a 300+mph IF1 racer...
They have pretty much wrung all the HP outta the O-200 possible...approx 260hp for a competitive race engine...
The rules are rather specific on several important points... wing area 66 SF, weight 500lb empty, fixed main gear (nose or tail wheel can retract), fixed pitch prop...and of course the aforementioned O-200...
My current thinking is to build a pusher prop, tricycle gear (retractable nosewheel), racer with a steel tube safety cage attached to the aft fuselage with pyrobolts and a ballistic chute on the cage for pilot safety... (the midair at Reno really grabbed my attention...)
I see the current state of air racing about where auto racing was in 1967...when Jackie Stewart and others began to complain loudly about how deadly the F-1 car of the day was...
Seemingly all the safety related engineering work in air racing seems to be totally focused on avoiding the crash...a good idea...but in racing...there WILL be crashes...so some of this engineering acumen must go into making the inevitable crash survivable... current auto racing tech nologies show us most of what we need to know... I have seen many F-1, Indycar, and Top Fuel Dragster crashes that way exceed an IF1 crash in energy where the driver walked away...
Dave
They have pretty much wrung all the HP outta the O-200 possible...approx 260hp for a competitive race engine...
The rules are rather specific on several important points... wing area 66 SF, weight 500lb empty, fixed main gear (nose or tail wheel can retract), fixed pitch prop...and of course the aforementioned O-200...
My current thinking is to build a pusher prop, tricycle gear (retractable nosewheel), racer with a steel tube safety cage attached to the aft fuselage with pyrobolts and a ballistic chute on the cage for pilot safety... (the midair at Reno really grabbed my attention...)
I see the current state of air racing about where auto racing was in 1967...when Jackie Stewart and others began to complain loudly about how deadly the F-1 car of the day was...
Seemingly all the safety related engineering work in air racing seems to be totally focused on avoiding the crash...a good idea...but in racing...there WILL be crashes...so some of this engineering acumen must go into making the inevitable crash survivable... current auto racing tech nologies show us most of what we need to know... I have seen many F-1, Indycar, and Top Fuel Dragster crashes that way exceed an IF1 crash in energy where the driver walked away...
Dave
