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Engineers Bringing Soap Box Racing Back Again
kpw10 writes "It appears that soap box racing has made a recent comeback as traditional races are getting big attention again. But at the same it is also adapting itself into a more modern engineering challenge: pro car designers from companies like Audi and BMW just last week raced in California's Extreme Gravity Series, with super aerodynamic racers reaching speeds of 44mph. Meanwhile on the east coast, industrial designers and artists competed in the Durham "Fall Classic Soap Box Invitational" with converted lazy boy recliners and enormous eight foot wheeled vehicles. I hope this is just a sign of what's to come!" We have come a long way since the 1930's.
I don't really have a link to anything, but CMU has been having it's "buggy" race for several decades.
Indeed, this sort of racing can be very dangerous. Perhaps that's why it is such a thrill for participants and the racers.
I recall watching one of these races sometime in the 1940s. Even using relatively primitive technology, some the participants were able to build cars that were quite fast. Unfortunately, I also witnessed a rather gruesome accident.
As anyone who has seen one of the races knows, the participants start at the top of a hill and race downwards. Now, along the track hill there were a number of trees. This poor fellow got going very fast, but somehow lost control about 3/4 of the way down the hill. His car veered towards a tree, and he wasn't able to get out in time.
Indeed, he hit the tree, and his car was demolished. Unfortunately for him, the tree went right between his legs, and violently damaged his genitals. The races were quickly cancelled, and the paramedics arrived.
While I didn't actually see him after his accident, I talked to some of the men who had helped him out. They were completely thrown aback by the injuries he had sustained to his manhood. One of them even threw up he was so disgusted by what he had seen.
I hope that these days they're taking more care to make the vehicles safe, or at least race them in safer areas.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
TreeeEEEEEEEEE!!
It used to be a lot more practical when soapboxes were more readily available.
It is a hobby. Practicality has never been a requirement of hobbies. Fishing for sport and collecting figurines may be deemed impractical by some, but those are hobbies. Hobbies bring enjoyment to those who take them up, and certainly not all hobbies are for all people. To me, blasting down a hill in a lightweight, aerodynamic toy sounds like a blast.
The Extreme Gravity series happened the first week in September. Check the date on the byline of the linked article.
Hah, I know of a few hills where they probabaly could hit 80.
This sounds pretty fast, but road racing cyclists routinely achieve faster downhill speeds. I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I've gone down steep hills at 55-60 mph.
The difference is that a two-wheeled vehicle can negotiate turns at higher speeds than a four-wheeled one, because the two-wheeled vehicle turns by leaning. So it doesn't have to deal with anything like the same "sideways" forces at the tire / pavement interface.
I remember a couple of years ago watching some Tour de France footage with a (non-cycling) friend. It was one of the mountain stages. He asked, "Why do they have support motorcycles and cars?" I said, "Because the cars can't keep up going downhill through the curves."
Yeah baby, Derby Downs, right next to the Rubber Bowl. Ahh, the memories of growing up in Akron and reading books about our fair city, the Rubber Capitol of the World.
....yeah, I'm glad I live in DC now.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
ScuttleMonkey
Scuttlebutt - Butt Monkey
ScuttleMonkey!!!
local perf car mag did technical measurements on track of fast m/bike vs fast car and while lap times where within a whisker of each other on this particular circuit it's WHERE they were faster and slower that showed interesting things.
cut to the chase: car was FASTER IN CORNERS than bike, and bike ACCELERATED faster in straights so they had different advantages in diff places.
I've driven the circuit the mag used and you could setup a high speed drift in off camber bend with a good car (AWD Turbo GT-R) that you would NEVER contemplate/do on a bike (been riding 25+ yrs).
So your m/bike faster in "normal" road situation up to a point but cars actually faster and faster capable, in corners.
cheers!
First I had to deal with reality shows...now I have to watch running public speakers too.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
As the title says, Portland, Ore. has its own a"Adult Soap Box" race.
I've been for a number of times and it is a hoot.
Granted, "Informative" isn't quite right, and "Interesting" doesn't come close. Maybe "Insightful"? But speaking as a male with genitalia, this comment, while worthy, is certainly *NOT* funny.
/. we don't all get the opportunity to actually use the genitalia as intended as often as we might like, but that doesn't make it funny!
I mean, I know here at
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville
I'm in love with derby babe.
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/47167068@N00/5919773
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Yes a car definetly has the advantage in the corners. Four wheels vs two gives greater surface area on the road and more traction. Its very easy to overcook the corner on a bike and wind up in the gravel - Ive done it several times myself. On a push bike you may feel like youre flying through a corner, but your real speed probably isn't that high. In contrast to a motorbike where you have a reading of your speed and are travelling at the same speed as the rest of the traffic, you notice a lot more the need to slow down for a tight corner.
I.O.U One Sig.
I saw it happen in the Simpson's Satudays of Thunder episode.
Boingboing recently had an article pointing to a Flickr Photo Set about the Bernal Heights Illegal Soapbox Derby. Lots of silly cars, and the one rule is that every car is required to have a beer holder. Usually Halloween, sometimes other weekends as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
cars certainly have far more room between starting to lose grip and completely losing control (and road cycles are completely all or nothing in this aspect) but there's another important difference between bikes and cars:
bikes can move their center of mass closer to the sides of the roads because they are not as wide as cars, allowing for a wider curve radius in the same corner. this makes a lot more difference on the narrow streets typical for tour de france downhills than on a wide racing track.
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
I did something like this once a few years ago with my father, before I graduated HS. We would rig up solar cells to the top of hood of the car and put in a crappy little motor that would locomote the soapbox... if nobody was in it, that is. Otherwise, it would get really hot in there.
:(
Technically it wasn't a soapbox car, as we used orange crates. Here is an old picture circa 1982 of it having just spun out of control and into a drainage ditch
Aye, right, you sound like a regular mama's boy. Raced cars at 160? What'd you drive, a pinto? My foot won't let off the gas of my Ferrari at anything less than 200 (even in neighborhoods!). Bikes on public roads? Why, I bike on some private roads - which happen to be on a military artillery range! Scuba dived below 60m? Might as well just be dipping your toe in. Hell, I can hold my breath to 100m while I'm hunting for sharks! You climb rocks, I climbed Everest with only a single Sherpa (who I left behind at 8,000m) and my bare hands and feet. You kayak whitewater, I do that too, but without a paddle and with lead weights tied to my ankles! Rugby is a fun game (for girls and homosexuals), and jiu-jitsu is Japanese for "slap fighting" (yes, I speak Japanese, as well as 43 other languages. I am the last remaining speaker for 16 distinct dialects). Instead of all that pussy stuff I wrestle gorillas that I've loaded up with steroids and bred to be super-intelligent, usually with an arm tied behind my back, sometimes blindfolded.
All women want to have sex with me (which means my ability to maintain an erection for up to 3 weeks at a time, with only an hour of downtime in between, really comes in handy), and all men want to be me (which they someday can, thanks to my extensive genetics research... did I mention that I'm a geneticist, as well as a nuclear physicist, meteorologist, and concert pianist? I also wrote an operating system called Calambracix that is used, interestingly enough, to run candy factories).
You would think that with all I've accomplished, I'd be a bit arrogant, but I'm actually very humble (possibly the most humble of anyone), as is mandated by the spiritual laws of Calambracism (a religion that I founded and, incidentally, am a primary spiritual figure of). It's therefore disappointing to me to hear you brag about your personal exploits as if they should be an example to the rest of the world. Considering how unimpressive your feats are, it would be most disappointing if a young child were exposed to the notion that they could settle for a life like yours. If you were humble like me, you would recognize your inferiority and hide your head in shame, never speaking in this forum again.
bicycle drifting. Parent was talking about bicycles, not motorbikes. Despite the fact that you may never contemplate doing such maneuvers on a (motor?)bike, I'm certain the folks who race motorcycles on ice tracks put quite a lot of though into two-wheeled drifting. I myself wouldn't go out drifting on bicycles because a drift gone awry would be "crashing" every time rather than "spinning out" then recovering most times.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
reaching speeds of 44mph
From the last paragraph of the article:
In the end the fastest gravity racer was the Volvo entry, which hit 54 mph.
Come on, man. We're geeks here. Numbers matter.
Not here in Portland, OR. Check out the infamous Adult Soap Box Derby, a once-a-year downhill melee with mad-max style buggies duking it out with drunken drivers. Water is the only allowed projectile (balloons, guns, etc).
Cars are divided into two categories: Art (more like downhill parade floats), and Science (cars built for speed). Prizes are many - like 'slowest car' and 'best costume,' as well as 'worst injury,' and 'most creative.
They've also got 'downhill poker' where riders try to pick up the best poker hand from cards scattered on the track... the infamous 'Road Rash Royal Flush'. People end up in the emergency room quite often. For more mayem, check out: http://www.soapboxracer.com
As well as the more serious entrants, there have been mobile divans, bath tubs, etc. Unusually for Germany, you don't need to have any special license to do this, just to pass the pre-race safety inspection.
See my journal, I write things there
Over 60 mph without any aerodynamics.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Maybe we'll start seeing them produce cars with an increasingly lower drag coefficient?
I hope someone can beat the Ford Probe V concept eventually, and actually market it.
The bikers love the immediate accelleration available, so there's really no replacement for that rush of stuff between your legs for them.
I prefer a nice roll cage, but maybe I'm a wimp.
Moving the center of mass doesn't really change the horizontal part. All it does is keep you from flipping over really. If your center of mass is ever outside the outside line of tires in a turn, your vehicle will begin to rotate (flip) greatly. Thus motorcycles must lean in to keep from falling over. Cars have their center of mass between the left and right set of wheels, so the center of mass is never outside the outside wheels.
So leaning over isn't a positive, it's a compensation for a negative.
The real problem with motorcycles and turns is that since a motorcycle leans over, the tires must be very rounded. And the more you turn, the smaller patch of rubber you are running on. With cars, since they don't lean a lot, the bottoms of the wheels can be flat and thus you keep most of the rubber on the road in a turn.
It's a huge advantage for the car.
A two-wheeled vehicle would have an advantage in that less rubber on the road means less friction, which is very important in a gravity race.
But I think the real reasons bike riders can go faster than these vehicles are two-fold. First is that they have a lot longer slope (and probably steeper) to go down. This course was a half-mile long. That means, they are on-course perhaps 80 seconds, and drop perhaps 800 feet in that time? Second is that the bikes are not strictly gravity powered. They pedal at the top to get up speed quicker and they can pedal after every corner they brake at to get their speed back quicker.
They really should have let two bicyclists do this course, one with pedaling and another with gravity only. That would give us some more info to analyze and BS about.
Acutally, it isn't like they destroyed this hill after the race. Someone could go down there and try it...
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That was the best answer yet. Motorcycles have two fairly small, oval-shaped contact patches connecting their tires to the road. As someone else has mentioned, they generate cornering force by camber change, (which requires a round profile).
Cars have four much larger tires. They, (ideally), stay square to the road and therefore can be made with a tread that is quite wide in relation to the size of the tire. In short more contact area == more force can be applied. (Yes the coefficient of friction and the force applied to the tire matter as well but those would lead to an excessivly long comment.)
On the other hand, even street motorcycles have amazing power to weight ratios. This can give them a good edge in acceleration. The limitations imposed by contact patch still apply but a good rider can accelrate like the proverbial scalded cat.
Almost forgot -- In a gravity based event the real enemy is going to be air resistance. I'd put my money on the two wheeler as it probably has a smaller cross section.
A lot of the theory on contact patches, various forces etc are also horribly manipulated and influenced by the road surface (bumpy and otherwise) and of course what you find ON it! (sand, oil/diesel - god forbid!)
;-) .. of course the said cars aren't going into attack mode and at anything less than insane speed on marginal roads it Is simply easier to go faster, overall, on a bike and 99% of cars.
The upshot is that in a couple of closed stage road events where I've driven hard charging cars on road tires (Subaru STi, Nissan GT-R) you'd NEVER survive trying that on m/bike!
The cars can take an absolute pounding, compensate for bumps,dips,holes and with AWD esp go like a scalded cat all because of wheels and rubber everywhere.. whereas doing/trying that on a bike will just get you killed quickly.
so going wayyyyy back to grandparent+ poster where said they used support mbikes as were faster than cars in corners would only apply if cars were some bongo van with drinks esky in the back
all good fun!
Alex.
dunno if the frats @ lehigh still have bedraces, but i helped build & test the 1st go-kart style bed;-) most frats just stuck bicycle wheels on a bedframe, steering by yanking it around turns. since the only requirement was a 'mattress', we gutted a little one & rolled the cover up behind the seat;-)
lehigh's campus is on a hill, although the race didn't have much of a downhill run, i of course had 2 test it from the top;-) @ nite, of course, the better 2 c oncoming cars around the hairpin turns...where i discovered the short wheelbase gave it spectacular oversteer;-)