Physics of Racing - Part 6: Speed and Horsepower
Part 6: Speed and Horsepower
By: Brian Beckman
The title of this month's article consists of two words dear to every racer's heart. This month, we do some "back of the envelope" calculations to investigate the basic physics of speed and horsepower (the "back of the envelope" style of calculating was covered in part 3 of this series).How much horsepower does it take to go a certain speed? At first blush, a physicist might be tempted to say "none," because he or she remembers Newton's first law, by which an object moving at a constant speed in a straight line continues so moving forever, even to the end of the Universe, unless acted on by an external force. Everyone knows, however, that it is necessary to keep your foot on the gas to keep a car moving at a constant speed. Keeping your foot on the gas means that you are making the engine apply a backward force to the ground, which applies a reaction force forward on the car, to keep the car moving. In fact, we know a few numbers from our car's owner's manual. A Ferrari 308 QV, for example, has a top speed of about 158 miles per hour (255 km/h) and about 250 hp. This means that if you keep your foot all the way down, using up all 250 hp, you can eventually go 158 mph. It takes a while to get there. In this car, you can get to 60 mph in about 6 seconds (if you don't spin the drive wheels), to 100 mph in about 14 seconds, and 150 in about a minute.
All this seems to contradict Newton's first law. What is going on? An automobile moving at constant speed in a straight line on level ground is, in fact, acted on by a number of external forces that tend to slow it down. Without these forces, the car would coast forever as guaranteed by Newton's first law. You must counteract these forces with the engine, which indirectly creates a reaction force that keeps the car going. When the car is going at a constant speed, the net force on the car, that is, the speeding-up forces minus the slowing-down forces, is zero.
The most important external, slowing-down force is air resistance or drag. The second most important force is friction between the tires and the ground, the so-called rolling resistance. Both these forces are called resistance because they always act to oppose the forward motion of the car in whatever direction it is going. Another physical effect that slows a car down is internal friction in the drive train and wheel bearings. Acting internally, these forces cannot slow the car. However, they push backwards on the tires, which push forward on the ground, which pushes back by Newton's third law, slowing the car down. The internal friction forces are opposed by external reaction forces, which act as slight braking forces, slowing the car. So, Newton and the Universe are safe; everything is working as it should.
How big are the resistance forces, and what role does horsepower play? The physics of air resistance is very complex and an area of vigorous research today. Most of this research is done by the aerospace industry, which is technologically very closely related to the automobile industry, especially when it comes to racing. We'll slog through some arithmetic here to come up with a table that shows how much horsepower it takes to sustain speed. Those who don't have the stomach to go through the math can skim the next few paragraphs.
We cannot derive equations for air resistance here. We'll just look them up. My source is Fluid Mechanics, by L. D. Landau and E. M. Lifshitz, two eminent Russian physicists. They give the following approximate formula: 
. The factors in this equation are the following:
Cd - coefficient of friction, a factor depending on the shape of a car and determined by experiment; for a 308 QV it is about 0.30;
A - frontal area of the car; for a 308 QV, it is about 20 square<
For a complete look at Sempre Ferrari, you may want to check out the rest of the articles from Volume 3, Issue 1 - January 1996