Wouldn’t they all be flooring it? If the lane is straight how does one driver speed up and pass another?
Edit: straight aways
In: Engineering
Car engines don’t make power at a constant rate, their power output is always changing depending on the RPM of the motor. If you accelerate an F1 car as fast as possible, it’s rate of acceleration is not constant, it gets faster and slower at different speeds.
So if you had 2 identical cars with identical performance, but one hit the accellerator 1/10 of a second earlier than the other coming into a straight, it comes into it’s power band 1/10 sooner, which pulls that much harder, which results in opening up several car lengths compared to the other driver. So even with all things being equal, the speed with which you exit a corner, especially onto a long straight, matters more than your speed through the corner. The faster you come out of the corner, the faster you will accelerate down the following straight, even if the line you take is slower or not ideal. As long as you exit fast, that’s all that matters.
Another way to pass on a straight is to use aerodynamics and drafting to let the cars ahead of you break the air up like a wind breaker, and you get into this air by driving closely behind them, and it’s much less drag on your car, allowing you to drive faster than the car in front. Think of it like the car in front is doing all the work of pushing that air out of the way, and the car behind doesn’t have to push as much air out of the way, letting more of it’s power go to speed instead of fighting the air.
So cars will use this reserve speed at the right moment to sling shot around the driver ahead of them, maybe even chaining several of these together slingshotting from car to car, gaining more and more speed, and seeming to suddenly pull ahead of the pack. Eventually they will run out of cars to draft, and others will draft them as now they are the wind breaker and slow back down.
In general groups of cars travel faster than they would by themselves, so it actually benefits everybody to have opponents close by even behind you as it reduces the wake drag on your vehicle which lets even the car in front go a little faster than normal, just not as much as the drafting cars boost.
Finally using new technologies such as KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System aka regenerative braking) the drivers have a short amount of power boost on demand they can use for passing. It reuses some of the stored braking energy, usually in the form of a flywheel that was spun up. It only lasts a second or two but it’s basically free power that gets recharged during long braking.
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