If I were to drive my Volkswagen with a V6 engine at 140mph, it would run out of fuel within an hour. How can these types of cars with V8 do hours of driving at over 140mph? What kind of black magic is this.
Edit: Thank you all for the answers.
In:
F1 cars engines sip fuel not gulp it.
They have engines that have tolerances that are not achievable as mass production so they get more energy out of a drop of fuel.
Keep in mind – internal combustion engines are extremely inefficient.
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I mean… they’ll have larger fuel tanks and they do still need fuelling pretty often. At the Nürburgring 24 hours, cars will need to put generally after 7, maybe 8 laps. Doing a 9 minute lap that’s every hour – 1 hour 10 minutes or so.
Your first assumption about your VW isn’t true. You could definitely drive your VW at top speed for more than 140 miles. I think you are also making some false assumptions about the frequency that race cars refuel, how big their tanks are, and what kinds of engines they use.
If you have a 14 gallon tank, your VW would only need 10mpg to go 140mph for an hour. This is easily achievable for a modern v6 engine
In 1999, Toyota’s car consumed a 4.95 kg of fuel per lap. If this fuel was gasoline this would be about 3.75 liters. By 2019 this had reduced (because of race regulations requiring cars consume less fuel) to 2.36 liters. Since a lap is about 8 miles long as get 0.29 liters consumed per mile
If you had a Volkswagen Jetta 2019, you would have fuel efficiency of 40 miles per gallon, which Wolfram alpha tells me gets 0.09464 liters per mile in normal highway driving. Even if we cut the fuel efficiency of your vehicle in half because you are driving at top speed, the Volkswagen is pretty favorably efficient.
Of course, the lmp1 car runs at an average speed of 248 kph and the Jetta has a top speed of 205 kph, so we start to see some of the differences there.
https://www.racecar-engineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2020-09-11-at-11.12.02.png
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2018/03/20180308-jetta.html
Edit: phone
[Here are the LeMans regulations in a .pdf file](https://assets.lemans.org/explorer/pdf/courses/2019/24-heures-du-mans/regulations/2019-24-heures-du-mans-supplementary-regulations.pdf)
They do make pit stops to swap tires and refuel.
In aerodynamics (looking at Newton’s laws of motion), drag is proportional to velocity squared.
The competing cars have a much lower drag coefficient than production cars, more efficient drive trains with less power loss and weight less than 900 Kilograms.
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