What is Slipsteam and how does it help in racing?
In: Technology
Imaging instead of air we had chocolate pudding everywhere. To move around the track, you have to push your way through the chocolate pudding.
The car in front has to do a LOT of work pushing that pudding out of the way and making a car sized hole in it. But that hole doesn’t collapse immediately behind them. Behind that car there will still be an opening in the pudding.
If you drive right behind the first car, your car has to push a little bit of the pudding out of the way, but not nearly as much as the first car. So you don’t have to push your engine as hard.
This isn’t quite accurate – in air you’re not leaving an actual hole, but you are leaving air behind you that’s moving forwards and following along with your car. That means if another car stays in that area, their car gets pulled along with you – meaning they have to do less work to keep up.
A slipstream is the area behind a car where the air is less dense. This happens because the car in front is pushing the air up and out, and not all of it is going to immediately get sucked back behind it. When you’re in the slipstream, you have less air for your car to push out of the way, so you can typically go faster.
That said, sometimes it’s not necessarily a good thing. For example, F1 cars only weigh about 800kg, but produce another ~2000kg of downforce from the air pushing down their wings. But when they’re in the slipstream, they don’t have as much downforce because there’s less air pushing down. While they can follow in a straight line a lot better, they can have a harder time cornering behind another car without all that extra downforce helping to give their tires grip.
When something moves through the air, like a car, the air in front of it is displaced by the car; the air directly behind it where the car used to be needs to be filled creating a vacuum. If you drive up close enough to the car in front of you, you will encounter much lower air resistance because there is a vacuum there.
You’re in a crowd with your friends. You all need to get somewhere. If you all tried to walk side by side it would be difficult, as there are alot of people in the way. Typically, you all end up following the leader. The leader has the hard job of breaking through the crowd, which makes following super easy for the rest of you.
In racing, the air is the “crowd” . If the person in front of you does all the hard work of moving the air, you get to move faster because the air isn’t in your way. Time this right and you can use all that extra free speed to pass someone.
There can be a downside though. Depending on how the vehicle in front is shaped, it can leave behind air that is messier than it would be if you weren’t following. This “dirty air” can end up making you slower.
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