Going Faster Without Adding Power

Whether you are competing, or just taking your car to the track for fun, it is pretty much a given that there will come a point where you start to think about lowering your lap time and going faster.

As you start to compete, and especially if you are building and running your car in a class, you will almost certainly start to put a lot of thought into making your car faster.

But how much faster can you really make a car without simply adding power?

Power is a natural place to start when you start thinking about making a car faster, and it can certainly help in many cases.  But not all necessarily.  And what if adding power is not an option because of the class that you are running the car in?

In 2020 we had two examples come up where we were able to make a race car much faster, and make significant improvements in lap times without adding any power.  The first was with our Subaru WRX race car that we have built to run the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, and the second was with Scotty's 2011 STI race car that he runs in NASA Time Trials.

For our Pikes Peak Hill Climb car, we didn't add any more power because we simply didn't have an engine that was built to hold it, but in Scotty's case, he is running in TT3 with NASA, which is a class based on power to weight ratio. So if he were to add power, he would also have to add weight to balance the increase, which would minimize most of the benefit.  So he has built his car to be competitive while making as little power as he can, not as much as possible.

More than anything, I would say that this is not a standard or typical thought process for building a race car, but because of the benefits that we saw in both cases, I wanted to put together a video detailing what we saw with each of these cars this year because I think it is a good example how important the brakes, suspension, and handling of a car is when you really want to start to go fast.

Thanks for watching!

And a big Thank You to Nam Phan for some of the use of the in-car footage in this video, and Jerry Musgrove for the use of some pictures.  It is very much appreciated!