Tying things together

[BillyShope]

I hope you'll find this interesting. George Wallace, while at Chrysler, developed an equation for estimating the quarter mile speed of a drag race car. The variable was horsepower per pound. I've been playing with this a bit. First, I included distance traveled as a variable, so that it could be used at eighth mile dragstrips. I wanted something for elapsed time, but, since there's so much happening in that first 60 feet (for which they have timing lights at virtually every strip), that I had pretty much given up. Then, I realized that I could integrate between 60 and 1320 feet and simply toss in that 60 foot time. This allowed me to tie together the elapsed time, 60 foot time, and speed. The following chart is the result. Unless I made a silly arithmetic mistake, it should be somewhat accurate, since it's based on something...the Wallace equation...which has been used by many over the years.


(In fact, the Chrysler Ramchargers used the Wallace equation to estimate the speed of their first car before a wrench had been turned. Except for the manifolding, the engine was essentially stock, so a reasonable estimate of horsepower could be made. The calculated speed and the speed on the car's first outing were within 1 mile per hour.)
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