Turns out, it's fairly straightforward to build a car that rather radically exceeds the physical limits of the driver.
I would love to watch the autonomous version of that, though, with "no restrictions" (or nearly none - melting the nose of the car behind you with a flamethrower isn't quite in the spirit). You want to have a driver in a sim booth drive it over wireless? Great. You want to have a self driving algorithm? Great. You want to generate gobs of downforce with upward firing jets? Great. Just define some basic fan safety based limits, or... don't, and have a closed track.
I would love to see what some of the race teams could come up with, unrestricted from all the various "Hey, let's keep drivers and fans alive!" limits out there.
If you’re going to race, rather than time-trial, you probably want limitations on car size, too.
Also, formula one for years has cars leave a so highly turbulent wake that they had to introduce a system that gave cars close behind other cars some leeway as to their aerodynamics to make overtakes possible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_reduction_system)
They've actually radically redesigned the aerodynamics of the cars this year to address this exact problem (using ground effect instead of relying so much on wings for downforce). It's had it's own issues (there have been real problems with the cars bouncing on track), but it does seem like it's worked, they can follow much closer for much longer now.
DRS is still there though. The basic argument for it is that it makes races more exciting by encouraging overtakes even more (though there is a lot of debate about that).
Given that one restriction would have to be no hot exhaust (which would damage the other cars), electric turbines would have to be used, which should make the races pretty interesting, and the technology useful, especially for electric planes!
Turns out, it's fairly straightforward to build a car that rather radically exceeds the physical limits of the driver.
I would love to watch the autonomous version of that, though, with "no restrictions" (or nearly none - melting the nose of the car behind you with a flamethrower isn't quite in the spirit). You want to have a driver in a sim booth drive it over wireless? Great. You want to have a self driving algorithm? Great. You want to generate gobs of downforce with upward firing jets? Great. Just define some basic fan safety based limits, or... don't, and have a closed track.
I would love to see what some of the race teams could come up with, unrestricted from all the various "Hey, let's keep drivers and fans alive!" limits out there.