[mikelzapi3]

I still don't understand why you'd want four wheel drive in this

It seem that with 4WD, the car isn't so much "traction limited" when accelerating, think that this car weights nothing and if you want use all that power you need some wide rubbers if you go RWD.

Anyway, the claims that this guy has made are a litle bit optimistic, he said that this could accelerate as fast as a F1 car.

There has been a lot of discussion of the dp1 on the LiveForSpeed forum. It seems there is a lot of support in the LFS community for the inclusion of the car in a future version of the sim, so hopefully this can happen at some point. Would be a lot of fun. In the meantime, one of the forum contributors ran an acceleration simulation. The results correlate well with my own calculations, with 0-60 time of about 2.0 sec and 0-100 time of about 4.2 sec (click pic for larger version).



The simulation assumes the power spec for the 2.6L version of the v8 (2.8L that I'm using should be closer to 400hp but I don't want to officially claim this until I do some dyno testing on Bikini). This performance is on par with a modern F1 car and it can be yours for only $125K - that's less than the cost of a used Ferrari .

UPDATE: Speaking of a Formula 1 car, in the sim it looks like this (click for full size):



The comparison is interesting and illustrates the various performance aspects that I talk about on the dp1 site SPEED section - namely power/weight, power/traction and power/drag. You'll see that the F1 is traction limited to about 83mph and so can't use its full power until then. Hence its 0-60 time of 2.34 sec vs 1.96 sec for the dp1. But once the tires hook up, it's gone - the power/weight ratio of just under 2 lb/hp and a better power/drag ratio put it 0.25 sec faster to 100 mph and power the car to over 200 mph vs my top speed of 178 mph. Now granted this is a simulation and cannot be taken as absolute but doing a quick reality check against my own calcs and available data out there it seems quite accurate. A lot of details are taken into account in the sim (from wheel rotational inertia to suspension setup) and it should be a very useful tool for playing with various settings once it's available. The program is still in development as of this writing.