Another day, another stolen LiveLeak shitpost :(

There's also the ongoing cost of the weight of the system, which has to be factored in, too. Airlines are pretty good at tracking their costs, though, so I am sure that the payback period on this has to be reasonable.

This is going to cost the taxpayers of Missouri a LOT of money. So many lawsuits... So many...

Wow. History turns full circle... The term "Destroyer" is short for "Torpedo Boat Destroyer," originally a class of ship designed to protect capital ships from swarms of small, fast boats. Back in the pre-WWI days, the solution was a fast hull and multiple quick-firing, relatively small caliber (3-5 inch) guns.

This, my friends, is why the NHRA rulebook says that the final motion into the staged beam must be in a forward direction - to keep unfortunate drivers who over-stage from launching in R-for-Race. Starter should have backed JRA out and brought him back into the beams from the right direction.

Obligatory.

Yeah, but it appears the compressor in that implementation is being driven off the crank via a hydraulic pump, rather than by an exhaust-driven turbine. To wit:

Please please please be meta-trolling me...

LOL I am not saying it doesn't work - empirically it's providing an advantage. I just don't think the explanation on the video is correct in the details, and might be intentional misinformation designed to send Mercedes' competitors down the wrong alley trying to catch up.

Hmm... I am not gonna pony up $24 to satisfy my curiosity, but based on the abstract it sounds more like a turbo-compound setup designed to capture energy from the exhaust and help drive the crankshaft, rather than spin the compressor (though a hydraulic supercharger drive is apparently discussed as inspiration for…

Ooh, yes please... I know they were also working on a technology similar to the Energy Recovery System currently in use that would spool the turbo using electricity, and use it as an alternator as well, but I never heard much else about it.

Well, it's fairly mature and well-understood technology; if you look at all the centrifugal superchargers that have a geartrain to step up crankshaft RPM to the speed the compressor wheel likes, you can see you'd just need one of those gearboxes on either end to do the job.

A very good, nicely written article from an outsider's perspective. I've made a lot of dragstrip passes, and spent many weekends baking in the sun trackside taking photos and doing race coverage. Knock on wood, I've never been in the gravel myself, though my quickest "race car" only runs mid-12's in the quarter.

Why do you say that? As a matter of fact, as a former owner of a Syclone and a first-gen US WRX, I am well aware of the difference in performance. Please carefully re-read my comment.

Allow me to clarify - I don't think that moving the compressor from the front to the back appreciably shortens the piping required to go from the compressor outlet to the intercoolers, and from the intercoolers to the manifold. Maybe it makes packaging easier, and it definitely shortens the intake tract feeding the…

It's possible that they've built step-down/step-up gearing into it so that you don't have a shaft spinning at 30k RPM

I'm not entirely sold on the supposed benefits of less cold-side piping, or a lower heat load on the transmission - after all, the compressor is far, far cooler than the turbine is. But F1 is a game of looking for tiny, tiny advantages, and not having the compressor in proximity to the turbine is probably enough in…

Just like those Smart cars in SF. Duh.

We part as friends, good sir.

Meh. I like hidden headlights (I own a C5 Corvette) but to my eye the All-Trac is dated, while the first gen Celica is timeless.