Which is FASTER??
 

I have always wanted to know which is faster ... and by how much (assuming a race between the two is on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway over say 5 laps):

F1 vs 250c.c. MotoGP bike
F1 vs 500c.c.
F1 vs CART
F1 vs Indy
F1 vs NASCAR

R
 

In order of lap times, starting with the slowest, I expect it would go something like this:

250 bike
500 bike
NASCAR
F1
Indy
Cart

Bikes are a lot slower than cars around corners as they only have 2 wheels and no wings. They are also much less aerodynamically efficient for a lower top speed down the straightaways.

NASCARs are slow, wingless and generally pretty lardy, I believe.

I'm not too sure of the differences between Indy and Cart, but they would probably both beat F1 due to the turbo engines and odd-sized wheels. On any circuit featuring corners in more than one direction, meanwhile, neither would see which way the Formula 1 went. F1 (Lotus) came to Indy in the '60's and won without too much trouble, so if any of the GP teams were to design something specific, there would be your lap record holder.
Please note that I'm highly biased:D

Id agree with castex. cart/indycars have more horsepower than an f1 car, and theyre designed for top speed around an oval.
when driving skill is necessary though, the f1 car is the quickest.

not to be a dick, but castex and powercolwn, you are both dead wrong. on a one mile oval the slowest champ car is about 2 seconds faster than the fastest car in the irl.

on a road course like montreal, the slowest f1 car is about 4-6 seconds quicker than the fastest cart car. irl dosent road race so dont try to make a comparison.

f1 cars are much lighter and produce way more downforce. top formula one engins produce over 900bhp, a champ car engine somewhere in the reagon of 7 to 800bhp and the irl less than that...

as for an oval... well, lets just look at the half of the oval that f1 uses at indy... speeds are faster than irl when they break for turn 1....so....

Am I missing something here?
Isn't this what both castex and I said?

From what I read, you and the other dude said cart is faster then F1. cycloptor is saying that F1 is faster... and I agree with him.

thats what i read as well.

I said:
CART is faster than F1 on ovals.
F1 is faster than CART on road courses.
F1 speed into turn 1 (~200mph) at Indy is slower than IRL speeds at Indy (~220mph).proof

The only place F1 is faster than Indy or IRL is on road courses.
Agree/Disagree??

Car Comparisons

whoops double post

I think power has it right and his link shows it pretty well.

Now that that is out of the way - maybe the thread would be interesting if we showed different conditions / or tracks and debate what will do best. For example, the Bikes can win short distances off the line and so how can that help them? How will it affect a road course race results?

Thanks for the insight everybody. That link to 'Car Comparisons' was great, power. I was thinking along those lines too, mondak, about further comparisons but I didn't want to complicate the issue at the time. Now that things are clearer let's develop the topic further.

Before we go into different conditions, tracks, etc., let's tackle pure ACCELERATION first. How would GP bikes/cars perform against each other over the following variables??

0-30 mph
0-60 mph
0-100 mph
0-150 mph

ACtually i think an f1 car would be superior to all.. As right now they do have more hp than all their competitors (even more than NASCAR with their huge displacement engines) ferrari is somewhere over 900bhp this season with their NA engines.. Plus with a higher gear ratio i'm sure an f1 team could take to the track with their superior aerodynamic advantage to beat everyone else.. Even in a stop to 100mph situation and back to stop again.

Though i think the 500gp bikes would be quite close on the stop 100mph than back to stop again..

Serpent - I really don't think so. Acceleration is not just about Horsepower. If it were, the space shuttle would be the fastest in the world 0-100. The bike would win I would think since it has a small amount of weight compared to the HP.

Im just curious what serpent considers to be a huge displacement engine for NASCAR? 358 is not that big of an engine, there are far bigger out there.

358 cubic inches is huge compared to a 3 liter engine (183 cubic inches) that an F-1 or IRL car runs.