Originally Posted by John Stranahan
Koabich-Be kind to us and point out exactly what those differences are other than scale that you mentioned, and the relatively stronger material for its size that results from a small scale. I'll point out a few of the similarities. To make it easier lets discuss rubber tired cars with standard front ball diff or gear diffs as not too many fullsize race cars run a locked front diff or foam tires.
1. The chassis has flex on full size cars; eliminating this would require too much of a weight penalty.
2. The roll stiffness of the front and back of the car tunes exactly like the full size car (Spring and Anti roll bar changes).
3. Roll center changes tune exactly like on a full size car. I have personally changed the roll center spring stiffness and sway bar on my full size 300 Horse Power touring car. The effects are very similar to several of the RC touring cars that I have owned.
4. The Tire loading vs traction curve is identically shaped for both, which affects exactly how items 2 and 3 are used. I have measured this.
5. F1 cars corner at 3.5 g's. A good full size touring car with a few aftermarket parts is over 1 g. An RC touring car on very high grip indoor asphalt is limited to about 2.8 g's. A touring car on carpet will lift both inside wheels at 3.5 g's so maximum cornering potentials are very similar.
6. Note that you can talk about a scale distance, but talking about a scale speed of 400 mph is ridiculous. 400 mph is 400 mph. If the car is not designed very strong pieces will fly off at this speed.
7. Power to weight ratio about 1 horsepower per 9 lbs for an RC touring car, about 1 horsepower per 2 lbs for an F1, about 1 horsepower per 3 pounds for a rally race car or Touring race car.
This argument has been made many times before so I will not get into it here, but yes as you stated general rules of physics apply to both...but both are not identical. Both are not going to behave the same under all conditions.
Real cars do not run belts and have batteries and electronic motors. Most do not have 4WD and run on carpet with foam tires then considered with the fact that the scale speed is what...300MPH...I don't think we are comparing apples to apples here. I am not an engineer but I ould bet that the weight difference is not exaclty scale either...I bet an RC car is much lighter than it's real counter-part throwing another wrench into the mix and further effecting how one reacts to changes or adjustments compared to another
The point I was trying to make was not that camber on one effects the other differently or that anti dive does this or that.
The argument made above, which my comments was responding directly too and nothing else, was the fact that someone stated "using chassis' with more flex in RC to gain more traction is stupid because engineers with real race cars don't do the same thing." That is just a stupid argument and an irresponsible comment.
It's really funny that one would expect both real cars and RC cars to react and behave in exactly the same way under all circumstances.