Gravity-Driven Virtual Racing

This is a Windows-based program simple enough for the Cub Scout to use yet deep enough for the adult gravity-driven race car engineer to apply to car design. No more will there be debates like the relative merits of increasing weight vs. aerodynamic drag coefficients or wheel moment of inertia vs. wheel radius. All interacting effects of up to 14 different car parameters have been included in this program.

The Pinewood Derby Car application only requires that you input 12 of these easy-to-measure parameters as described in the Virtual Race Measure Parameters E-book. Actually, for most stock kit PWD cars you will need only about 6 measurements. The larger cars like Soap Box Derby may require 2 more parameters, namely wheel weight and car length. The fundamental mathematical physics of gravity-driven race cars has been developed in great detail in the first part of the book The Physics of the Pinewood Derby - With Engineering Applications. The solutions to the equations of motion for any car have been incorporated into this program and will give as output the race finish time for any car, or any group of cars, racing on any size of the given track types. For example, the race time solution for the horizontal run equation is shown in the Example of Theoretical page. The program gives as output the ramp time, the velocity entering the horizontal run, the time spent on the horizontal run, and the total race time. The track ramps available are the fundamental circular arc ramp and the popular inclined plane ramp. The ramps may be of any height and any horizontal length. The tracks also have a horizontal run that may be of any length provided it does not become so long that the car cannot make it to the finish line (because of friction, air drag, etc).

We now finally have for you a bona fide real time race simulator that gets you and the kids really excited and ready to build and race a real car. It is called the Graphic 2-Car Race and comes on the new VR-VII CD . Moreover, the VR-VII CD is FREE to current owners of the original VR CD. Just shipping and handling charges are all that's required. No longer do you just get cold hard finish times as described above in the original VR. Now you can race any 2 virtual cars side by side and compare them as they travel down a race track as viewed from above. Again, this VR-VII program is revolutionary and is the culmination of 20 years of hard work. It is a fitting result that the The Physics of the Pinewood Derby - With Engineering Applications, a 530 page book, has as an embodiment the Virtual Race program, which incorporates over 10,000 lines of Delphi-Pascal code running in a Windows environment. For details on this new VR-VII capability, see the new Lecture 24.