logo

How fast can our ICR2 cars accelerate?


It has been a while since I felt the urge to put ICR2 to another test but a little while ago I was browsing through some drag racing related websites. On one page I found out that the drag racing world record stands at 4.420 seconds and is held by Doug   Kalitta. So a thought occurred to me. I wondered if I would be able to break that dragracing world record in ICR2. I knew already that I probably needed to cheat to get the record but that's OK, all is fair in love, war and CRHQ Experiments.

I have supplied videos for all the runs. The videos are encoded with Divx video and Mp3 audio. They are all about 1 - 1,5 Mb. And yes, I did attempt to make something that almost resembles a top fuel dragster :)

 
But first I needed to think of a way to measure my speeds. ICR2 does not support a dragstrip so I needed to make a workaround. I edited the Heartland Park Roadcourse into the Heartland Park Dragstrip. put the start/finish line at the beginning of the dragstrip and then layed down another line at exactly a quarter mile from the s/f line. My plan was to start the run with my wheels just before the s/f line, then when I hit the gas the clock would start running and as soon as my front wheels touched the second line indicating the end of the timed part of the run I would hit P to pause the game and write down the time. This worked surprisingly well.

My first run was just to get warmed up, I put the tank full of fuel [I might get lost somewhere] and put my wings at 18/18. A run of 9.323 seconds was the result with a top speed of 160 mph. Not very spectacular.
261mph
Download the video of my first run !

The crowd was not impressed.

The second run was with 1 gallon of fuel in the tank and my wings at 3/3. This brought me down to a time of 8.643 and a top speed of 185 mph. Still nothing to get excited about, I still need to lose half of the time to break the record.

185mph
Download the video of my second run !

But, as you might know if you read our first experiment, I am not afraid to tamper with mother nature, so it's off to the .txt file again to fiddle with the wind settings. It took me a long time to make sure I had just the right direction settings in the file so that I had a perfect tailwind. Then I increased the wind speed to as far as it would let me... which turned out to be 500 mph or thereabouts. I had my wings at 3/3 and 1 gallon in my car when I made my next run. I crushed my previous times by doing a 4.709 with a top speed of 283 mph.

283mph
Download the video of my third run !

But I still can not find enough acceleration to get to lower times and my wind settings are maxed out. So what to do ? Well a steeper wing catches more air so I spent a long long time adjusting my setup so that I got more speed out of the car but keeping enough control to make it through a run. The problem being that the car with a setup that is not good enough will just be blown right off the line :) This took me hours to get right but I finally did with 12/15 wings and a 450 mph tailwind. Here is the result:

322mph
Download the video of my final run !

What's that ? HOW FAST ??!!

Mision accomplished ! World record beaten by more then half a second.

The end

Do you want to make drag runs as well ? Want to try to beat my record ?

Download the Heartland Park Dragstrip [the replays of my four runs are included].

This track does NOT have any AI [so only run it in Preseason Testing !] Please do not post this tracks anywhere, it is not meant for anything other then having a laugh.

The experiments: