The Multidisciplinarian

San Francisco police are highly tolerant. A few are tolerant in the way giant sloths are tolerant. Most are tolerant because SF ties their hands from all but babysitting the homeless. Excellent at tolerating heroin use on Market Street, they’re also proficient at tolerating vehicular crime, from sailing through red lights (23 fatalities downtown last year) to minor stuff like illegal – oops, undocumented – car mods.

For a progressive burg, SF has a lot of muscle cars,  Oddly, many of the car nuts in San Francisco use the term “Frisco,” against local norms.

Back in the ’70s, in my small Ohio town, the losers drove muscle cars to high school. A very few of these cars had amazing acceleration ability. A variant of ’65 Pontiac Catalina could do zero to 60 in 4 1/2 seconds. A Tesla might leave it in the dust, but that was something back then. While the Catalina’s handling was awful, it could admirably smoke the starting line. Unlike the Catalina, most muscle cars of the ’60s and ’70s – including the curvaceous ’75 Corvette – were total crap, even for accelerating. My witless schoolmates lacked any grasp of the simple physics that could explain how and why their cars were crap. I longed to leave those barbarians and move to someplace civilized. I ended up in San Francisco.

Those Ohio simpletons strutted their beaters’ ability to squeal tires from a dead stop. They did this often, in case any of us might forget just how fast their foot could pound the pedal. Wimpy crates couldn’t burn rubber like that. So their cars must be pretty badass, they thought. Their tires would squeal with the tenderest touch of the pedal. Awesome power, right?

Actually, it meant a badly unbalanced vehicle design combined with a gas-pedal-position vs. fuel-delivery curve yielding a nonlinear relationship between pedal position and throttle plate position. This abomination of engineering attracted 17-year-old bubbas cocksure that hot chicks dig the smell of burning rubber. See figure A.

Fig. A

This hypothetical, badly-designed car has a feeble but weighty 100 hp engine and rear-wheel drive. Its rear tires will squeal at the drop of a hat even though the car is gutless. Its center of gravity, where its weight would be if you concentrated all its weight into a point, is too far forward. Too little load on the rear wheels.

Friction, which allows you to accelerate, is proportional to the normal force, i.e. the force of the ground pushing up on the tires. That is, the traction capacity of a tire contacting the road is proportional to the weight on the tire. With a better distribution of weight, the torque resulting from the frictional force at the rear wheels would increase the normal force there, resulting in the tendency to do a wheelie. This car will never do a wheelie. It lacks the torque, even if the meathead driving it floors it before dumping the clutch.

Figure A is an exaggeration of what was going on in the heaps driven by my classmates.

Above, I noted that the traction capacity of a tire contacting the road is proportional to the weight on the tire. The constant of proportionality is called the coefficient of friction. From this we get F = uN, meaning frictional force equals the coefficient of friction (“u”) times the normal force, which is, roughly speaking, the weight pushing on the tire.

The maximum possible coefficient of friction on smooth surfaces is 1.0. That means a car’s maximum possible acceleration would be 1g: 32 feet per second per second. Calculating a 0-60 time based on 1g yields 2.73 seconds. Hot cars can momentarily exceed that acceleration, because tires sink into small depressions in pavement, like a pinion engaging a rack (round gear on a linear gear).

Here’s how Isaac Newton, who was into hot cars, viewed the 0-60-at-1-g problem:

• Acceleration is change in speed over time. a = dv/t.
• Acceleration due to gravity (body falling in a vacuum) is 32.2 feet per second.
• 5280 feet in a mile. 60 seconds in a minute.
• 60 mph = 5280/60 ft/sec = 88 ft/sec .
• a = delta v/t .  Solve for t:  t = dv/a.   dv = 88 ft/sec.  a = 32.2 ft/sec/sec.   t = dv/a = 88/32.2 (ft/sec) / (ft/sec squared) = 2.73 sec.  Voila.

The early 428 Shelby Mustangs were amazing, even by today’s acceleration standards, though they were likely still awful to steer. In contrast to the noble Shelbys,  some late ’60s – early ’70s Mustangs with inline-six 3-liter engines topped out at just over 100 hp. Ford even sold a V8 version of the Mustang with a pitiful 140 hp engine. Shame, Lee Iacocca. It could do zero to 60 in around 13 seconds. Really.

Those cars had terrible handling because their suspensions were lousy and because of subtle aspects of weight distribution (extra credit: see polar moment of inertia).

If you can’t have power, at least have noise. To make your car or bike really loud, do this simple trick. Insert a stack of washers or some nuts between the muffler and exhaust pipe to leave a big gap, thereby effectively disconnecting the muffler. This worked back in 1974 and, despite civic awareness and modern sensitivity to air and noise pollution, it still works great today. For more hearing damage, custom “exhaust” systems, especially for bikes (cops have deep chopper envy and will look they other way when your hog sets off car alarms), can help you exceed 105 db SPL. Every girl’s eye will be on you, bud. Hubba hubba. See figure B.

Fig. B

I get a bit of nostalgia when I hear those marvels of engineering from the ’60s and ’70s on Market Street nightly, at Fisherman’s Wharf, and even in my neighborhood. Our police can endure that kind of racket because they’re well-paid to tolerate it. Wish I were similarly compensated. I sometimes think of this at 4 am on Sunday morning even if my windows are closed.

I visited the old country, Ohio, last year. There were no squealing tires and few painfully loud motors on the street. Maybe the motorheads evolved. Maybe the cops aren’t paid enough to tolerate them. Ohio was nice to visit, but the deplorable intolerance was stifling.