What kind of top speeds are people seeing on the track? (Page 1 of 3)

anywhere from 5 to 110

my spedometer always reads 90ish, so who knows...

Silly answer - Our car (a rusty Neon) tops out well below 100 mph, but we don't have a speedo to confirm that.  The fastest car I've driven tops out well over 100 mph, but I was too busy spinning out to confirm that either.

Serious answer - The E30s and maybe some of the American Muscle (like the Lincoln mark 8), I'm guessing, get up to 110+.  Front wheel drive Lemons cars tend to top out at about 100 mph.  But your ride doesn't really matter - the question is, how fast is your skill?  Can you threshold brake?  How quickly can you manage that reducing radius turn?

The guys with the Operation E30?  Their skill is 100 mph plus.  My skill?  Barely adequate for 30 mph, especially when it's dark.  (Well, okay, I'm exaggerating.  But you get the point.)

Warp 7

I got that!

I think our GTP reached around 90-100 on the straights at CMP.

105. Maybe 110 in our FWD American forced induction yacht at Summit Point. If we had some more straightaway there's another 1 or 2 thousand RPM in there, too. On CMP's shorter front straight we were in the 70-80-90 bracket depending on traffic levels at the braking zone and the individual driver.

What you should be asking is "what kinds of speeds are people seeing through the turns" - in which case 35, 40 and panic stop seem to be the most common choices of other drivers.

This means that being fast comes with a serious penalty - you're basically running your brakes and engine through a continuous-duty 30-100-30-100-0-100  type torture test - along with your drivers.

Yes, it's truly an awesome feeling to look down a straightaway, pick a car a third of the way down it and then blow the doors off of it - up until you realize that the car in question was a 3-cylinder Metro, anyway. The question you have to ask yourself is this: "Is it worth it?" It's hard as hell to make up lost laps - but you'll lose them at an astonishing rate the moment you stop to refuel, change a gasket, change a driver, or replace your busted-ass brakes. The trick is to lose fewer laps than anybody else.

Being QUICK - that is, keeping up with the 75th percentile or so helps a lot. Anything beyond that really doesn't help matters all that much. (Hm, maybe I should bust out Excel some time and get some precise figures for this - laptime percentile versus overall finishing position)

I was just surprised I was first out with it!

Thanks for the comments. I've raced one race, and we went just over 100, but that was on a long straight at Buttonwillow that we only ran the course that way on Sat. We have a choice of gearing in the car we're considering and I was just curious what other tracks and cars were like. My question was as much about possible top end rpm as it was about actual top speed, which can also have something to do with reliability. We wound that car out pretty tight at Buttonwillow and the motor may not be the same again.

Of course, this car might not run as well and so the whole question could be moot..........

Fastest we have seen is about 135-140 at PBIR while CMP(Kershaw) is about 90-95.

None of our dash instruments worked so we don't know speeds, but we've always wondered. We don't have the size of team needed to reliably count laps for each driver either so I was looking for a cheap system to give us laps/speed info. I couldn't find one that cost less than $800 used. There's no way I'm dropping that amount of money just to satisfy my curiosity!

So, I got a cheap assed pocket PC phone thing with built-in GPS from Ebay, loaded Chronos lap timing software on it and strapped it to the dash.  I got it primarily to count laps, but disocvered it tracks Vmax too. Bonus!   It works on GPS and it doesn't need a Sim card for that so no running costs, just charge it up and go. 50 bucks all in for an in-car GPS timimg system.....result!

MSR will be the first time we get to use it in anger so I guess we'll see how well it works there.....I'll report back on how it all goes at a later date.

135-140 is definitely cheater territory.

Almost sounds like Pratt & miller, but I think they were even faster.

Arent you guys driving the mercedes? that thing took off like a f-18 coming out of the corners.......