Yes, there is. Because like all race cars, they are designed within a particular set of rules. It would be relatively easy (and cheaper) to build faster, higher-performance cars. In fact, they keep tweaking the formula for slower speeds year after year so they don't exceed the safe limits of the tracks.

The reason it would be cheaper to build faster cars is that a lot of the design money goes into finding the best design tradeoffs within the rules. If you tossed the rules out, you wouldn't have to do nearly as much tweaking.

This is true of all race cars from Rotax karts to F1 or NASCAR or WRC or ...

The cars that used to really be "anything goes" were from the golden years of the Can-Am series.

 

I'd like to see them race upside down. How about a 360 in every straight?

 

As cool as it would be, they couldn't really run upside down (remember those slot car tracks where you could) b/c the fluids in the engine would not circulate properly.

BTW, my money for fastest starship would be the USS Voyager. Warp 9.97 for 1 hour I believe.

 

Aren't all the fluids under pressure? What would prevent them from circulating?

 

The oil drains down into the oil pan via gravity. If the car were upside down then the oil would not drain down, so the pump(s) would not be able to scavenge it.

 

The old Enterprise would NEVER be able to take the new Enterprise. It's newer.

 

I thought dry sump systems keep the oil under pressure? Otherwise the engine would be dying in every multi-G turn or braking.

 

No, a dry sump still has to pick up the oil from somewhere. They just have one pump system for scavenging the oil into the remote reservoir and another pump for sending the oil from the remote reservoir to the engine.

 

depends on the Enterprise version & captain, don't you think? Archer vs. Kirk vs. Picard...

 

mike, dry sumps can have any # or pickups. They should have no problem running a F1 engine upside down. of course they would need to make some changes to the oiling system. But a dry sump actively sucks oil out and puts it back under pressure from an external tank.

Of course an F1 engine isn't designed for being run inverted so I'm sure they would make a lot of changes.

-Ry