How Much Faster Can Speedway Racing Really Get? That’s a People Problem

Around a road course, cars like the Dallara IR18 Indy car or a NASCAR stock car aren't nearly as quick as a Formula 1 car. On their own turf though, they'd wipe the floor with an F1 car; it's what they're built to do. But how close to the pinnacle of speedway racing are we? Wouldn't it all be better with more downforce and more horsepower? Well as it turns out, we're already pretty close to the limit of what the human body can take, as explored in a YouTube video from XKCD.

Originally a webcomic, XKCD is the creation of Randall Munroe, a former NASA engineer who became a cartoonist. One of his offshoots, the "What If" series, recently explored the question of what would happen if speedway racing had no pesky performance-limiting rules, to see how quickly a 500-mile oval race (like the Daytona 500) could be completed. Munroe's background is in these very physics, so he's the perfect person to explain how fast it could be done—by a human, without one, and with a slightly looser definition of a car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcXpCyPc2Xw