Are these early 1900 racecars realistic?

[Lee]

First off, I love this game, it's amazing, especially the realism of it.

There's one thing that seems unrealistic though, early 1900's race cars, right now i'm in early 1910 and I made a 4.999cc W12 with 252hp & 424Nm, the entire car weighs 437kg and does 0-100 in 5.4 seconds, tops out at almost 260Km/h

I know cars, I don't know that much about cars in the early 1900's but i'm pretty sure they would not beat my my 105 years younger CLA250.
So question is, were machines like this possible in this time period? If they weren't, why is it in an otherwise super realistic game? It cost $3.800 to make in 1910, that's $91.000 today or the price of four model-T fords in 1910, a lot but not that crazy. I'm not asking if they existed, I know nothing like this existed, I'm asking if it was technically possible with the technology they had.

I'm Belgian, a lot of the early car engineering was done here, I know the 1899 speed record was a Belgian engineer doing over 100km/h in an electric car, the 1903 record was an american doing 135km/h in Belgium, the 1904 record was a french man doing 168km/h on that same Belgian race track. I googled the gaps in what I know, the 1910 record was 211km/h in a mercedes with a 200hp 21.000cc engine, bigger than the rolls royce engines the british air force were shoving in their best WWI bombers.

TLDR : Why am I getting 250+hp from a 5.000cc engine in 1910 when the actual record was 200hp from a 21.000cc engine

[Eric.B]

Was it technically possible? Sure it was. Was it done? No, it wasn't, as you researched.

From the looks of it, you're playing the game on Easy mode, which means you're unlocking W engines and 12 cylinders quite a bit early. In the real world, W engines were used in the mid 1900s on motorcycles. So W3's. W12 weren't used until WW1. This 1917 W12 produced 450hp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Lion . They eventually got the same engine design up to 1350 by 1930.

So the problem isn't that the game is unrealistic. You're just playing in too easy of a game mode and min/maxing stats. If you were to play on Normal or Hard mode, it will take you much more time to unlock advance techs, thus causing you to have to make large displacement engines like the aforementioned Blitzen Benz, whose 21L engine was an inline 4. That would then increase the weight of the vehicle, thus making it not as fast, but still pretty fast.

Your top speed is roughly in line with the Blue Bird, which uses the Napier Lion engine I linked. As you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed...-driven.29
Your weight is low, because it's early game years. Again you're unlocking technology too fast, most likely due to your game settings.



As for beating your CLA 250, the standing KM time of the Blitzen Benz is 31.326 seconds. I can't find the data for the CLA, but a Bugatti Veyron does it in 18 seconds. C7 Corvette does it in 26.4 seconds... So it is pretty safe to say a 1909 super car can beat your 105 year newer car in acceleration and top speed. Acceleration and Top speed has always been mostly math problems in increasing HP and decreasing drag for many years. Your car has probably the same amount of horse power, less drag, but greater surface area and weight. So performance wise, it'd be about the same (excluding gear ratios). Handling is where the real difference is.

[Lee]

Interesting stuff, I am indeed playing easy, i'll restart on a harder difficulty, probably have more fun that way if I like realism.
Probably shouldn't have 980 million dollars in the bank in 1912 either.

You make a lot of excellent points, the list of speed records you provided doesn't reflect road cars though, all of those records seem broken by "cars" with 30.000cc engines from airplanes or suitable for airplanes.

I did find one example in the late 1930's of mercedes, they made something that somewhat fits the description of a car, called the rekordwagen, it went well over 400km/h on german autobahn to promote the nazi party, amazingly, that thing still holds the highest speed ever recorded on a public road as of 2017.

What I didn't know and learned from looking into this is, old cars were faster than I thought and the pace of engineering cars was brutal back then. They doubled how fast a car could go every four years or something, that's modern era computer chip pace of engineering.

[Garay]

I never knew this about the "rekordwagen." Thanks for sharing this piece of trivia.