DriveTribe Reveals Why Race Cars are Deceivingly Mini-sized
Why does an LMP1 car seem twice the size of a GT3 car? Sometimes you can’t trust your own eyes.
The first time I saw an LMP1 car racing around on TV as a kid, my mind made the association that those things must have been massive compared to “real cars”. Just look at the aero! Even the headlights have like 4 projectors per housing, there is no way that thing isn’t near the size of a Hummer, at least in length. Well, it wasn’t until seeing one of these prototype cars in real life that I figured out I was surely mistaken.
See the thing is, we as viewers on the screen don’t have a frame of reference for these cars because we never see them driving around on the road. We just don’t have anything to compare them to. So our minds builds whatever image it sees fit to represent them visually. DriveTribe‘s YouTube channel finally sets this record straight by giving us an all-out comparison.
The video starts by comparing two drastically different Porsches, the 911 GTE, a GT3 car based off a 911 chassis, and the 919 LMP1 Prototype, based on a bespoke racing chassis. Obviously, these two cars share different confines. One retains the shape of a familiar road car while the other is more like a… spaceship? When we see a 919 on screen, the first thing our mind does is build a mental representation of it. We start with associating the size of the car with one key feature: the windscreen. Our mind assumes that the windscreen is equal to the size of a road car, when in reality it is only but a fraction of the size.
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- Actual Size
Thus, when we blow up to the windscreen of the 919 to fit our imagined size of it, it suddenly becomes a monster of a car. Some how then, it is substantially larger than the 911 GTE, when it reality this couldn’t be farther from the case. Simply by looking at the roof line of the 919, we can see that 919 is considerably mini in comparison to a regular sized road car such as a 911.
This is not necessarily the case with all racing cars however. Take into account an 80’s period F1 car compared to a modern 2019 F1 chassis. The increase in overall size has actually been substantial. The front end of a modern F1 is over 3 feet longer than the classic period vehicle. This accounts for the increased complexity of the body work, especially the aerodynamics. This definitely lets us know one thing: looks can be deceiving. Fret not however, a go-kart is just as small as it seems (we can guarantee this one).
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