Tuesday 25 September 2007

Rolling Different Tires Down A Ski Slope

2 comment(s):

Anonymous said...

Man, some bat-s%!t crazy stuff ends up on Japanese television.

Unknown said...

It's a pretty good physics lesson: the potential energy lost from going down the ski jump is turned into forward motion, friction and rotational energy. The larger diameter tires lose less energy to friction,and (I think), get less rotational energy because rotational energy is proportional to rotational velocity squared, and rotational velocity goes up as diameter goes down. So, larger diameter tires fly further. The Formula 1 tire is too wide and probably has too much friction.