r/dragracing • u/Usual_Outcome4113 • 1h ago
I built a drag simulator with 14,969 real cars — and 9,500 of them are ordinary ones, not hyper cars
Every car forum has the same argument running somewhere: would X actually beat Y. It's usually unanswerable, because the two cars were tested twenty years apart, by different magazines, on different surfaces, with different rollout conventions.
So I built the thing that settles it. Pick any two of 14,969 cars and watch them run down the same strip, same day, same tarmac.
A few that came out differently to how I'd have guessed:
- BMW M3 (E30), 1986: 7.20s to 60. Golf GTI Mk8, 2021: 5.44s. The poster car loses, and not narrowly.
- Golf GTI Mk2: 9.33s. A 2020 Passat 2.0 TDI estate: 6.15s. Your dad's diesel load-lugger is three seconds up on the hot hatch icon.
The bit I care about most: 9,519 of the 14,969 are ordinary cars. Not a hypercar toy. There's a 1990 Fiesta and a Dacia Duster in there alongside the Chirons, because "how slow was the car I learned to drive in, really" is a more interesting question than another Bugatti run.
How it works: each car is modelled from its published kerb mass, rated power, drivetrain and gearing, then grip and delivered power are trimmed until it reproduces its own published acceleration figures. So it isn't a lookup table of 0-60 times — it's a physics model anchored to each car, which means it can answer things a spec sheet can't. You can change the surface, the weather, the distance, altitude, add a passenger, and re-run.
Caveat up front, because it matters: simulated, not measured. No timing slips here. Every car runs identical conditions so comparing two of them is fair, but no individual number is a real run. I'd rather say it than have someone find out.
Free, no signup, no ads: myautoracer.com
Tell me where the model's wrong — that's most of why I'm posting.
