ok i had this thought the other day my brother and a friend of ours went to this abandon street that us and alot of the local guys sometimes race at,
and they painted a starting line and a line thats a qtr of a mile away
i ran thru it by my self yesterday and this is where the question comes into play i had no stop clock so what i did was divided my speed 75mph by the number of feet in a 1/4 mile which is 1320 i belive? anyway i came up with 18.02 and some other numbers my question is is this a reasonable way to kinda generically figure out how fast you made it thru the 1/4?
now i didn't launch i just kinda accerated hard but my brother took his mx6 thru and got to like 85 or so which when divided by the feet in a 1/4 mile came out to 15 something which sounds close to what these cars run in a 1/4 mile so what do you think?
peace
dante

 

interesting...never thought of it that way. I'll have my brother who is a mathematics major figure it out for us.

 

kool! that'd be pretty awesome if that was a way to figure out how fast you make it thru
peace
dante

 

Hmmm...interesting...We'll have to see if it works!

 

u could a lways try the motion in a straight line formulas... wont be the most accurate but yeh hehe..


U(initial speed), V(final speed), A(acceleration), S(distance), T(time)... i caint remember the 4 formulas off the top of my head

V = U + AT.... i know is one...
V^2 = U^2 + 2AS

oh man its late and i caint find my physics notes LOL... i will get back to ya;ll later if it still aint solved...

 

Yeah, but you are on the right track (no pun intended). I always sucked at math but I know you need to account for acceleration and the fact that you are starting from a stopped (non-intertial) position.
Here's my solution: go to Kmart or something and buy a cheap stopwatch. It's more accurate than looking at your speedo when you cross the line.

 

also keep into account that formulas only work for constant acceleration... and it wont take into account wind resistance, and other frictional forces involved...

as kargoboy stated... buy a stop watch hehe.... or even spend like $50 and buy the old skool Gtech.... does it all for ya.... and a bit more

 

very true hadn't thoght of that i think what i'm gonna do is like was said just go buy a stop watch and run through with it and then do what i was saying earlier divide my speed by the number of feet in the 1/4 and see how similar the results are maybe i'll do it tonight!
i'll post the results if i do
peace
dante

 

For some reason this was really funny to me, made me spit my drink out. Thanks