Skid Pad Rating?

[TurboKA37]

A piece of string.

Find a large open parking lot that is flat and level. Pound a nail in the parking lot surface and tie the string (15'11.1''long) to it. Get a can of spray paint. Paint a circle. Holding the string driectly against the can will give you a measure of 15'11.1''. Thusly, as you walk around the nail, you will create a circle with a circumference of 100 FEET. 60 MPH around a 100 foot circle is 1G. Do the math to find what your car is pulling before you break loose. (30 mph=.5g, and so on.)

should i try to keep the inside edge of the car to be on the line or try to keep the line directly underneath the middle of the car when doing this?

[Mr. Joshua]

Gravity, acceleration towards the center of the Earth, can be posative or negative, depending on your reference point. It doesn't matter, as long as the sign remains constant throughout your calculations.

[RMiller]

9.8 m/s^2 is acceleration due to gravity ignoring air resistance. Dork.

I think you're confused. How much air resistance is affecting the lateral acceleration of a car travelling in a circle at 30 mph(speed obviously depends on the radius of the circle). I would guess that this amount is low enough to be considered NEGLIGIBLE for this calculation. Be careful when you try to make someone else sound stupid when you're not sure what you're talking about.

Also, you may have not even understood what that post's purpose was. The number of g's is used as a reference point to measure lateral acceleration, etc. And yes, g=-9.8. Guess what? If you want to find the force you exert on the ground, it is independent of air resistance. Here's an example: Let's say you drop a ball from an airplane, there are essentially 2 forces acting on the ball, the force due to gravity, which is F=-mg=-9.8(mass of ball), which acts downward, and the frictional force, which depends on a constant given for air and the shape of the object, which acts upward. The acceleration of gravity is ALWAYS -9.8 on Earth. Sorry to disappoint

Staying awake in physics would have been much more beneficial.

Speak for yourself. Or did you even take physics?

[RMiller]

Cyberkreig--There is no force acting inward from movement around a circle(like a ball on a string). It's really hard to grasp this concept. The force is pointed toward the center of the circle. Here's how I think of it: When you accelerate in your car, you feel like you're being pushed back into your seat, but the force is actually pushing you forward.