Can you drive an F1 car on the ceiling?

Depending on the setup, probably. Gumpert claims that their Apollo could, and that's a street car.

 

Yeah, Saleen S7 is also supposed to produce enough downforce to match it's own weight at 257 km/h.

But that's not enough to drive on ceiling. Not only you need to counteract gravity, but also produce more downforce if you want to have any traction and therefore ability to maintain speed and control. And the faster you go, the more traction you need to counteract drag.

So I'm guessing S7 would need to go well over 400 km/h to produce 3-4 g's and actually drive on ceiling.

Open wheel cars are much lighter so the speed at which they produce their own weight in downforce is lesser. They're also capable of reaching speeds when they do produce 3-4 g's of downforce.

 

Yup

I incorrectly assumed tyres will not work properly on non-HAT surfaces I guess I didn't give it enough thought or I would suggest disablng HAT myself in the first place.

Just in case low speeds will draw attention - LesiU was obviously using exaggerated downforce for that test.

 

Nice one, how much extra downforce was needed for that or was it similar to the f1

 

Yes, rF2 tires work on both HAT and non-HAT. Sometimes this works basically as expected, like if you ever drive one of the historics on Spa into the trucks in the paddock and get a tire jammed between the road and the bottom of the truck. At other times, like touching a tire against a guardrail, there's so many opposing contact points that it doesn't really work realistically (and sometimes even flips out, but I currently think that's actually due to a poor interaction between tire collision and regular collision).

 

Yeah, getting multiple contact points physically stable is a real bugger

By the way, I know you're using center point and radius for each triangle in collision body, but do you also build a tree out of these spheres while loading a mesh?
I've noticed CPU usage raising insanely while drifing F1 car within 0,5m of metal guardrails at Eau Rogue in some early builds (49 for sure and perhaps next one aswell) but it seems gone now.

That would be an important optimization hint for track modders to know we don't need to split long guardrails into shorter pieces just to make collision detection work on smaller domains.

 

45 degree camber limit has some to do also, I have tried 90 degree camber limit and that seem to create tires that work better with those random situations as if I have understood correctly, it then uses tire contact model to almost any tire/surface contact?

That has lead me to think that it is not actually only 2 wheel driving and motorcycles that can benefit from that, but also open wheelers with tire to tire contacts and contacts with guardrails etc.

However my understanding of things is rather limited as of now, so it can also be that changing that camber limit just masks underlying issue, that might be better to solve differently.