Mamba XL ver2?

[BrianG]

See, now you guys are overthinking the smoke thing. I'm telling you, it's the friction from the smoke that causes problems. The correct answer is usually the simple one.

By the way, red items don't go any faster, they just appear that way because the color grabs your attention. It's all about perspective.

What DOES make things go faster is a flame graphic (sticker/decal/paint). That has been proven a number of times in controlled, repeatable tests. The reason behind this is a little more complex though. What happens is the various colors of the flame graphic cause thermal variances just above it which positively interact with the airflow from the object in motion. This redirects turbulence in a controlled manner to provide the least amount of air resistance when traveling at high speed. Of course, this only works on a planet with a yellow sun and when it is at an ideal angle at noon in a narrow temperature range, so changes to the flame orientation, color gradients, and flame tongue curvature must be made for maximum efficiency depending on geographical location, temperature, and time of day. Fortunately, the design of the common flame graphics are such that they work well in a variety of locations; you just don't get the maximum benefit as you would with a specifically tuned graphc. In the R/C world, our vehicles are scaled down by X amount, which means the variances in flame efficiency are X order of magnitude less (efficiency variances scales down by model scale), so even a "generic" flame graphic has almost the same performance as a perfectly tuned one. Incidentally. this is why R/C vehicles can have pretty much any flame kind/size/color/geometry and they all drastically improve performance almost equally; even more so the smaller the vehicle. Don't try that on a real 1:1 car though and expect good results; stick to a properly designed flame graphic when at larger scales!