The GRIP Vehicle · working name TBD
Inspired by GRIP: Combat Racing — wheels taller than the body, fully exposed, no fixed front, works inverted. Electric wheel motors launch it; an artificial electrogravitic well propels, plants and brakes it at speed. Not road-legal by choice; tested at Bonneville, Black Rock and Hakskeen Pan.
The whole vehicle, in 3D
The full vehicle, built from our own geometry — four magnetic axles, the central chassis, and everything that has to fit inside it: two Stoic engines, the battery, a 500 L fuel tank, cooling and four single-person crew pods. Switch the body to see-through to inspect the packing; a 1.7 m figure stands alongside for scale.
Concept & design rules
Dimensions · GRIP proportions
Matched to the GRIP: Combat Racing cars: the body about three tyre-widths across, each tyre twice as tall as it is wide, the tyres tucked against the body — at 2.5 m wheels and a 1.5 m body, symmetric top and bottom so it drives either way up.
| Parameter | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Wheel diameter | 2.5 m | Locked |
| Tire width | 1.25 m | Locked |
| Overall height (= wheel) | 2.5 m | Locked |
| Body height (with gravity plating) | 1.5 m | Locked |
| Body width | 3.68 m at the axle line · 3.41 m at the skins | Derived |
| Floor clearance | 0.50 m, either way up | Derived |
| Track (centre to centre) | 5.17 m | Derived |
| Overall width (incl. wheels) | 6.42 m | Derived |
| Body to tyre (axle line) | 0.12 m | Derived |
| Wheelbase | 5.0 m | Re-packing |
| Overall length (incl. wheels) | ~7.5 m | Re-packing |
| Crew | 4 × single-person pods | Re-packing |
| Wheel speed @ 1,000 km/h | ~2,120 rpm | Derived |
| Mass, fuelled (Rev D estimate) | ~13 t | Estimate |
The wheel, body and axle figures follow the suspension design below. Wheelbase, length and crew packing are carried over from the Rev D packaging study while it is re-packed to the new proportions. Individual figures refine as detailed design proceeds.
Propulsion & power
The electrogravitic well is the main propulsion at speed: a field ahead pulls, fields at the rear and underside push and plant, and reversed it brakes — while the wheel motors give the fast initial launch. Because it sips power at cruise, a single tank carries the car farther than most cars travel in an entire lifetime.
2 × TM-250 Stoic engines = 500 kW (671 hp) continuous feeding an 800 V DC bus, buffered by a 250 kWh battery. At full output the plant refills the whole pack in about 30 minutes — but it rarely needs to: cruising sips power, so it modulates to demand and the fuel lasts.
See the engine →The electric wheel motors handle the fast, low-speed launch; the electrogravitic well takes over for the efficient climb to high speed; and the track boost supplies the top-speed sprint. More thrust simply means brisker acceleration — and a higher cruise.
A Bugatti-class hypercar wrings everything out of 1,500 hp and is still held back by its tyres. GRIP makes just 671 hp — but its thrust comes from the gravity well, not the contact patch, so it never fights the air the way wheels do and isn't capped by grip. Straight-line acceleration is limited only by what the crew can take — a few g, 0–100 km/h in under a second — and top speed isn't a horsepower war at all. The engine rarely even runs flat out: cruising barely sips power, so burning all 500 kW would empty the tank fast and simply isn't needed.
Performance
At cruise the well sips power, so range is measured in hundreds of thousands of kilometres. The faster you choose to go, the shorter the range — but even flat out it stays enormous.
Thrust per kilowatt
Chemical rockets — the most powerful machines humanity makes — deliver well under one newton of thrust for every kilowatt of power. The electrogravitic drive works in a different class entirely.
Because the drive overpowers drag so cheaply, the body no longer has to be sculpted for the wind. Drag still trims range, but you can give the vehicle almost any shape you want and let electrogravitics and electric power carry it — form follows the vision, not the wind tunnel.
In vacuum there's no drag to cap speed, so the same tank keeps accelerating — reaching past Pluto on a gentle setting. Space mode carries an oxidiser for the engine and spends extra power on an electrogravitic particle-shield (a collision at those speeds is catastrophic) — but the reach is interplanetary on a modest tank.
Figures are propulsion at steady cruise; real-world draw (launch, cooling, life support) trims them — still far beyond any combustion car's lifetime.
In design
Open threads — captured as they take shape, not yet settled.
The well isn't one device — it's a phased array of plate emitters, armor-plate-shaped and surface-mounted so the field forms outside the hull. Forward plates pull; rear and underside plates push and plant; reversed, they brake. Direction is set by which plates fire and how hard — vectored thrust, no moving parts.
Not one big sphere — four single-person G-pods, each a gimballed cell on conductive ball-bearings (a spherical slip-ring). Any pod can drive; the others watch and stand by. In a crash each pod ejects as its own survival capsule and sheds speed on its own gravitic field.
The boost pads — made real. The car carries pickup plates on belly and ceiling (the emitter plates, doing double duty), so passing over a powered track plate couples energy into the car and routes it straight to the forward emitters for an extra pull. Works either way up.
Vision without windows: 2–3 small electrogravitic drones fly escort and beam the chase-cam view into the driver's sphere — exactly the video-game camera. They dock to recharge and hot-swap with a fresh one, so coverage never drops.
Wheel & tire
Rim: forged titanium, ~3× safety margin at 278 m/s rim speed. Tire: an aircraft-style pneumatic casing with aramid/steel cord, carrying a grippy replaceable tread skin over a cool-running structural body.
A tread surviving 100,000 km at 1,000 km/h heat is the problem that isn't yet solved — hence the swappable skin. Rolling heat runs ~14 kW per wheel at top speed; active balancing is needed.
278m/s
at 1,000 km/h — managed with a ~3× safety margin on forged titanium.
Suspension architecture
Every stage is anchored at the ball joint where the hub casing meets the steering carriage, and everything is mirrored top and bottom because the car drives either way up. Magnets take the small bumps, the casing's swing takes the big ones, and hinged plates on torsion bars catch the rest — with the same travel in bump and rebound.
| # | Interface | What it does | Travel |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shaft in casing (stage 1) | The motor shaft floats inside the fixed casing on actively controlled magnets, fore-aft and up-down. It takes the small bumps, and it is also the wheel's fore-aft give: the wheel slides back to soak up a hit without turning | ±8.3 cm |
| 2 | Casing on keyed ball (stage 2) | The whole casing swings up and down on the ball joint. The ball is keyed: it can't let the casing turn fore-aft (that would steer the wheel every time it braked or hit something) or roll about its own axis (that roll is how the motor's torque reaches the car) | ±12° · ±28 cm |
| 3 | Hinged magnetic-rail plates (stage 3) | A plate above and below each casing, hinged right above the ball, floats the casing magnetically. Once the 3.5 cm float gap closes, the plate swings open with the casing — so it can never clip — and winds the torsion bar that is its own hinge pin | from 6 cm · ~11° swing |
| 4 | Hinge frame | At each end of the steering arc the stopper carries straight on, at its own angle, as a pillar; solid decks sit on the pillars and carry the torsion bars in bearing lugs — spine, pillars and decks make one closed frame round the joint | Fixed |
| 5 | Volcano cone & steering carriage | A solid cone spreads the joint's loads into a curved plate that slides along the spine's arc to steer; at full lock it butts the stopper | Steer · ~17° inner |
| 6 | Central spine & keel | A closed shell between the two arcs with a spiked prow. Down its centre a box-section keel stiffens it and carries the batteries, inverters, pumps, cooling and ducts; fuel sits in cross-fed bladders either side so the car stays balanced | Fixed |
Because the casing is keyed, it doesn't have to be round. From the ball to the tyre it is a chamfered-square octagon, 0.59 m across: its flat top and bottom are the float faces under the plates, its flat front and back give the magnets a face fore-aft too, and the box section is stiffer than a round tube of the same height. Inside the wheel it turns round again (0.56 m), because the wheel spins around it on its magnet cushion.
Two power bridges per wheel, one high and one low, run from the inverters in the keel across the fuel to the steering arc; each carries a full feed. Copper conductor rails set in the arc hand the power to the sliding carriage through collector shoes, and it runs on through the hollow ball and the casing's corner pockets to the motor — power never crosses a spinning gap.
Earnshaw's theorem: permanent magnets alone can't be stable in every direction. The answer is hybrid — permanents carry static load at near-zero power; electromagnets, under fast feedback control, correct deviations and set stiffness, damping and ride height on the fly. The torsion-bar stage stays purely mechanical, as the fail-safe backstop if power is lost.
Kinetic energy at 1,000 km/h is ~38.6 MJ (10.7 kWh) per tonne — and impact energy there is ~40× that at 160 km/h. The design target is fail-safe (every failure ends controlled, wheel stays attached), damage-tolerant, with a predictable weakest point chosen so wheel and cabin survive.
| Zeno | Founder of Stoicism — and of the paradoxes about motion. |
| Gravitas | Roman virtue of weight; literally names the gravity drive. |
| Tonos | Stoic physics: the tension holding matter together — like the magnetic tension holding the wheels. |
| Ataraxia | Stoic calm — a car undisturbed at 1,000 km/h. |