>>13758841These racers generally use old ass engine designs even if they are riced to hell.
If you paid some modern engine designer to make a brand new, scratch designed radial bank aero engine you could probably squeeze a bit more power density, using modern materials and computer managed fuel injection.
This would be inordinately expensive though, especially since these kinds of engines have seen basically no development since the 50s.
Likewise these aircraft are still ultimately based off the original airframe structures, if somewhat modified.
An aircraft designed from scratch around modern composites would likely do better.
At the end of the day these air races mostly use spare junk; if they had a formula 1 budget and likewise Lockheed, Boeing, GE ect lining up to have them try out their cutting edge shit, you would likely see the boundaries pushed further.
