There are different programs on the internet that will help you with the HP needed to run a car at a certain speed. They pretty much require inputs for the frontal area, Cd of the car, the weight of the car if they also take rolling resistance into consideration and of course the speed you desire to run. The problem in using these with a lakester is that if the tires are away from the body to some degree you have the frontal area/Cd of the body and then a different frontal area/Cd for the 4 tires/wheels. Unless you assign one frontal area/Cd for the whole car.
I've have some spreadsheets on my site to help with this but none that were specific to the problem so I made up a new one using formulas from different sources that seem to be fairly well accepted. Here is a view of the spreadsheet with input guesses and outputs for my lakester ...
You input the rolling resistance value, car's weight, frontal area of the body (not the tires), Cd of the body and the desired speed. Then to the right you input the tire's Cd, height and width for the front and rear tires.
From those inputs you get the HP needed to overcome the rolling resistance, the HP needed to propel the body, the HP needed for the 4 tires and finally a combined RWHP needed to obtain the desired speed.
It also gives you the weight needed on the drive wheels to get the required HP to the ground under different salt conditions.
I made the spreadsheet in Open Office and saved it as an Excel format. I'd really appreciate it if some one opened it in Excel and told me that it works and looks ok in that format.
You can find the link to the spreadsheet here....
http://purplesagetradingpost.com/sumner/bvillecar/bville-spreadsheet-index.htmlThe spread sheet should also work for cars, streamliners and even bikes if you enter zero's where the tire inputs are,
Sum