I’ll bet you can guess how I came to this premise. One day I was driving through my neighborhood, and what should come on the radio one day but Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss”:
There are a couple speed bumps, and I swear, when I went over one of them, my front and rear tires hit at almost the exact same time as the stomps in the song. This was the most exciting thing to happen to me in months, so I looped the block a couple times trying to recreate it, but no dice. I had to know what the exact conditions were that would allow me to recapture that bliss again.
What does that entail?
In a nutshell, I need to determine what speed I’d need to be going for my tires bumping to line up with the two stomps in the song. If I know one thing from high school physics, it’s that I’ll never ever understand the right-hand rule for magnetic fields. Why can’t magnets be left-handed? If I know a second thing, it’s that distance equals rate times time. We want the rate.
So what’s the distance?
This one’s pretty simple. I drive a 1999 Ford Taurus. (Ladies, please simmer down…) This jewel of American engineering has a wheelbase of 108.5″, or the distance between the center of the front and rear wheels.
And what’s the time?
We need to cover that distance in the time it takes to go from the first to the second stomp in a pair. I looked around online for the beats per minute (BPM) of the song, but there were conflicting reports. I would need the utmost precision, so I counted.
The single version of the song is 3:39 long, but the first and last stomps occur about a second and a half each from the start and end of the song respectively. The total number of double stomps (or lone stomps)?
87
Because our counting starts with the first stomp, we’ll say that the length of the song is 86 stomps. Stomps start four beats apart, so the song in total contains 344 beats.
These beats take place over 3:36 (216 seconds), which works out to 95.56 BPM. (Shame on you, websites that said it was 94.)
Working towards our target number, we can change that BPM to beats per second: 1.59.
But really what we want is seconds per beat, so we’ll take the reciprocal. 1/1.59 = 0.63 seconds per beat
Last step, the stomps occur a half beat apart, so we halve this number and get a time between paired stomps of…
0.31 seconds
D = R * T
Insert known values
108.5″ = R * 0.31 s
Flip so we’re solving for target
R = 108.5/0.31 inches per second
Divide through to get one number
R = 345.59 inches per second
Divide by 12 to get that in feet per second
R = 28.8 feet per second
Multiply by 3,600 (60 * 60) to get that in feet per hour
R = 103,677.78 feet per hour
Divide by 5,280 to get that in miles per hour
R = 19.64 miles per hour
Conclusion
If you want to have the two stomps in “Lip Gloss” line up with your tires hitting a speed bump, you simply need to travel at 19.64 MPH.
(And perfectly time hitting your front tire as soon as the first stomp hits which is considerably more difficult but we’re not going to focus too much on that since I can’t tell you how to do that with math.)
I don’t know if going over a speed bump at that speed is necessarily good for your shocks or alignment or whatever, but some things are more important than having a working vehicle.
Epilogue
If the rush of hitting the stomps perfectly once is not enough for you, a series of speed bumps perfectly spaced out would allow you to match every single stomp.
We know that the car travels one wheelbase in one stomp interval, and there’s eight stomp intervals between the start of each pair.
Therefore, our 108.5″ wheelbase car would need speed bumps spaced 72′ 4″ apart.
If anybody knows of any stretches of road that contain 87 speed bumps each 72′ 4″ apart, do let me know.
I will cross continents to experience musical vehicular nirvana.