How to stop a car without getting run over

You might have seen this video making the rounds on the Internet in the last couple of days. A team of rugby players holding back a fully powered Formula One car that's trying to run them over.

Before you keep reading. Watch the video first (it's short, promise) and then keep reading. We'll wait.

Okay...At first it seems unbelievable that a few men could pull off such a feat. Or maybe the video is a fake? Remember that Red Bull spends hundreds of millions dollars on its Formula One team, and billions in its overall marketing budget.

The Big Crunch wanted to know what was going on here, so we asked somebody who could tell us.

"The video is telling the truth," said Josh Browne. He's a former NASCAR engineer and crew chief. He has a Ph.D. in engineering from Columbia University, and is the co-founder of Pit Rho, a racing analytics software company.

He first had to remind viewers that the numbers in the video themselves didn't mean much. "Clearly Adrian Newey wasn't consulted on the ridiculous units stated in the video. But we should be able to figure this out," Browne said. "As Matt Damon would say [in the movie "The Martian" ], we should be able to science the s--t out of this one pretty easily."

"This just comes down to units conversion," he said. Here's how he broke it down for us:

Do you remember the equation for force from high school physics class? Force equals mass times acceleration, or F = ma for short. For the purposes of this exercise, we are going to use that. Here's the equation for the car's force.

If the mass = 800 kg (700 kg car + driver + 100 kg fuel), we need to find the acceleration. Let's assume it goes 0 to 100 km/h in 1.7 seconds, which means 100 km/h x 1000 m/km x 1h/3600s = 27.8 meters per second. That means a = 27.8 m/s / 1.7s = 16.4 m/s^2. "That's about 1.7 g-forces of acceleration, which seems reasonable for an F1 car," Browne said.