Under Car Airflow - articles

[260DET]

Here is the link, fascinating stuff http://autospeed.com/cms/A_2455/article.html?popularArticle

[m4xwellmurd3r]

Very cool little article. Thanks for the link

[ZR8ED]

Interesting indeed. What I get from this is that underbody aero is about as complicated as rocket science, except that less people have/are working on it.

 

This doesn't mean that all is lost. What it does mean is that much of what you hear/read on the net about theories, is just that; theories.

 

What I am taking from it though is that if we are to work on underbody aero for our z's, then it is up to us to experiment, (carefully and safely I hope) Try and document and share our ideas/results. It sure won't stop me. Wind tunnel or not. Its going to be seat of the pants, stopwatch on the track, video recording, gas mileage checking, and hopefully not flying off the track airborne! (that last one is for John C.)

 

Scott.

[260DET]

Its like a lot of things, if you make your design decisions based on recognised principles and be conservative where it gets a bit difficult, then you can't go far wrong and its almost certain to be be an improvement.

 

The modest aero stuff I've done on the S130 all seems to work, at least the car indicates alls well when its getting pushed around a race circuit

[JMortensen]

I only found 2 of the articles. Not sure what the problem is, maybe I'm just brain farting, but I could only find the one linked above and this one: http://www.autospeed.com/cms/A_2159/article.html about undertrays and bonnet vents which I think we've gone over before.

 

I can say 2 things pretty definitively about the first article. 1. I think they're right on when they say that flat bottoms and diffusers won't work unless you get the car low and heavily sprung. 2. The idea that a new car should be more concerned with drag than downforce and that for this reason they might want to run a higher airdam for instance is only marginally useful when applied to a car which has crappy aero design like a Z. Might as well try and get something useful from the .4x drag coefficient, and since the design is so bad we can actually improve drag while getting more downforce by installing a huge air dam. They did suggest that race cars have a focus on downforce at the expense of drag, but I think you might get some people who are inclined to take their air dam off of their 240 after reading that first bit and that would be counterproductive no matter whether the goal was reducing drag or increasing downforce.

[260DET]

Second one http://autospeed.com/cms/A_2456/article.html