The car is undergoing the winter development, and I was lucky enough to be invited to go to MIRA by Simon McBeath, for articles in RACECAR ENGINEERING later this year. Not having any CAD models of the car to simulate this was going to be very interesting, and we all hoped we would learn something, and we certainly did!

Some areas of the car worked as intended, and others were actually working in the complete opposite way (Some air exits were actually inlets!!!) You can see in the first picture a lot of wool tufts stuck over half of the car. These proved to be very useful, as well as the figures from the tunnel itself.

Whilst blowing smoke over the car this strange pattern emerged. I have no idea why at the moment, but thought it interesting. The air seems to be twisting as it comes off the wing at the edge. 

The session was a massive success with an aero balance being generated whilst at the same time reducing drag by about 20%! We tried LOADS of bits on the car. Some I thought would be demon tweaks, buts turned out to have no real effect, whilst other bits turned out to be hugely important. There is a load more to do now, and perhaps first on the list is to make a new front splitter and modify the side pods. More on all this later…

Tags: Bodywork

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2011 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Modifying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.