Quote:
Originally Posted by Piwoslaw
Maybe testing showed that the front wheel covers' increase in frontal area wasn't worth the reduced turbulence? On the other hand, the top view shows that the rear of the wheel well sticks out well beyond the front, scooping up lots of air, so that doesn't help either. On the tuft test you can see that the airflow isn't as clean behind the front wheel.
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I think the lack of front wheel covers is related to the car's intended purpose, high speed tire testing under real world conditions on the Autobahn. With the higher speeds suddenly available after the construction of the Autobahn, the existing tires at the time couldn't handle the continuous high speeds and were blowing out and otherwise not holding up to the high speed conditions, hence the need for a car to test new tire designs at high speeds out on the road. They had to be able to easily inspect the tires after a run and quickly change them out for other tires to be tested, which would be more difficult to do if they had to remove a wheel well cover each time. Also, since most cars have open wheel wells, they had to do their testing in an open wheel well for the results to be real world transferable to the typical car of the day. The original design for a high speed, low drag car included front wheel covers, since that was obviously the lowest drag way to go, but they didn't include them in the final build since they got in the way of their tire testing. That is also why they had the poor aerodynamics around the front wheel covers mentioned above, since it was a last minute decision to drop the wheel covers.