Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
Whoopsie. I was thinking about getting rid of my running boards.
Morelli? Banana car?
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*If you were going to run the pontoon fenders,the running boards could stay,and the fenders could be blended into the body as Breer did with the DeSoto Airflow,for reducing the 'bumps' as Richard Whitcomb of NASA did with his Coke-bottling/Whitcomb-waisting.
*If the fenders are going bye-bye as in your avatar,then that beautiful belly down under probably won't be the liability like on a body-on-frame,deep ladder-type chassis pickup truck,in which case we can lose the boards.
*On the pickup,we're going to have some of the highest pressures in the industry,and the running board will act like a crude wingtip spoiler,preventing the high pressure underneath from spilling up onto the faster,lower pressure body sides and on towards the roof.
*Morelli's banana car is a conundrum.NASA published a mathematical algorithm for the form in the 1940s.They probably never considered it for an automotive body.With Cd 0.05 in ground effect,without wheels its astonishing.0.03 lower than the best half-body!
But when wheels were added,the drag jumped beyond the streamline half-body (Cd 0.161) and when lowered to the road surface doubled in drag essentially,to Cd 0.35.
They had to do a lot of clay modelling around the wheels to finally get it down to Cd 0.201,absolutely great for 1976-78,but already eclipsed by lower drag in the 1920s,1930s.
Where 'caveats' are allowed with the half-bodies,it appears that the NASA/Morelli form cannot tolerate any 'contamination' of the pure form without suffering severe degradation.
I love the car,and Alberto is a real hero.Casting pearls before swine is fraught with long spells of quiet desperation.Paris fashion overpowers average reasoning.Folly.You could write stand-up routines around it.
