[M_a_t_t]

Originally Posted by JulianEdgar

1. Probably a bit of both. For example, moving from a good standard wheel to one with a full cover I doubt does anything at all, and if it did in fact do anything, it would be so small as to be next to unmeasurable. I also see lots of modifications that I am sure do nothing. (Unfortunately what I have found with discussion groups is that if you attempt to call these out, people get very upset. Notably, there is never any evidence that these mods work. I've stopped looking through build threads because I find it so frustrating.) To keep it simple, I think the physical size of the modification usually correlates pretty well with its likely impact - positive or negative.

In one of your videos (Porsche on low drag wheel design) you say "Ventilation drag is...primarily through air passing through the openings in the wheels. Ventilation drag alone contributes up to 8% of total vehicle drag. Any difference in ventilation drag is going to be significant in terms of overall drag of the vehicle." (this isn't quite word for word, but very close) @~1:10

Then: ventilation drag is 50 percent tires and 50 percent wheels. This would suggest that 4% can be saved by putting full wheel covers on. This is double checked in the wheel graph you show later (@2:50) by a fully covered rim giving a -.015 Cd. On a car whose Cd is .30 this is a 5% decrease in drag.

In the qoute above you say you don't think it makes much of a difference. It sounds you are contradicting yourself. Maybe what you mean by "much of a difference" is different than my version? I know if Porsche went through the effort to find these results and I would assume that Honda did for the insight then full wheel covers would be worth their effort on our own cars (rather than buying a new set of rims).

I would like to thank you for the compliment in wheels (again in the video) as I've put insight wheels on my mercury. What tires are you running on yours? Some have said some of the newer FE tires have worked better than the original spec potenza re92's.

On longitudinal drag: If you put wheel skirts (or spats) on the outside and enclosed the wheel well as best as you could while still allowing the suspension to articulate do you think this would mitigate most of the longitudinal drag and ventilation drag? Possibly worth 6 or 7% in the case you were making in the video?

Edit: I just watched your video on "deceptive rules of thumb in car aerodynamics" and could see a point to be made that not every car will see these results. None of the evidence I've seen has said you would get worse Cd by adding them though so they should always show some benefit. Correct?