Quote:
Originally Posted by orange4boy
You really love your stories. Everything is a big narrative to you in which you are the big hero rescuing us all from the evil baddies. I hate to break it to you, it all happens in your head. You give yourself permission to make all of these grand assumptions but damn those who point them out.
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What a series of strange things to say - and you seemed to have drifted away from the topic... which is car aerodynamics.
Where people write things about car aero that I know are incorrect, I will try to correct them.
Where people (and in fact there's only one - so 'person') repeatedly writes incorrect things, so misleading others, and point-blank refuses to even look at references and citations that show his errors, well, after a while, I figure that he's doing it deliberately.
I actually think the "big heroes" here are those who have been strong enough to admit that they've been badly mislead over years by some absolute and utter rubbish. Not coincidentally, they're also the people who have followed my oft-stated advice:
Don't believe what I say - find out for yourself. Read any aero textbook of the last 15 years and do some on-road testing. Think about what is being written here, and assess it in the context of those readings and measurements.
Unfortunately, nearly everything that Aerohead currently writes here is either outright wrong, is misleading, or is wrong for current cars. That's a real shame, but that's how it is. Today's "how diffusers work" is a typical Aerohead example: completely wrong (as in, a 2 minute web search will show that), but when corrected, Aerohead refuses to acknowledge the error, let alone consult the cited reference.
Multiply that by dozens of examples and you end up with people on this forum who often have a very confused idea of car aerodynamics.
I've seen this before in web fora, but usually there are enough people with a sufficiently good knowledge of the subject to 'right the boat', so to speak. Some such people have appeared here, made their comment, seen how they were treated, and then left. (The person who made the brilliant suggestion to me of using a pitot tube to provide the static pressure ref when doing pressure testing is a good example of that.)
Unless you're really committed to learning (textbooks, SAE papers, actual on-car testing) you're much more likely to be blindsided by the 'wall of noise' and 'complete denial' approaches that Aerohead takes to criticism. I am just bloodyminded enough to take on such an approach, and furthermore, I hate it when I see car modifiers being misled. Since I typically make every one of my car modifications three times until I am happy with it, I am very slow - and when I think of people spending many hours doing pointless or incorrect aero car modifications, it makes my blood boil.
Thankfully, many people are starting to realise how badly they've been misled - and as for the others who don't want to realise that, I don't care so much!