Fender flares, instead of wheel well covers?

[winkosmosis]

Lowering a car is a lot of work and money for reducing frontal area from tires by a few square inches. Plus the ground effect increases... the effect of which would depend on the individual car.

[Sean T.]

I have the same problem. My bumpers curve in and so it's not easy to build a wheel well cover that goes down very far...

[Drive Stick]

Is the picture of your taurus legit, or is that a photoshopped bumper cover? That's about what I'd need to make, in order to cover my front end.

[lunarhighway]

it seems that on recent cars the bumpers have gotten a little wider down low, but most still leave a little bit of the tire side exposed neat the bottom end.



one car wich has an interesting feature and some pictures on this area is the tesla roadster...


in the first pic there's a virtual model wich shows the airspeed accross the tire edge

in the second pictures there a mock up wich has "reverse mudflaps" taped to cover this area, and when you look carfully the production model seems to have retained this feature


now this could very well be a stability air rather than drag reduction, but a similar setup might benefit existing cars with the same configuration...

[MetroMPG]

Those Tesla deflectors are likely there for drag reduction, and something similar on the Neon may help slightly.

I can post a similar before/after CFD image of a bumper which leaves some of the tire tread (face) exposed vs. one which doesn't. I'll see if I can find it...

[Drive Stick]

That would be great, because I have no idea where you guys are finding these images.. I'm just getting into all of this, and the aero mods are my next things to do so the more I learn the better mods I can make.

[MetroMPG]

Source: Contribution of different devices to the total drag - http://www.dd.chalmers.se/~lelo/rvad...on-to-drag.pdf

[lunarhighway]

this moddification was accepted by the styling department

that explains a lot...

[tasdrouille]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

Those Tesla deflectors are likely there for drag reduction, and something similar on the Neon may help slightly.

The SAE paper on the development of the c6 z06 corvette calls them wheel openings extensions. They were added to reduce drag.

[cfg83]

MetroMPG -

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

...

Source: Contribution of different devices to the total drag - http://www.dd.chalmers.se/~lelo/rvad...on-to-drag.pdf

This is really cool. I only have frontal mudflaps installed right now, but I also have some "shaped" mudflaps in the garage that I could adapt for this use.

CarloSW2