An insightful article on aero...
 

Car Aerodynamics - Hot Rod Magazine

Discuss!

We have already discussed this article at least twice.

Yeah....so?
Maybe someone like myself wouldn't know to find a specific writeup like that..and maybe many more have not seen the original posts themselves...?
Now it'll show up on a "recent" search...
Bonus if you ask me!

Or maybe ill just not post anything anymore....

So, use 'search'

And what exactly would I put in for a query?
As if...

I was directed to thearticle on another forum and decided to share. I'm not going to try to find the exact same article on here somebody might of posted 5 years ago, rifling thru all the **** that would come up on a search before posting...

Thanks for the post. I hadn't read the article. Its good to see some well respected folks like Hotrod Magazine cover aero and give a few figures. I'd love to have a garage where I could work a wind tunnel. Anybody got some seed money to crank one up in Huntsville, AL? We'd get some gov't work too :D

-Ryan

I can say I found the car lowering and air dam advice in that article, to be "spot-on" through my own experience at the Bonneville Salt Flats. My air dam is almost identical to the Hot Rod Camaro's (heavily influenced by that article, in fact), and after testing another design and no air dam at all, this design worked the best (at high speed). I had a few people tell me I was adding drag with that "snow-plow" bolted to the front of my car, so I tested it. Nope - it truly helps.

- Same thing with lowering the entire car. I had people tell me it would be better to raise the back end a bit - slope the hood & roof down, etc. So I tested that too. Nope - the least drag is with BOTH the front AND back ends as low as you can get them.

Now, this is for high speed and reducing lift, too. For minimum drag in a hypermiling type thing, extending the air dam all the way down to the ground is probably NOT the best - as discussed on here before. The idea is to make it low enough to "cover" the lowest hanging stuff under the car, but ONLY that low.

Very interesting. Gives me the motivation to continue work on my air dam.... Once the weather warms up a few degrees!

""hot rod magazine" aerodynamics"

Duh

I appreciated Wungun's thoughtfulness to think of us when he stumbled across this article. If duplicates start to plague the forum, I'm sure the moderators will start deleting. Until then, why don't we just help each other?

-Ryan