Good stuff, thanks for sharing. As for the waxing, true enough for a "low
speed wind tunnel" but you sure about a 300 MPH car? Maybe I'm just from the
"has to look right to be right" school ... LOL
Dale
Subject: comments from the wind tunnel...
Maybe there are some newer folks that haven't seen some of this...
Eakers first rule he gave me.... LOWER IS BETTER... almost virtually Always.
Rear spoilers suck HP ... you only need downforce if your last name is
FORCE... or your doing stupid things like we are... and then you only need
enough... but NO more then just enough... last year at 260mph I had 415lbs of
rear downforce and 350 on the nose... for a total increase of 765lbs...
However I found that the nose was caused by shock travel and not wind.. (
rebound was stiffer then compression )
Front spoilers often clean up a car... front air dams are kick ass at keeping
air from the bottom of a dirty car.
The attitude of a car effects the total frontal area of a car... minimize the
profile to the wind... make it as small as possible.
Wax doesn't do a dang thing... Gary was vehement about this... it honestly
doesn't do JACK... he's tested it way to many times and can't read that far on
the right side of the decimal point.
If your curious, all that CD thing means... is this.... you have three major
concerns out on the salt... Traction, HP and Drag... with any given amount of
traction you can use the Hp available to overcome drag until the hp exceeds
the available traction.. the less drag you have the faster you can go before
the wheels start to spin.
The easiest way to increase drag is to add weight to the car... which
increases the downforce on the tires... but then you have to worry about
balance and taking more Mass from point A to point B... with 5 miles to play
with, Mass isn't always a killer... but it's never good in the event of an
incident. ( E will always equal MC squared )or the energy associated with an
incident is directly proportional to the amount of Mass and velocity it's
traveling...
Okay hmmm there has to be more but my brain is tired of trying to figure out
how to spell... LOL
Keith
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