At 02:38 PM 3/13/97 GMT, you wrote:
>baballen@sky.net wrote:
>
>>>>And those two blow holes on each side of the bonnet
>>>>of the MGA obviously makes it a. . .
>
>Dolphin ? Whale ?
>
>Andy
Okay, about those two vent holes: Can anybody verify this story? I
remember reading a few years ago that some time in the '60s, an engineer for
one of the big 3 US car companies, who owned an MGA and autocrossed it,
wangled a little time in his company's wind tunnel. As it turns out,
because of the way the body dips between the hood and fender, there's a
channel of high-pressure air that runs up that groove, made worse by the
air-dam effect of the windscreen. Thus, rather than exhausting hot air,
once speed goes above about 45 mph, air is actually pushed into the vents,
thus slowing down the flow through the radiator & making the it harder to
keep the car cool, because the air is pushing forward against the air coming
through the radiator! Apparently the engineer found that by stuffing rags
up the vents from indside, and securing so they wouldn't drop onto the
engine during autocrosses, his car ran cooler. I'm going to find the
article I read this in, but meanwhile, has anyone else heard this? FWIW, I
mentioned this to my brother, who went to Art Center College of Design, and
now works for an auto-design skunkworks in California, and he said that just
eyeballing the probable airflow, it seems very likely. Another triumph
<sorry> of British design?
Mark Moburg
markmoburg@mindspring.com
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