Aero info

[Lynchy]

Guys

I've found some resources that may be useful to some of you:

http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/gro ... icle/AERDY

This link is for the SAE website where you can buy technical papers relating to aerodynamic development of vehicles. There's a lot of them here and I went through the list, there's some good stuff buried in here mainly relating to cars.

I also found out that dropping the tailgate on a ute actually increases the drag and reduces rear downforce by up to 60%. At the same time it increases susceptibility to sidewinds.

There's quite a bit more to the site that I haven't looked at yet.

Another site that looked interesting is ecomodder:

http://ecomodder.com/

This site is for guys trying to get as much mileage as they can out of a tank of petrol. Mostly they do it via aerodynamics. There's some weird looking cars in here. I think some of their mods are suss like removing the car aerial to reduce drag would seem to be a waste of time to me, but others are quite right.

Lynchy

[David Leikvold]

Lynchy, that aerial removal would make a difference, the radio wouldn't work anymore. Seriously though, the Aircraft Spruce & Specialty catalog lists tiny streamlined section plastic tubing to go over the bracing wires on biplanes and ultralights because the round section of the wire does drag a lot more than a streamlined section. On a biplane the difference might be measurable because there's a lot of bracing wire, but on a road car you'd never notice it because the aerial is tiny and the car is much slower.