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RichardP
02-23-2007, 01:02 PM
My teammate taking time out to dynamically tensile test standard galvanized interwoven fencing material last year had the unintended benefit of giving us good data acquisition information on my car with and without the silly looking aero bits. I thought some of you might be interested in a comparison.

The car was run without aero at a Driver’s Edge event and then run again a few weeks later with the splitter and wing at the May race. The car was set up the same and run on the same set of tires. The only difference was the weight. Ballast was not added when the aero stuff was (forcibly) removed so the non-aero version was about 50 pounds lighter.

Results: The car with aero had both higher peak (1.33 vs. 1.24g’s) and average (1.13 vs. 1.04g’s) lateral accelerations through the carrousel. It also had a higher corner exit speed onto the front straight (89.2 vs. 83.6 mph; 5.6 mph delta). The higher corner exit speed also translated into a higher top speed before braking (123.8 vs. 119.9 mph; 3.9 mph delta). In the braking zone, the car with aero also had higher peak and average braking G’s (-.90 vs. -.83g’s; -.66 vs. -.61g’s).

These are just some select numbers that I picked out to try and show some representative picture. The actual numbers vary a bit from lap to lap but the trends do stay the same. More telling than these two best segments were the results from the Sunday 40 minute race. The average cornering acceleration through the carrousel over all twenty laps of the race (including good laps, bad laps, traffic, etc.) was higher with the aero than the fastest “qualifying” style lap that was done without the aero.

Just a little info to help you decide if you want to go through the effort and expense of making your car look silly. I do have to mention that having aero on the car is a major pain in the butt…

I posted a more detailed evaluation on Corner-Carvers for those with nerdish tendencies.

Richard P.

Todd Covini
04-19-2007, 12:14 AM
Nope.