f500 aerodynamics

Hi guys, there has been a lot of chatter about Calvin Stewart's NovaKar Blade at the Runoffs. Yes Calvin's car was faster than every other F500 by several MPH. In fact in Q4 he was timed in the timing loop at the start finish line at 158.988 mph. Wowser, even I was impressed. This speed in that session was 3-4 mph faster than any other session and that was simply because he got a draft on that lap from multiple FF cars that punch a decent hole in the air.

Look here to check all the numbers if you are interested.
http://cdn.growassets.net/user_files...pdf?1443120015

Now many are saying that our advantage was our giant HP advantage. We probably did have a small power advantage but certainly not enough to go NEARLY 160 mph. The reason the car was a rocket at Daytona is that when I designed the car I spent nearly a year doing over 100 CFD analysis runs. I also made sure that the car was as small as I could make it within the rules.

This car has an actual frontal area of 6.9 sq ft. The car that finished in 2nd place has a frontal area of 8.1 sq ft. OK, what does that mean? At the very least it means that our car has 17% less frontal area and probably 20% less drag than any of the cars in the class.

You ask, how does Jay know about these things on the 2nd place car. He built the 2nd place car too. That's how he knows.

Here it is in all of its trimmed out glory.

Congratulations on the win Calvin and Jay.

Looking at the car, and considering that you spent so much time focusing on CFD, one might ask why not have used a roll hoop fairing, even more on such a tall roll bar?

While the tube has a small frontal area, the round profile certainly adds some drag.


JS

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jean-Sebastien Stoezel

Congratulations on the win Calvin and Jay.

Looking at the car, and considering that you spent so much time focusing on CFD, one might ask why not have used a roll hoop fairing, even more on such a tall roll bar?

While the tube has a small frontal area, the round profile certainly adds some drag.


JS

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Def on the plate, ran out of time.

I'm thinking that the best use of the fairing would be if you were taking engine air from behind the drivers head, since they were taking air from an outboard air scoop and there is no way to cleanly fair in the rollbar without creating more flat plate area, that it would be a wash aerodynamically.
Dave