Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Since the introduction of wings on racing cars in the mid-1960s, airflow has been everything in racing. Until then, the goal was to make the car as slick as possible; Less drag means more speed on the steering wheel. Then designers like Jim Hall at Chaparral and Colin Chapman at Lotus realized they could use air to push the car on the trackincreasing grip and allowing it to go faster in corners. Things haven’t been the same since.
Achieving aerodynamic efficiency began as a black art. Application wind tunnels depending on the scale of the cars was still in its infancy, so many teams were expensive and sometimes trying dangerous routes. But wind tunnels can run day and night, rain or shine, and you’re unlikely to damage the car or injure the driver (or worse) during this time. Wind performance became more important when F1 began to ban track testing to help teams cut budgets. Therefore, teams will do as much work with samples as possible before confirming the results during the limited number of tests allowed.
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations came later. In racing, everyone is looking for an advantage over their competitors, and finally it was possible to imitate, with fidelity, the effect of air flow on the car model. Not only were CFD sims cheaper than wind simulations, they were also much faster in iteration. The preliminary design work is now done in silico before it is accepted by the scales on the wind track, since many series—including Formula 1, the World Endurance Championship, Formula E, and NASCAR—have banned road trials.
