Part 2 of Robby Gordon "Road To Dakar" airs on December 24th at 10pm/pt (1am on the December 25th calendar for eastern time zone)
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Question? Why wouldn't he use a nascar wind tunnel for the air flow instead of old school "redneck" highway testing?
No need to. They got the results they were looking for, doing it the way they did, while they were testing in the desert.
Attaching ribbons to key areas of the body and driving down a smooth road will provide information just as good as you would get in a wind tunnel using a smoke wand.
As I posted before Zora Duntov did the same thing in the 50s to fix the 53/54 Corvette from sucking exhaust back into the cockpit. He also needed to find out why there was exhaust generated oil contamination on the rear. The result was to go from this:
to this:
Why pay for wind tunnel time when this does the trick?
This technique has been around for many years and often gives better results than a wind tunnel, as a wind tunnel cannot easily simulate the relative motion of the car moving over a fixed surface (road)----unless it's a very special "moving plane" tunnel. The simple test of taping ribbon or yarn at critical points used to be known as "Tuft-testing"and has long been considered an excellent way to get good basic aerodynamic data, such as observing laminar flow as they did here, where it is not necessary to specifically quantify values such as lift or drag. This is particularly the case with relatively slow-speed aerodynamic testing such as this, where it is possible to have a chase-car film the test. No wind tunnel would have given better information for this particular purpose than did this test.
Not to mention, I could only imagine the wind tunnel time and the costs...I do remember when GM paid for some wind tunnel time tears ago, but this is on RGM's dime.
Since I live in Vegas, I just had to ask; Is there any over/under on how many times the Peugeot team puts one on its side or how many times on its lid?
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