Hello,
My first post on the forum. Has anyone used the Bowling aerodynamic calculator? Does anyone know how close it's prediction have been with real world experience at Bonneville or elsewhere? I wrote a series of articles some years ago for a bike mag on the subject of aero most of which was based on work done by Kevin Cooper for CanAm up in Canada at the gov't low speed tunnel. Using the math he introduced me to the Bowling calculator seems to produce results very close to Cooper's. Bob Barker who rode the bike and was the head engineer at the factory on the project said the Cooper predictions came very close to the speeds they actually acheived with their rotary valve 125 mps bike in setting the record. I talked to Cooper not long ago and his feelings about the fairings used on sportbikes and even GP bikes was that they are pretty much a waste of time. I know that back in the 90's when I did the article for the mag a friend and I ran his CBR600 Honda at Maxton and found the bike significantly faster without it's fairing but with stock seat. We changed the seat to one we made based on Cooper's suggestions with no fairing and it was significantly faster than the faired bike and the naked bike with the stock seat. We never got back to Maxton to run the bike with a CanAm style LSR fairing. Should have been quite fast I suspect.
regards, Jimmy Reed