Song: Blue Man Group
I would be able to give you plenty of help to prepare for a test. The best thing to do is call me (704.799.1001) for a pre-test consultation or email me pics of the car (dave@aerodynwindtunnel.com) and list specifics about the car and what you would like to learn from a test.
-Type of car
-Class
-Horsepower
-Front & Rear weight
-Handling issues
-Cooling problems
-etc…
From there we can come up with a good game plan to make sure you are well prepared for a test, and able to make efficient use of your time in the tunnel. I am also available to help during the test with interpretation of the data and point you in the direction needed to maximize your test and reach a more optimized configuration for your car.
To answer Seldom Seen Slim:
Wind tunnel testing can be intimidating because most people don't know what exactly it is that they are getting into, and what they will get out. Most teams that do test on a regular basis are not willing to share anything because they spent the $$ to learn and they don't want to send their competition somewhere where they found some speed. Most wind tunnels also just have an operator, and it is left up to the customer to run a test and interoperate all the data. At A2, we understand that 80% of our customers have never been to a wind tunnel, and that is why we are here to help you learn what aero is and how important it can be. All information learned at each test is proprietary to each customer, but we can point you in the right direction and find what works, and even as important, what doesn’t work on your particular car.
It is not just waving smoke over the car to see what the air is doing. The car is NOT on the floor, but is connected to a 6 component balance underneath the floor. Each run will measure: drag, front downforce, rear downforce, front sideforce, rear sideforce, yaw moment, pitch moment, roll moment and any flow measurements for cooling ducting that is hooked to our flow meters. Then we tell you what all those # mean and how changing one little thing can affect all those #.
For Bonneville racing it is mostly about drag reduction and I can try to put it in terms that might be easy to understand (HORSEPOWER). Say your car runs 200mph and it takes X-HP to go that speed. You then come to the tunnel and get a baseline (run #1) of exactly how you run the car at the track. Then you try different configurations on the car and find after several configurations you have reduced the HP required to get you to 200mph by 100HP. That means that it now takes you 100 less HP to go 200mph and now you have an extra 100HP in aero saving to go faster. In other words, it’s like adding 100HP to your engine. Now you look at the cost of several hours of tunnel testing to optimize your car and you call up your engine builder to find out what it would cost to put 100HP more in your engine. We have had a team that found 200HP of savings in one session and improved the aero balance (front to rear). I am not saying that everyone would find that because all cars are different, but it shows that there can be big gains made in the wind tunnel for landspeed racing.
