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Do lowering your car affect.....
- Thread starter Man-Chun
- Start date
No expert, far from it but I would of though if you lowered you car it would create a vacum under it do to air moving faster over the top and less air underneath, bit like a plane wing causing the car to have more grip at high speed.
Just a theory though. Probably totally wrong but worth a shot..
Im no expert either but Ive been doing a bit of thinking and reading around this subject.
There seem to be two main things going on here; firstly having the car closer to the ground reduces the air flow below the car and instead channels it around and over. For the normal street car/street racer this is the dominant force and common sense suggests that the less air you have going under the car, the less likely it is to get light at high speed. However you need to keep airflow going high over the rear rather than following the line of the tailgate, cos this causes lift at the back because of the swirling/vortex effect that lowers pressure over the rear end. Thats what huge rear wings are for.
The second more techy way of maintaining grip is to use the ground force effect which basically does work in the same way as an aeroplane wing, but in reverse. you need to have the car really scraping the tarmac, then shroud the whole underneath of the car with a smooth undertray, with a flattish central tunnel running through it and widening out at the back. This creates an area of fast flowing air underneath, in relation to the airflow around and over the car. The faster the airflow, the lower the pressure and thus slow air over the top and fast air underneath creates downforce - the ground effect. This is why F1 cars have had their exhausts vented into the central tunnel so this increases the speed of the airflow through it, increasing downforce. Dont know if theyre allowed to do it nowadays, I dont follow F1 very much, but I do know that the problem with this system is that as soon as you let off the throttle the grip that you did have suddenly disappears. So its maximum attack all the way round.
This system also has to be so low to the ground that the tunnel under the car really is virtually sealed from the airflow along the sides of the car.
yeah, i got my letter published in CCC this month on the very same subject. But on a road car,lowering wont make much of a difference, because the isnt any advanced aerodynamics on the rest of the car.
But your right about the rear of the hatch. Hatches are actually more aerodynamic than most cars as the air comes off and creates an area of lower pressure behind thus meaning less drag. This is why volvo entered the estate in the BTCC before its saloon, because it was more aerodynamic. Its now known that air comming off the vehicle is more important than the air its going into.
