Quote:
Originally Posted by dogbone
The topic of air pressure in engine bays and wheel wells, and hoods generating lift is a new area of curiosity for me.
You have a solid technical grasp of these cars, so I'll ask you:
If you were to make a general guess-----how much change in lift/downforce do you think you might see from a vented hood? I saw in that linked article that the M3 is making 22lbs of front-end lift at 124mph. If you say that a "negative lift" situation might be the result of hood vents, I'm assuming you're thinking the change in force is more than 22 lbs. How much change in force do you think it could be?
And do you think the effects of the vented hood are overshadowed by having a lip and 5" splitter and canards in place already? (The addition of the lip and splitter changed the car DRAMATICALLY for the better.) Or would they all work together to create even more downforce?
Anyway, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
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I’d think keeping air out from under the car must be an order of magnitude larger than any help you get from venting the hood but just a guess? Certainly once you’ve closed that off with the front aero as well as possible, the cooling air suddenly becomes a bigger contributor to the remaining crappy aero problems we have to deal with when the engine is in the wrong place? My envelope math is way too full of assumptions for me to guess at a number but realistically I think dozens of lb would be the most to hope for. Lift mostly just comes from the plain sad truth that cars do not fly so clean flow in the 3-4”’of space underneath is near impossible to achieve and even worse with a front engine.
The F1 comparisons are uh...not useful for hopefully obvious reasons
But one useful takeaway... they don’t dump their radiators under the car