We mocked up a wind tunnel for the Scalextric team to see how aerodynamic our car was - hmmmm.... 'not very' it would seem given the dissipation of the smoke flowtube over the roof of the car - not seeing the streamline beyond the middle of the roof suggests turbulent flow, flow separation and vortex shedding, but this would be expected from a three box design...
Now is this good, for creating drag at the rear and reducing oversteer, or bad for creating drag and reducing speed?
We need some track days to test the impact of aerodynamic styling on lap times!
We will improve the wind generation using a computer fan instead of a hairdryer next time and have more smoke tubes... Maybe invest in an anenometer to get more quantitative data?
Now is this good, for creating drag at the rear and reducing oversteer, or bad for creating drag and reducing speed?
We need some track days to test the impact of aerodynamic styling on lap times!
We will improve the wind generation using a computer fan instead of a hairdryer next time and have more smoke tubes... Maybe invest in an anenometer to get more quantitative data?
Comments
Should help a bit!
We will certainly improve the wind tunnel and add more smoke straws. We now have a CAD model car body that we have sent to school for cutting on a 3D CAD/CAM router - look more like a Lotus Elite than the Triumph 1500.
We are planning to investigate weight distribution so we'll try your suggestions, but we are stuck with rear wheel drive unless we do quite a lot of work on the front axle which we dont really have time for.
It might be worth if you are still testing and trying different models, getting a foam block and sanding it down to different shapes, widths, heights and testing them to see if anything will affect if your smoke tunnels.
If you are serious try and make some own custom tyres, or buy some good ones which will give you the edge in the corners, alone with spreading the wheels out right to the edges of your car which will make it be able to turn very good.
Good luck!
Take a look at the fastest cars on the road and saloon racing cars to get an idea of fast shapes.
Have you looked a the Design Guide on the Scalextric4Schools web site? This suggests other factors you should consider.
The Make-Assemble_setup booklet on the web site has some suggestions for tuning the car for maximum performance.
Sot car forums on thw eb have geat advice on getting the maximum out of your car.
Good luck!