Influences of Aeronautical Engineering at Motorsport Engineering (part II)
Hello Everybody At the previous post, I talked about the first motorsport cars with aerodynamics generating downforce. This downforce helped the car to gain lateral acceleration in cornering, increasing cornering speed. The gains with regular front and rear wing design were not converging into the best configuration, until Colin Chapman developed the first ground effect car: the Lotus 78 (see details of this introduction into the previous article here ). At this point, when Lotus 78 ground effect car was developed, the need for ground effect downforce in Formula one (and also other categories) were the rule of a competitive car. The Lotus 79 (evolution of Lotus 78) was so dominant that every competitor tried to develop his Ground Effect car his own (not only at Formula One, but also at other categories in motorsport, like Indycars and so on). Figure 1 - Lotus 79 Ground Effect Cat. The Evolution of Lotus 78 car that dominated the 1978 F1 season The fight for finding downforce at the bod...