According to K&K, an autocross is a "low speed event" and speeds should be under 70 mph. Nobody's going to be standing there with a radar gun, but course designers should be taking this into account. It would be unfortunate if there was an accident and K&K voided the insurance because cars were hitting 100 mph on course. If you want to run an event with higher speeds, you pay more for the insurance and probably have to deal with stricter safety requirements. Dunno, never done one.
So, back on the aero bit...
If you have a front splitter, where should the air that passes through the radiator come from?
It seems to me that if you have it come from over-the-car air, that you'd need to have a belly pan across the bottom of at least the engine bay, and you'd have to give that air a place to vent back into the over-the-car airstream (cowl induction hood, perhaps?).
But, if you try to scavenge it from the under-the-car-air, it seems like you'd lose a lot of airflow over the radiator, and be limited to only what your fan could pull through.
I'm also curious in the first scenario what happens to all the heat coming off the exhaust manifolds, as most of the race cars I see seem to have heat extractors right behind the radiator, which seems like it'd have zero effect on pulling hot air away from the engine block.
I think you want to have a belly pan if possible in any scenario. It really helps reduce drag and induced lift under the car.
As far as cooling is concerned; on a production chassis I think the best possible configuration is to have the air enter from the front (as is traditional) and exit from the side either through the wheel wells, behind the brakes (which is already an area of poor air flow), or through the fenders just behind the wheel wells.
In this configuration you don't introduce any additional airflow over the car or under the car. If that's not possible, I think second best is to have the air come in from the front and out from an inverted scoop or louvers towards the leading edge of the hood.
The biggest thing is that you don't want the air from the cooling system going back under the car (like it does in most production cars).
In reply to JohnyHachi6:
So, in either of those scenarios, how do you get the heat of the exhaust manifolds out of the engine bay? What's to keep it from stacking up at the top of the firewall?
Louvers louvers louvers!
Didn't the 4th gen F-bodies take their cooling air from behind the airdam? Seems to be that you'd want to pull from all that nice high-pressure air above the splitter.
You'll need to log in to post.
