Race Car Aerodynamics: Designing for Speed (Engineering and Performance)
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- Studio: Bentley Publishers
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- Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 Stars
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Customer Reviews
- Best Tech book out there for aerodynamics
- Reviewer: Eric Cantore (Huntington Beach, CA), Date of review: August 27, 2010
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
- This book is awesome! I am an aspiring race car designer and this book has great information. I have always drawn cars and have read alot about race car design, but this book explains why you design certain body parts. I highly recommend this book and hope to be able to meet or take a class with Dr. Joseph Katz.
- My opinion of the book.
- Reviewer: Oldair (Groveland, CA), Date of review: May 18, 2010
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
- This is my first book review since high school (52 years ago), so please keep that in mind.
My interest in racing is in making a 36 HP (modified) Volkswagen go as fast as it can in a straight line at Bonneville and other tracks, which is very much affected by the aerodynamics of the situation, so I was interested in finding out what this book has to say about it. Many race cars are also required to go around corners fast, which is what this book is mostly concerned with. Author Katz explains that the aerodynamic forces that push a car down onto the ground very greatly affect the cornering (and braking) ability of the car. The book is very much concerned with down force on the car resulting from the shape of the car. There are many pictures, explanations of how aerodynamic forces work, equations, and examples of the various aerodynamic effects caused by the shape of the car. The equations are simple enough that no one should be afraid of them.
The book contains many explanations of boundary layer, lift and drag coefficients, effects of air density and viscosity, Reynolds number, and other factors, all of which are explanations of how air flow over a car affects its movement at high speed.
My concern with the various devices to increase down force on the car is limited to what is required to keep aerodynamic lift from affecting the stability of the car at high speed (for me, 100 mph). Although I want to understand these down forces, I would have liked to learn more about what it takes to reduce drag at high speed. There is a list of references at the end of each chapter, some of them probably answering this question, so I will be interested in checking them to see what they say about drag.
As explained by the author, a stable situation at high speed results when the down force on the rear wheels increases more than the down force of the front wheels. How to do this is what I want to know, and the book explains how wings and underbody shape can do this. I am still considering how to do this with my VW.
I obtained the first edition from the library and bought the second edition. This book will be part of my library on old VWs, and I expect to be rereading it often. If the author or anyone else reads this review, I would like to receive any comments on it.
- interesting but dated
- Reviewer: Alexander T. Gafford (Midland, Ga United States), Date of review: December 19, 2009
- Avg. Customer Rating: 3 Stars
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
- It is perhaps a mistake to title a book New Developments in Race Car Aerodynamics because the time will come when the book is no longer new. In 15 years the nature of aerodynamics has not changed but racing rules and regulations have and the tool of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has greatly matured. The effect of the CFD revolution, if I can call it that, is that flow vizualization and flow calculation based on 3D mathematical models of cars has become so good and so cheap, relatively speacking, that wind tunnels are now a verification tool to make sure the models are correct. All this means that a rewrite of this book would look entirely different. In additon, I am still unclear as to who the audience was for this. It was not for a practicing automotive aerodymanicist, not being technical enough. But somehow it doesn't seem to me correctly structured for the car sports enthusiast who wants to know a bit more about aerodynamics and auto racing.
Still, there are good things here. The brief discussion of wind tunnels is quite interesting and in a sense explains the demand side of the CFD development since clearly the capital intensity of really accurate autosports wind tunnels is high. The basic explanations of fluid dynamic behavior are clear enough. The references at the end of the chapters are quite helpful and would enable anyone seeking more in depth understanding to find a path, though again, they are all 15 years old.
This is not a bad book, but more a starting point than an ending point.
- Good compilation of formulas, theory and practical examples
- Reviewer: Race Car Reader , Date of review: August 29, 2008
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
- An excellent review of race car aero. It is one of the few books that accurately discusses current trends. Answers a lot of "How does that work" type questions regarding undertrays, splitters, spoilers, wings and vortex generating devices. With the Milliken and Milliken book, Gillespie's vehicle dynamics manual and this book, a competition car engineer has all of the tools necessary for design and analysis.
- Very nice book!
- Reviewer: Alen Milosevic , Date of review: November 06, 2007
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
Very nice book!
Many diagrams and pictures, very interesting for a reader..