| chrisl |
11-03-2013 04:04 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hanni_0176
(Post 1310315)
If you take the car to the track, and therefore the wing has functional use, then I wouldn't call it rice. Although that wing does look ricey as hell (way too over-the-top) and I'm sure there are other wings that provide sufficient and/or better performance without being quite as tacky.
If the driver of that car bought the wing and doesn't plan on tracking the car or achieving speeds where the wing would even do anything... then the driver is a ricer, pure and simple. Most aesthetic mods that try to turn the car into something you'd see in Fast and the Furious when the driver just wants attention from other drivers on the road... yea, ricer.
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The thing about wings is that the bigger they are, the more downforce they make. That wing looks like it has a pretty decent airfoil cross section, along with good sized endplates to minimize vortex formation, increase downforce, and decrease drag, so there's not a lot to be gained by simply making that wing more efficient. Going to a smaller/less obnoxious wing probably couldn't be done without decreasing downforce (aside from maybe using a fairly complex multi-element airfoil, but even that might only increase the lift coefficient by 50% or so at most, and it would look just as obnoxious visually). In other words, if the car is tracked, and that wing was put on to improve downforce, a significantly smaller one would not be a viable substitution for similar performance. Yes, it looks obnoxious, but if the car is tracked, I think it's a justifiable performance upgrade.
Actually, come to think of it, I'm surprised that multi-element airfoils aren't more common among the larger wings available for cars. They can be significantly more effective than a single element airfoil of the same size. Here's what I'm talking about, for anyone not too familiar with aerodynamics:
http://www.mh-aerotools.de/airfoils/images/jf_me_1.jpg
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