New front end aero for 2007
I've been searching this winter for proper front-end aero for my racecar without finding anything satisfactory.
First I wanted to build some decent "diveplanes" for the car after successfully experimenting with them last year. I found out that they don't so much provide front-end downforce, but they somehow help evacuate air from the wheel wells and hence underneat the car. After studying a lot of pictures from DTM cars I fabbed these up out of 1/16" steel and powdercoated them gloss black. (Yeah, I recently purchased a powdercoating setup for the shop, nothing metal is sacred now!)
I think the trailing edge is way to aggressive after building them, so I'm going to cut down the swoop considerably.
I've also been searching for a decent splitter. The only ones I found for sale were made for standard 965 bumpers and not the ones with the integrated winglets. Even the ones that I found would fit would require a lot of modifications and didn't give me the drop and adjustability I wanted. Solution? Build your own.
I set the bumper on a large piece of 1.4" luaun plywood and traced the outline. Then I used a compass to draw a 2" extention past it, and also behind it to give me "adjustable protrusion."
I then cut them out with a scroll-saw. Now I had the pieces for two dimensions. I then took some long strips of heavy carboard (for flexibility in following the countours) and hot-glued them to the two form pieces. I think I need to strengthen the mold so I can re-use it later. I covered the blank in metal tape to give a good non-porous surface and coated the form in some spray-on tacky grease to release the fiberglass.
HERE IS THE MOLD:
1 quart of bondo fiberglass resin and about 7 square feet of cloth on it's way. Cut it into strips and layed out about 4 layers successively over a day. Cured under heat lamps.
I pulled the part out out of the mold, trimmed it, filled in the pinholes with more bondo filler and sanded it out. Painted today.
All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how the new aero devices came out.
Total cost of all materials: $55.
Labor - 15 hours or so...
Result? Pretty okay.
