[Divefire]

Oh dear, this might not go down so well but bear with me…

Aerodynamics, down force, on a scale buggy doesn’t really exist. Ok now before you throw your chair at me, let me explain a bit.

Yes I know, body shells and wings make the cars handle differently, and that’s a fact but it happens because of the drag being produced not because of downforce. Why not? Well because air density increases with speed, and at the speed the buggies get up to, plus their rather small size, it’s not enough to produce downforce. There’s not the surface area or the speed there.

So how are your normal wings and bodies producing more grip? Basically drag. If you look at a high downforce wing or a touring car body that people say gives more front end, usually they have a very steep front profile. This produces the drag. Drag itself doesn’t produce more downforce but what tends to happen is a cushion of air is built up, increasing the density more then in other areas and thus pushing the car down a bit. Of course at this point the air is having trouble flowing over the car so it isn’t terribly efficient but that doesn’t matter so much on scale racers.

So how does this relate? Well making parts aerodynamically efficient is a bit pointless in this scale. Yes if you’ve got a giant front upright you’d want to try and find a way to minimise it’s drag impact, but that’s about it. Making things like wishbones so they’re an aereo device won’t help, they’ll be no better then a conventional one.

Of course on the subject of wings there is a school of thought that says a multi element wing would produce some efficient downforce, but it would be rather fragile and at the end of the day be no better then a drag inducing wing for our purposes.

Sorry if that comes out a bit know it all, and feel free to argue, aerodynamics is a black art at the best of times. Now if we could just come up with some decent body shell cooling ideas…

Oh on the subject of the actual car design itself, I’d go with mass centralisation, a balanced left to right weight distribution and then find out what front to back weight distribution works best, probably around 55/45. And then there’s suspension geometry and all that fun stuff to play with… Good luck!