Ty,
I agree. When I meant the NSX-R wing is more effective, I meant from a downforce perspective. Looking at the streamlines, like you concluded, the NSX-R wake is larger than the standard NSX (meaning higher Cd like you stated). Obviously, the tradeoff for some increased rear downforce was an increase in drag.
I used to have a link to an official Honda page that gave the technological highlights of the NSX-R. It was like a 6 page thing that detailed Honda's "tweaking" in suspension, aero, engine, weight, etc, and it gave specific values on the impact their aero changes made to lift and drag coefficients over the standard NSX. I can't find it now :frown:
Perhaps, but it should be obvious to most folks participating in this thread that these streamlines look accurate enough to be realistic. Just thought I would throw it in there with the other pics since I haven't run across them before on this site :wink:
Like greenberet said, lowering a car "should" decrease the drag slightly in the real world. In fact, commercial vehicle manufacturers use front airdams that extend pretty low in the front to balance the amount of airflow going through a vehicle's radiator with the total airflow underneath. Having a low front airdam will increase the "frontal area," but the tradeoff in not having the air get disturbed underneath the vehicle is worth it from a drag perspective. Of course, that has to be balanced with brake cooling, airflow through the radiator/engine compartment, and how far down you can extend the dam before it breaking all the time during normal consumer driving.
When I used to race, besides the cool IR thermography cameras for tire temp (http://www.nsxprime.com/forums/showthread.php?t=142671), we also instrumented our coilovers with LVDT's, or linear velocity displacement transducers to measure their extension as a function of time over driving. With this, you could kinda get an idea of downforce or lift generated on a straight flat section of a course. F=kx, so knowing your spring rate and displacement from the LVDT's, you could measure the change in load. Pretty simple, besides giving you important info on what your coilovers are doing anyways. This is what I recommended to Driving Ambition here (also discussing aero too): http://www.nsxprime.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134440
Oh, I don't encourage increasing the rake of our vehicles because it will drastically change the static/dynamic weight distribution and make it prone to oversteer.
Dave
